The Fashion Cities Coalition binds Paris, Milan, New York, and five more capitals into one sustainability platform, landing days before the EU’s ban on destroying unsold clothing takes effect.
The world’s fashion capitals have decided to stop treating sustainability as a local project. At Midsummer Camp, the two-day conference Paris Good Fashion staged in Paris last week, eight cities signed on to a new Fashion Cities Coalition built to share research, set common priorities, and move the industry’s transition forward together. Paris anchors the group, joined by Copenhagen, Cotonou in Benin, Dubai, London, Milan, New York, and Singapore. Rolling meetings will travel from city to city through February 2028, and organizers say a second wave of members is expected to follow.
The group is equally careful about what the coalition is not. It is not another signed pledge or public target, of which the industry already has a long shelf. Organizers describe it instead as a working platform where fashion capitals can test ideas, compare data, and build practical tools they can each carry home.
“We need to accelerate the transformation of the fashion industry to become sustainable,” said Federica Marchionni, chief executive officer of Global Fashion Agenda, which is supporting the initiative. She framed the coalition as a way to gather organizations, brands, and cities around specific goals, and she drew a firm line on credibility.
The launch closed a conference weighted toward evidence. The first day handed the floor to more than 70 scientists presenting findings on new materials and garment longevity, and the second filled with workshops involving LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Comité Colbert, ANDAM, and EY.
Regulators have started supplying the deadlines the industry once set for itself. On July 19, just over a week after the coalition launched in Paris, the European Union’s ban on destroying unsold clothing and footwear will take effect for large companies under its Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. Those firms will also have to disclose how much unsold stock they discard each year and where it ends up, and a digital product passport for textiles is due to follow in 2027. Mid-size companies have until 2030 to fall in line.
France, home to the coalition’s founding organization, moved first on its own. On June 29 the French parliament passed a long-debated law aimed at ultra-fast-fashion platforms including Shein, Temu, and AliExpress, attaching per-item penalties that climb toward 10 euros by 2030, banning advertising that reaches as far as influencer promotion, and routing part of the proceeds toward collection and recycling. The law still awaits presidential promulgation. The net effect is that Brussels now holds a regional rule, Paris a national one, and the fashion capitals a shared workshop, three layers pointed at the same problem.
Why fashion is betting on cities instead of pledges
The wager underneath the coalition is that cities, not brands or trade shows, are the right unit of change, because they concentrate creativity, education, innovation, retail, manufacturing knowledge, and cultural weight in one place. The structure is meant to link established capitals to emerging economies and the regions where clothes are actually made.
“We need science, we need research, but we need also this to be very much applied,” said Pascal Morand, executive president of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, arguing that collaboration between cities has to be paired with practical solutions. “We have this so important environmental and sustainable challenge to address and to work on with each other, and I’m very glad that we are part of this whole story,” he said.
Some of the members already run the kind of enforcement the coalition wants to standardize. Copenhagen conditions a spot on its official fashion week schedule on meeting a set of minimum sustainability standards covering materials, emissions, and labor, a framework the British Fashion Council has moved to adopt in London. Milan will host the coalition’s next workshop later this year, bringing in brands, technology companies, academic institutions, and creative leaders. Carlo Capasa, chairman of Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, called the coalition “the natural evolution” of the cooperation already running between fashion organizations. “This coalition is more than a seat at the table, it is a commitment to transform dialogue into action, ideas into measurable results, and shared ambition into lasting impact,” he said.
Singapore’s seat is a deliberate reach past the usual capitals. “Singapore, being a retail gateway — we no longer do any manufacturing — but we sit in the heart of manufacturing,” said Ting Ting Tong, chief executive officer of the Singapore Fashion Council, who noted that roughly 80 percent of the world’s apparel is made in Asia. “We represent an opportunity to work with the big fashion cities to see how we can push for change,” she said.
New York’s inclusion carries its own footnote. The city sits in the coalition even as New York State’s Fashion Act, which would require large sellers to map their supply chains and set science-based emissions targets, stalled again in the 2026 legislative session without becoming law. Sarah Kozlowski, senior vice president of program strategies at the Council of Fashion Designers of America, put the case for collective work plainly. “We cannot do anything without each other,” she said.
Inside the coalition’s first project
The coalition’s first shared undertaking aims at the gap between what shoppers say and what they buy. Building on a recent international citizen consultation, Paris Good Fashion plans a behavioral research program to work out why good intentions so rarely reach the register. Alongside behavioral scientists, it aims to identify, test, and validate “nudges” toward more sustainable habits, producing both published academic research and tools that brands, retailers, and digital platforms can put to work. It is the one variable neither Brussels nor Paris can legislate, the decision a shopper makes at checkout.
Paris Good Fashion spent nearly a year assembling the group, and its cofounder measures the launch against the years of parallel effort that preceded it. “It’s a strong and important advancement,” Isabelle Lefort, its cofounder and director, said.
“We need to bring concrete results,” Marchionni said. “Without the scientific base, then we’re not credible.”
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