The world’s Fashion Weeks need to decide which side of the coin they are going to magnify — and, for the sake of the planet, it needs to be sustainability.
Fashion Week is at a crossroads. The prestigious twice-yearly event, which takes place in London, Milan, New York, Paris, and now in many other cities, including Copenhagen, Los Angeles, and Tokyo, has been shaping the fashion industry since the early 20th century. But, right now, at least from the outside looking in, the historic and highly respected events seem a little, well, confused.
You may remember in 2023, when Naomi Campbell — world-renowned supermodel and familiar Fashion Week face — teamed up with fast fashion giant PrettyLittleThing to send $15 garments down the runway in front of the likes of Emily Ratajkowski, Julia Fox, and Winnie Harlow, ahead of the official opening of New York Fashion Week. But just months before, Oxfam hosted its own show at London Fashion Week in February, with celebrities, activists, and models like Tasha Ghouri, Daisy Lowe, and Munroe Bergdorf showing off secondhand pieces.
The two events embody the two conflicting narratives that have been spinning around the fashion industry for some time. While the demand for quick, cheap fast fashion is growing dominant (demonstrated by the burgeoning behemoth that is Shein), the conversation around sustainability is also getting much louder.
Fashion Week’s relationship to fast fashion
When you think of Fashion Week, the first brands that come to mind are likely from the luxury sphere. For decades, names like Dior, Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton have hosted some of the most coveted shows in the Fashion Week calendar. You would be forgiven for thinking that the quality, expensive designs they showcase are exclusively for the rich and famous.
But while their designs are prohibitively expensive for most people, their overall message — that fashion is cyclical, the next up-and-coming trends can always be generated, and we must always be looking for new and shiny all the time — is highly accessible. Alongside cheaper copycat versions of designs, it has been taken by the fast fashion industry and dialed up to the incomprehensibly unsustainable rate of 10,000 new styles per day (hello again, Shein).
Most of these clothes will end up in landfills where they will not biodegrade because they’re mostly made with plastic-derived synthetics. Research suggests that one garbage truck of textile waste turns up at a landfill every single second. “[Fashion Week’s] philosophy trickles down throughout the entire industry, empowering fast-fashion brands to churn out new clothes at increasing velocity,” notes fashion writer Elizabeth Segran for Fast Company.
But now, as evidenced by examples like Campbell’s show, the relationship between luxury and fast fashion is becoming even more cemented. And this is not just down to one event.
Several years back, PrettyLittleThing showcased a new collection, helmed by Love Island star and mega-influencer Molly Mae Hague, during London Fashion Week. Like Campbell’s, the show wasn’t part of the official schedule, but the message from fast fashion was loud and clear: It has star power, influence, authority, and a loud voice in this space, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
This attitude was also evident in Shein’s recent Fall/Winter fashion show, Shein Live: The Livestream, which was hosted by actor and influencer Teala Dunn.
The numbers show just how urgent this pivot has become. Research estimates that the four major Fashion Weeks together generate around 241,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually, with transportation alone responsible for more than 147,000 tonnes of that footprint. Beyond emissions, single-use sets, press kits, and props add to the waste stream, with much of it landfilled within days of the events.
Can Fashion Weeks leverage their influence in a more positive way?
But while fast fashion is undeniably gaining speed, sustainable style is also getting its voice heard. And Fashion Week is playing a role here, too.
It’s not just Oxfam that is sending a sustainable message, either. In 2020, Gucci revealed it would be taking a new approach to luxury fashion, by reducing its show count from five to two. “So much outrageous greed made us lose the harmony and the care, the connection and the belonging,” said former creative director Alessandro Michele.
But over in Denmark, Fashion Week is going from strength to strength in terms of sustainability. Copenhagen Fashion Week has strict criteria, which brands must meet if they wish to take part. The 18 Minimum Standards include things like finding “a second life” for samples, no destruction of unsold clothing, fur-free, sustainable materials, and zero-waste show production and set design.
Proving that Fashion Weeks can be timely and cutting-edge in terms of style and sustainability, Copenhagen Fashion Week introduces new creative talent from the Nordic region consistently.
In Paris, Stella McCartney’s Spring/Summer 2024 collection also premiered an eco textiles marketplace. The brand is also committed to improving the industry and has been since its inception in the early 2000s. Collection after collection sees McCartney up the ante on designs made from as muc has 95 percent recycled materials.
Momentum is building elsewhere, too. In London, the British Fashion Council announced that beginning in 2025, Fashion Week designers must meet mandatory sustainability requirements, with full adoption slated for 2026. The move mirrors Copenhagen’s model and signals a new era of gatekeeping in which sustainability is no longer optional. Meanwhile, at New York Fashion Week 2024, more than 30 percent of shows incorporated deadstock or upcycled fabrics, while Milanese designer Francesca Liberatore staged a climate-themed show dramatizing ecological collapse. Stella McCartney went even further in Paris, presenting outerwear made of recycled nylon and vegan leather, with reports that her most recent collection surpassed 90 percent sustainable materials.
Still, a gap remains between high-profile gestures and industry-wide progress. The 2025 What Fuels Fashion? index found that just 29 percent of the world’s top 200 fashion companies have reduced emissions at all, and the average disclosure score on decarbonization remains under 14 percent. This suggests that while runways are signaling change, the broader machinery of fashion is lagging — and that Fashion Week could be decisive in bridging the divide between promises and proof.
Just like Miranda Priestley once taught us, fashion really is all about the trickle-down.
“You go to your closet and you select that lumpy blue sweater,” the Devil Wears Prada character (played by Meryl Streep and inspired by Vogue editor Anna Wintour), tells Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs. “But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue. It’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.”
She goes on to explain how cerulean garments were debuted by designers in Fashion Week collections before they ended up in department stores. “You’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room,” Priestley says.
So, if the people in the room could start selecting sustainability with every collection, perhaps we’d start to see real, eco-friendly changes start with Fashion Week, and end in our closets.
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