Fashion Leaders Petition to Join White House Task Force on Climate and Trade

The American fashion industry is pushing for inclusion in the recently announced White House Task Force on Climate and Trade.

An open letter written to President Joe Biden last week written by PoliticallyInFashion and signed by groups like American Circular Textiles, Remake, Patagonia, Mara Hoffman and Everlane implored the administration to include representatives from the design, retail, manufacturing, recycling and reuse sectors of fashion, textiles and jewelry to be included in the effort.

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Announced on April 16 by John Podesta, Senior Advisor to the President for Clean Energy Innovation, the Task Force will develop a climate and trade policy toolkit to address carbon emissions-related issues. According to Podesta, it will draw upon learnings from ongoing negotiations between the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and the EU for a Global Arrangement on Steel and Aluminum.

“We’re open to proposals from our colleagues on Capitol Hill and policy thought leaders from inside and outside government,” he said at the time.

The new letter pointed to the fashion industry’s outsized role as a driver of the U.S. economy, employing more than one million people across the country in retail, design and manufacturing jobs.

“However, there are challenges facing the industry including an unlevel playing field for international trade and lack of strong environmental data and standards,” it said. “As an industry that globally is a leading producer of carbon emissions and also a key player in global trade, we seek to engage with you on designing robust trade and environmental policies that will be crucial to the sustainability of the fashion industry.”

“We respectfully request a seat at the table as you embark on this mission to craft trade and climate policies so we can promote and protect this vibrant, creative, and economically important industry,” the letter read. BFG Lab, Dara Lamb, Fashion Mingle, Helpsy, Jewelers Vigilance Committee, Nanette Lepore, Lozena Sustainability, New York Embroidery Studio, SCRAPNYC and Sustainable Brooklyn also signed the missive to the president.

PoliticallyInFashion, a group dedicated to informing and educating the U.S. fashion sector about policy and regulatory issues that impact the industry, spearheaded the effort to bring fashion into the fold. The group’s founder, Hilary Jochmans, told Sourcing Journal that the fashion industry is often left out of important conversations on Capitol Hill.

“On the third week of April, John Podesta made a speech at Columbia, where he announced the formation of this task force, and those two issues—climate and trade—are hugely impactful to the fashion industry,” she said. “But as we’ve seen, unfortunately, with some other initiatives, fashion… has often been excluded from various initiatives or comments.”

Historically, fashion has not been the most engaged industry when it comes to public policy discussions in Washington, she said. Of course, trade groups do their part to represent the needs of the sector, but Jochmans said many “smaller brands, folks with very lean teams, newer brands, legacy brands—they just haven’t had the opportunity to engage with those resources and the bandwidth to do that.”

“I think there’s also a little bit of bias against the fashion industry,” she added. “You know, there’s always a little bit of a smirk when you mention fashion” in a serious, policy-related context.

Jochmans, a Capitol Hill veteran with experience in the House, Senate and former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s D.C. office, said that flies in the face of its significant contributions to the American economy. “One of the things I really saw firsthand was what an important industry it is to the economy of New York State; I think it’s number two behind financial services. And yet, between financial services or healthcare and fashion, it’s completely different levels of engagement.”

“We want to make sure that when the opportunity arises that the administration remembers that this industry is here, it’s a huge economic driver in the United States,” she added.

If a fashion industry stakeholder were asked to join the White House Task Force on Climate and Trade, Jochmans said she would like to see them address issues like circularity, textile recycling and the de minimis trade rule, which has allowed overseas players to blanket the American market in huge volumes of cheap goods. It’s not ecologically sound or economically beneficial to American brands, she said.

Circular Services Group (CSG) and American Circular Textiles (ACT) CEO Rachel Kibbe said she’s encouraged by the tenor of conversations around environmental impact taking place at the federal level, but she believes they “continue to exclude fashion broadly as an industry, and I think it’s largely because we don’t have a lot of manufacturing here.”

Governmental bodies don’t often consider the opportunity to include the sector in discussions—or address its responsibility for climate impacts. “I think it’s really critical that there are fashion-related organizations and representatives from manufacturing, reuse and recycling represented as a voice at the table, and I’m hoping that starts to happen.”

ACT, which is made up of more than a dozen fashion brands, recyclers, and rental and resale players, worked closely with Senators Michael Bennet (D-Co.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to develop a portion of the Americas Act, which was introduced in March. The legislation earmarks $14 billion to advance circularity in the domestic fashion industry.

“With the Americas Act, we’ve seen that there is an appetite and an understanding that it’s important” to include fashion in legislative discussions, “but much like many corporations, sometimes the government works in silos,” Kibbe said. “So when you see an initiative, you have to ensure that you present yourself and say, ‘We’re here, and our voice has to be represented for the benefit of everyone in the country—for jobs, economic development, for the businesses here.’”

If the industry were represented on the Task Force, Kibbe said she could see productive discussions surrounding material science developments, advanced technology and agriculture take shape, all with an eye toward decarbonizing the supply chain. “There could be so much more done at every level of industry, and we don’t think of it when we think of fashion,” she said.