US Fashion Policy: ‘Move Fast and Break Things’
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Maxine Bédat, executive director of the New Standard Institute (NSI), doesn’t buy into the narrative that the European Union is outlapping the United States in terms of legislation.
“They are definitely ahead in the thinking and in the directives, but in terms of actual bill language, I would argue that we’re at least in there with more specific language to actually be able to discuss…what would implementation look like,” she said at the Global Fashion Summit: Boston Edition at the Revere Hotel Boston Common last week.
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The NSI is one of the supporters of New York State’s Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act, a.k.a. Assembly Bill A8352 and simply referred to as the Fashion Act. Sponsored by State Senator Alessandra Biaggi and Assemblywoman Anna R. Kelles, its goal is to break the industry out of its accountability “black box,” by mandating social and environmental due diligence.
If passed, it would require apparel and footwear retailers that make $100 million or more in revenue and conduct business in the Empire State to map at least half of their supply chains, disclose their environmental and social impacts, and set binding science-based targets to ensure that they’re reducing their climate emissions in line with the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
It’s a mistake, Bédat said, to think of federal legislation as the “A team” and state legislation as the “B team.”
“I think we need to correct that idea because a lot of states in our federal system have economies that are larger than significant countries in Europe,” she said. “And very meaningful legislation, not just in the fashion industry but outside of it, is happening at the state level.”
Look at California, whose fuel efficiency measures ended up having a broader global impact. Lawmakers and activists have parlayed the success of the Garment Worker Protection Act, which passed in 2021, into a nationwide effort to hold brands liable for the labor practices of their manufacturing partners. The Golden State’s move to enact enforceable limits on the intentional use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, could influence the rest of the country, as could a pending requirement for all large businesses to supply a detailed accounting of their carbon emissions.
“We see both state and federal level interest,” Bédat said. “But I think a lot more action happening at the state level.”
The problem with U.S. policymaking is that it’s “really difficult and overwhelming and exhausting,” said Chelsea Murtha, director of sustainability at the American Apparel & Footwear Association, whose members include J.Crew Group, Calvin Klein owner PVH Corp. and The North Face parent VF Corp. Because the process for stakeholder consultation hasn’t been formalized, every locality does it differently. The U.S. process is also “adversarial by nature,” she said, which can be challenging.
“I think almost everyone I’ve talked to: NGOs, I obviously represent businesses…I think everyone has expressed to me some level of frustration about some policies, or they didn’t feel like they were kind of consulted in the building of [them],” she said. “And I wish I had an answer about how to change the structure of the way that the U.S. does its policymaking. Because it is so diffused, it is really hard to make sure that everyone gets pulled in.”
Murtha said that the EU has a more top-down approach, which is why Europeans often gesture across the pond and say nothing is happening, which isn’t true.
It’s important to note, Bédat said, that fashion is one of the least regulated industries in the nation and the fact that all this momentum is building marks an historic moment. But it won’t be easy. Not only is democracy “imperfect and messy,” but the sector also markets itself as “fun and frivolous,” which can make those pushing for change within it difficult to take seriously.
“I was reading about how Threads—ironic that it’s called Threads—wanted to be very fashion-focused and apolitical,” she said of the Meta-operated social media network taking aim at X, the platform previously known as Twitter. “Even tech companies see fashion as something that doesn’t have an importance and impact when clearly it has an enormous global impact. So I think it‘s time for the industry to look at itself a little bit in the mirror and in its communication and in its marketing.”
Fashion is an industry with a global reach, “not only just because everyone wears clothes, but also [because] our supply chains are everywhere, retail stores are everywhere,” said Randi Marshall, head of government and public affairs at H&M Americas.
Marshall said that she’s only one of a handful of fashion-company public affairs or government relations representatives who work out of Washington, D.C. Amazon, by comparison, has hundreds.
“So we’re going to grow our public policy chops,” she said. “We’re going to have [to have] more people who are going to be more knowledgeable with the processes and what’s going on.”
And not only in the United States but with its immediate neighbors, too. Colombia, she noted, is poised to regulate greenwashing. Chile, for its part, is mulling extended producer responsibility.
Murtha said that she’s constantly badgering her members to have a government relations representative on the Hill. While there’s a sizable industry presence that is focused on trade, the same institutional knowledge and expertise needs to be built up on the brand side.
“There’s not a fashion-to-policymaker pipeline,” she said. “There are lots of doctors, there are lots of veterinarians [whom] I’ve met in Congress. There are former astronauts [and] engineers. There are no fashion people in policymaking. There just aren’t. And I would love to see that change.”
One issue highlighted by Rachel Kibbe, founder and executive director of the American Circular Textiles Group, is that the United States hasn’t taken the past “five or 10 years,” as the EU has, to have thoughtful conversations about the potential impacts, both positive and negative, of policing the industry.
On Thursday, the coalition of reuse and recycling companies, including Rent the Runway and ThredUp, called on the Biden administration to include textiles in the sustainable product and services procurement rule that it’s proposing.
“I think, especially when we talk about policy that has to do with waste…it’s very challenging to create functional, extended producer responsibility policy; it’s relatively new to do so for textiles,” she said. “And so we have to talk about creating new terms and definitions and new ways of thinking about how to make something that‘s happening in the private sector larger and better and bigger and more innovative [so it can] actually have an environmental impact.”
Right now, the United States is “kind of in a move fast and break things state,” she said. Still, it’s paving the path forward.
“Fortunately, we do have a federal government that when they enact policy [it] really does influence state legislation,” Kibbe said. “But the states are really going to lead the way in terms of gathering the right people in the room to start talking about these things and hopefully creating coalitions that exist beyond the policy getting passed in states.”
