The Vogue Business 2024 100 Innovators: Sustainability thought leaders

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What fashion needs to do for the planet is clearer than ever. Making it happen is the hard part. This year’s sustainability innovators are the ones challenging the status quo, championing voices throughout the supply chain and working tirelessly to encourage the industry and the environment to coexist — and to uplift people within the ecosystem rather than leave some behind. Above all, these are the people offering hope, optimism and inspiration in an industry that has plenty of work to do.

Dr Lewis Akenji

Founder and executive director | Hot or Cool Institute

Ask any sustainability expert how to fix the fashion industry, and they will respond with a series of complex and amorphous concepts like degrowth and just transition. Research scientist and political economist Dr Lewis Akenji is one of the leading voices translating these concepts into concrete roadmaps, pushing the industry forward by quantifying the change it needs to implement.

His 2022 report ‘Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable’ proposed a “sufficiency” wardrobe of 74 items for a country with two seasons (or 85 items for a country with four seasons), inspiring fashion editor Tiffanie Darke’s ‘Rule of Five’ challenge, which went viral on social media for inspiring consumers around the world to curb their clothing consumption to just five items per year. The European Parliament has since cited the report’s recommendations in the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, using them to overhaul fashion’s supply chains. Now, the Hot or Cool Institute is establishing a Sufficiency Approach to Fashion and the Environment (SAFE) panel to further engage with policymakers, businesses and scientific leaders, building on its groundbreaking 1.5-degree lifestyles programme, which connects sustainability with well-being, inequality and lifestyles.

Brontie Ansell

Co-founder | Lawyers for Nature and Nature director | Faith in Nature

Giving rights to nature is a radical concept in today’s economic, legal and political structures. But considering how heavily dependent we are on nature and how quickly it is being degraded, it is hard to argue the notion that nature urgently needs not just protection but a mindset shift in what that protection should look like. Environmental laws, she explains, are written from a human-centric perspective — how much water or air pollution a community can live with, for example — but there’s no regard for what any non-human aspect of nature needs. This, despite the fact that companies really do depend on nature, whether it’s for raw materials, ecosystem services or even just human capital.

The need for nature to have legal representation is a principle that Lawyers for Nature co-founder Brontie Ansell has been advancing in courtrooms and, more recently, government bodies and corporate boardrooms around the world. Her work inspired hair and skincare brand Faith in Nature to call in 2022 and ask how nature could be involved in governing the company; that led to her bringing the voice of nature, for the first time, to a company’s board. Now, she sits on fashion and lifestyle brand House of Hackney’s board and is fielding regular outreach from others, in textiles and beyond, who are interested in the concept of giving legal rights to nature and incorporating the needs of nature into their businesses.

Crispin Argento

Co-founder and managing director | Sourcery

The cotton supply chain is broken, and farmers are the most vulnerable to its cracks and flaws. Amsterdam-based Sourcery, Crispin Argento’s brainchild, exists to connect brands interested in improving their supply chains directly with cotton farmers. Sourcery was formed after a string of other roles Argento played in fashion, including having led the development of the Organic Cotton Accelerator’s farm and seed programmes as executive director. This year, Sourcery launched a new initiative, the Impact and Assurance Programme, aimed at attaching the economics of cotton to how it is grown. It’s a revolutionary idea for its potential to upend how a commodity supply chain, which is built on anonymity, works.