How the Current Crisis Could Impact the Future of Fashion Forever

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The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on bad practices and unsustainable business models across industries, but one sector in particular has found itself at the forefront of this exposure—the fashion industry.

As one of the world’s most destructive business sectors, fashion is the world’s second worst offender when it comes to water pollution, according to the 2019 Global Wellness Trends Report, and is responsible for approximately 10 percent of all carbon emissions. Not to mention, with overproduction running 30 to 40 percent each season, more than 70 percent of clothes end up in a landfill and “an estimated $500 billion value is lost every year due to clothing being barely worn and rarely recycled,” The Business of Fashion reports.

“As we’ve seen the crisis unfold, the issues of resilience, or lack thereof, and various aspects of the supply chain have come to the fore within both the fashion and apparel space,” said Niall Murphy, CEO and cofounder of EVRYTHING, a tech platform providing digital identities for the world’s consumer products and a pioneer in bringing transparency to the fashion industry. “And in other categories, we’ve seen businesses called out, actually, with dependencies in their source materials, their raw materials, their components within their supply chain that they didn’t realize that they had because they don’t have sufficient level of visibility across the supply chain.”

Last week, Murphy was joined by Vanessa Barboni Hallik, founder and CEO of sustainable fashion brand Another Tomorrow; e-commerce pioneer Julie Wainwright, founder and CEO of The RealReal; and Kathleen Entwistle, private wealth advisor at UBS, for a discussion with Worth CEO Juliet Scott-Croxford about how the business of fashion is changing amidst COVID-19 and how sustainability, brand values and innovative technology will play a larger role in how consumers choose their apparel in a post-pandemic world.

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