The message is clear: ignoring sustainability is not a cost-saving strategy - it is a risk multiplier. Companies that fail to act now face growing exposure to financial loss, reputational damage, and long-term competitive decline. The Fashion CEO Agenda calls for courageous leadership, greater accountability, and decisions that prioritise long-term value over short-term gain.
The Five Core Sustainability Priorities
The 2025 Agenda reinforces five enduring priorities essential for driving meaningful, system-level change across the fashion value chain:
- Respectful and Secure Work Environments
- Better Wage Systems
- Resource Stewardship
- Smart Material Choices
- Circular Systems
Each priority offers a framework for aligning corporate strategies, strengthening collaboration, and accelerating progress towards industry-wide transformation.
1. Respectful and Secure Work Environments
Prioritising ethical labour practices strengthens resilience, attracts impact investors, and builds long-term brand equity.
Key actions:
• Drive open and standardised transparency: Map and disclose relationships across Tier 1–2 sites, aiming for Tier 1–4 disclosure using industry-aligned tools.
• Responsible purchasing practices: Implement measurable systems ensuring that lead times and pricing support fair working conditions.
• Human rights due diligence: Apply global standards to prevent, mitigate, and eliminate adverse impacts across the value chain.
• Worker representation: Respect workers' rights to freedom of association (FoA) and collective bargaining, publishing strategies developed in collaboration with unions.
• Converged social assessments: Adopt recognised social-assessment tools across Tier 1–2 sites to enable data sharing and comparability.
2. Better Wage Systems
Advancing wage systems strengthens livelihoods and business resilience by reducing turnover, unrest, and operational risk.
Key actions:
• Promote fair compensation and living wage: Collaborate with suppliers to build wage management systems, publish a roadmap, and report annual progress across all owned operations and Tier 1–2 facilities.
• Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs): Develop strategies to increase the share of workers covered by CBAs that lead to fair compensation.
• Achieve pay equity and close gender gaps: Assess gender pay disparities across operations and Tier 1 sites and publish joint action plans with suppliers and worker representatives.
3. Resource Stewardship
Embedding resource stewardship is critical to reducing environmental impact, securing essential inputs, and protecting business continuity.
Key actions:
• Limit greenhouse gas emissions: Set SBTi or UNFCCC-approved reduction targets across Scopes 1, 2, and 3 by the end of 2025 - aiming for 50% reduction by 2030 and net-zero by 2050.
• Supply chain electrification: Define and fund a transition plan, setting clear supplier adoption milestones.
• Freshwater stewardship: Use contextual and SBTN methods to assess material water pressures, prioritise key locations, and support good water governance.
• Chemical management: Ensure all chemical formulations comply with an approved Manufacturing Restricted Substance List (MRSL).
4. Smart Material Choices
Sourcing preferred materials is both a compliance and resilience strategy — ensuring reduced impact, supply stability, and future-proofed value chains.
Key actions:
• 100% preferred and low-climate-impact materials by 2030: Source all priority materials from preferred, low-impact systems aligned with UNFCCC requirements.
• Regenerative production: Prioritise regenerative farming methods for preferred cotton and sheep wool.
• Textile-to-textile recycling: Use recycled polyester and man-made cellulosic fibres (MMCFs) from textile-to-textile sources.
• Deforestation-free supply chains: Source bovine leather exclusively from deforestation- and conversion-free origins.
5. Circular Systems
Transitioning to circular systems decouples growth from resource extraction while creating new revenue streams and reducing emissions.
Key actions:
• Reduce absolute finite resource use: Set and track a baseline (no later than 2022) to measure reductions in virgin resource consumption.
• Design for circularity: Ensure all products are designed to be used more, made to be made again, and produced with safe, recycled, or renewable inputs.
• Reduce overproduction: Establish a measurable strategy for surplus reduction and report annual volumes of unsold items and returns.
• Grow circular business models: Expand rental, resale, repair, and remaking models - the U.S. second-hand market grew 14% in 2024, five times faster than the broader retail market.
• Support recycling infrastructure: Implement strategies that enable textile-to-textile recycling of both post-industrial and post-consumer waste.
Priority Accelerators: Driving Systemic Change
To move beyond incremental progress, the Agenda identifies five accelerators that cut across all priorities:
• Innovation: Direct investment towards advanced technologies and circular business models such as resale, rental, and remaking. Progress depends on scaling textile-to-textile recycling, supported by AI-enabled sorting and traceability solutions.
• Capital: Bridge the growing gap between declining impact investment and the funding required for systemic transformation - particularly for circularity and fair-wage innovations.
• Courage: Champion sustainability despite short-term pressures. Bold, values-driven leadership is now a business imperative.
• Incentives: Use internal ESG-linked bonuses and policy-aligned incentives to link financial performance with long-term impact.
• Regulation: Engage proactively with policy development to shape fair, effective frameworks. The era of voluntary progress is ending - proactive collaboration is the only way forward.
Looking Ahead
The Fashion CEO Agenda 2025 reaffirms that leadership today is defined not by quarterly results, but by contribution - to people, planet, and long-term prosperity.
For fashion executives, this is not only a sustainability agenda; it is a business resilience strategy. By aligning ambition with action and compliance with credibility, the industry can move decisively towards a net-positive future where responsibility and profitability coexist.