Dior’s new sustainability training program with the Institut Français de la Mode joins LVMH, Chanel, Kering, Prada, and Hermès in luxury’s push to put every employee, from legal to logistics, through sustainability school.
“With ‘Dream in Green,’ we aim to train all our employees so that everyone can have a positive impact within their position,” Clément Lefevre, chief sustainability officer at Christian Dior Couture, said in a statement announcing the house’s new partnership with the Institut Français de la Mode. “This training program, developed in collaboration with IFM, is thus designed as a driver for action, allowing teams to translate the house’s vision into concrete, innovative and meaningful initiatives.”
The Sustainability Fashion Leadership Program, unveiled in late May, gives Dior employees worldwide access to sustainability-focused conferences and educational content developed with the French fashion and luxury education institution. Its centerpiece is a certified one-year track for a first cohort of 23 employees drawn from more than 15 departments, structured around four modules covering regulation, responsible sourcing and manufacturing, traceability, biodiversity, eco-design, circularity, climate, and sustainable performance. Participants receive coaching to develop projects intended for implementation within the company. The initiative forms part of Dior’s “Dream in Green” sustainability strategy and aligns with parent company LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton’s Life 360 environmental roadmap.
Dior is enrolling in a classroom that has been filling for the better part of a decade. LVMH has pledged to train all of its 200,000 employees in environmental fundamentals by this year. Chanel has put nearly 500 leaders and key operational team members through bespoke executive education programs at the University of Cambridge. Kering co-developed an open-access online certificate with London College of Fashion. Prada Group trained more than 14,000 employees worldwide on ocean literacy. Hermès committed to extending biodiversity training to all of its employees by 2025, and Richemont launched a group-wide online Sustainability Academy designed to build ESG competence from beginners to practitioners.
Dior’s inaugural roster features a cohort of 23 people pulled from more than 15 departments; the seats are filled by merchandisers, logistics planners, and staff from finance, legal, and supply chain operations. These are functions Dior named when it said the goal is to embed sustainability across the business. The atelier was never the problem; designers have been steeped in eco-design briefs for years. The one-year track exists for the people who write the contracts, book the freight, and close the quarter.
LVMH’s plan to train 200,000 employees
LVMH aims to train its entire workforce in “environmental fundamentals,” is happening at multiple sites, WWD reported, including the Vallée de la Millière, a 30-hectare rewilding site west of Paris founded by photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, and La Caserne, a sustainable fashion hub serving the group’s 37,500 France-based employees.
“Each employee can be an actor of change, and providing expert training is key,” Hélène Valade, LVMH’s environmental development director, told an audience at the Change Now environmental summit in Paris.
The group’s curriculum is tailored by function: procurement specialists learn to evaluate raw material suppliers, sales associates learn to field customer questions about a product’s eco credentials, and logistics specialists learn to choose the lowest-impact way to move a trunk show across a continent. The appetite appears to be real. Valade told WWD that when the group’s human resources department posted a range of new environmental training options, most slots were filled within a day.
“It’s absolutely crucial to engage and to align the entire company around a common environmental ambition,” Valade said, noting the 2026 training objective is enshrined in the group’s Life 360 roadmap.
Arthus-Bertrand, an advisory board member of LVMH since 2019, said the group’s sponsorship will allow Vallée de la Millière to “carry out this unprecedented pilot re-wilding project, which could serve as an example and encourage others throughout France.” A merchandiser who spends a training day watching a former agricultural valley grow back into wetland is meant to return to the office with more than a certificate.
Making universities the sustainability departments
The academic partnership model that Dior is now adopting with IFM has two well-documented precedents. Chanel announced a three-year partnership with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership in 2021, combining customized education for management and key operational teams with innovation “sprints” run alongside Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing and scholarships for students from underrepresented backgrounds, the largest support of a CISL master’s program by a single company. The house extended the partnership for another three years in 2024, by which point nearly 500 leaders had been upskilled on topics ranging from biodiversity and climate change to efficient usage of materials.
“From providing deeper education to leaders to implementing innovative solutions in our operations, we have collaborated on concrete changes to advance our sustainability ambitions,” Kate Wylie, Chanel’s global chief sustainability officer, said in the extension announcement. “The programmes have inspired a collective sense of responsibility for sustainability, which is leading to business transformation.”
The classroom work has produced measurable operational results. According to CISL, Chanel teams developed improvement programs across manufacturing sites as a result of the sprints, generating significant year-on-year energy and material savings, and every leader who completes a session is expected to carry the material back to their wider teams. The house has since set a goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across its value chain by 2040, validated by the Science Based Targets initiative.
Kering took the opposite approach; its six-week certificate course with London College of Fashion, “Fashion and Sustainability: Understanding Luxury Fashion in a Changing World,” was billed at launch as the world’s first open-access online program dedicated to sustainability and luxury fashion, covering raw material sourcing, animal welfare, and greenhouse gas reduction for anyone with an internet connection, employee or not.
“It’s something that we emphasise at Kering; it’s not only a topic for the design team. It’s important that everyone has a minimal knowledge about sustainability,” Marie-Claire Daveu, Kering’s chief sustainability officer and head of international institutional affairs, told The Business of Fashion.
A cohort of young British designers identified by the British Fashion Council trialed the course before launch to test its relevance for working professionals. “By open sourcing knowledge, we can provide a platform for learning that encourages the sharing of ideas and solutions, with the potential of reaching a critical mass of people,” professor Frances Corner, head of London College of Fashion, said. The Kering course itself followed a 2017 program between LVMH and Central Saint Martins, “Double Vision: Innovation, Sustainability, Luxury,” which paired the group with students on sustainability-driven consultancy projects.
Sustainability training in finance, legal, and logistics
The cross-functional cast of Dior’s cohort tracks a broader migration of environmental education out of the design studio and into the back office. At Burberry, the finance team led an internal initiative called “Sustainability in Action,” delivered to more than 600 colleagues, according to a case study published by Accounting for Sustainability. Prada Group’s employee training, part of its Sea Beyond program with UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, reached its more than 14,000 employees through VR learning content and the AWorld app; the broader program is supported by 1 percent of proceeds from the Prada Re-Nylon collection.
Hermès sequenced its rollout from the top down. The house’s Act4Nature commitments began biodiversity training with managing directors and in-house experts before extending it to every employee in 2025, a reminder that the audience for this education now runs from the boardroom to the stockroom. Richemont built its version as a single point of entry, describing its online Sustainability Academy as a group-wide program that coordinates ESG capacity development under one umbrella and serves everyone from beginners to sustainability practitioners.
Regulation explains part of the urgency. It is the first topic listed in Dior’s four-module curriculum, ahead of sourcing, traceability, and circularity, a sequencing that reflects how much of the European Union’s incoming due diligence and reporting framework lands on desks far from the runway. A traceability requirement is a supply chain problem, a disclosure rule is a finance problem, and both eventually become legal problems.
Daveu sketched the endpoint of all this training years ago, and the industry has spent the time since catching up to it. Anyone looking to apply for a position at Kering should “have a minimal knowledge and understanding of sustainability,” she told The Business of Fashion. “It’s not just something for people in design and production to be interested in, but for all Kering employees. It’s important to share the same values.”
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