For the past three days, 40,000 sustainability advocates from every industry filled Paris’s Grand Palais with excited chatter at climate conference ChangeNow, the world’s largest expo of sustainability solutions. Material innovators pitched to impact investors, private sector leaders shared their blueprints for change, and activists mobilized the committed and recently converted alike. One famous economist even took a turn as circus ringleader (more on that later).
Some attendees noted that the summit was more subdued than previous years, hypothesizing that the political backlash against sustainability in the US and Europe had quietened corporate engagement, and demotivated (or defunded) the people trying to change these companies from the inside out. This crept into the conversations on-stage. There were both veiled and direct references to the European U-turn toward competitiveness; the war in the Middle East disrupting supply chains and energy sources; and the general feeling that climate action is faltering as priorities splinter amid the many compounding crises.
But overall, ChangeNow is an exercise in optimism — something sustainable fashion could use right now. Here are three key lessons for fashion.
The solutions already exist, it’s just a matter of scale
The overarching message at this year’s summit was a hopeful one: we have all the solutions at our fingertips; it’s just a case of scaling them. Many of these solutions either stemmed from fashion, or have applications in the industry, from alternative materials to new business models and different ways of engaging with stakeholders.
Fashion corporations had a smaller presence at ChangeNow this year, notes Nina Marenzi, founder and director of The Sustainable Angle, which organizes the Future Fabrics Expo. But two stood out for their thoughtful curations of sustainability solutions: luxury group Kering and beauty giant L’Oréal. The former spotlighted innovative startups incubated in its Material Innovation Lab, including 3D-weaving company Weffan and silk protein startup AM Silk. It also staged a mini conference on Tuesday evening, focused on the challenges and opportunities in scaling circular fashion, with insights from The Revival founder Yayra Agbofah and Circ co-founder and CEO Peter Majeranowski. At the L’Oréal booth — which Marenzi says offered a “convincing” demand signal to investors — the innovations on display spanned refillable perfume bottles to water-saving showerheads for hair salons, and the early recipients of its €100 million Sustainable Innovation Accelerator.
In the fashion section, leather alternatives were particularly well represented. 2023 Hult Prize winner Banofi leverages banana crop waste, Kering-backed Peelsphere combines algae and fruit waste, and Revoltech uses hemp, one of the lowest impact natural fibers. Each say they are inching toward price competitiveness with both conventional animal leather and plastic-based alternatives, which has previously been a major stumbling block to mass adoption. There was also a significant focus on upcycling. French design studio Artefact laid out its upcycled bags and accessories made from damaged and discarded performance products, supported by Patagonia. Behind them, industrial-scale upcycling company Losanje courted B2B clients to add to its 50-strong roster.
Elsewhere, attendees could nosy around the event’s Plastic-Free Land, curated by A Plastic Planet. Alongside plastic-free cleaning products and reusable packaging, there were several fashion and beauty-adjacent innovations on display, including refillable roll-on deodorant brand Rollr, plastic-free performance sportswear brand Mover, bio-based sequin alternative Sequinnova, and nature-based glitter and pigment company Sparxell.
“We wanted to demonstrate that it’s possible for us to make things without toxic, indestructible plastic. Nothing is the same as being here and touching a new hemp and flax-based faux fur, or seeing how you can make something out of banana crop waste and seaweed. There’s nothing like seeing is believing,” says A Plastic Planet co-founder Sian Sutherland. Renewed interest has stemmed from the recent Netflix documentary The Plastic Detox, she adds. “Suddenly, this is not just a pollution crisis, because the pollution is inside us. So the human health message is the catalyst. We have to hit where people care, and really demonstrate risk to industries and governments, especially when there are solutions and it’s entirely possible to scale them up.”
The climate conference was also a stark reminder that many of the proven solutions fashion urgently needs to scale apply to other industries, too. Regenerative agriculture, renewable energy, decarbonization, ocean degradation, and biodiversity loss are just a few of the sector-spanning issues and solutions.
“What helps me most as a leader is understanding how others lead through challenging situations,” says Elisa Niemtzow, VP of consumer sectors at Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and co-founder of sustainability platform Racine. Niemtzow moderated a panel about leadership for social impact, during which Accor hotel group chair and CEO Sébastien Bazin discussed the need for “south to north leadership”. The idea is that you know what to do in your gut (stomach), she explains, but you have to do it with humanity (heart) and make decisions on timing (head). “A key thing for me this year was seeing truly engaged CEOs and non-sustainability leaders on-stage. It feels like we’re making progress when business leaders are talking authentically about sustainability and inclusion, and how it supports business performance.”
A new economic system is closer than ever
Funding is often the elephant in the room at climate conferences. Who is going to pay for the transition? Who will bear the cost of compliance? How does the flow of funding reinforce global inequalities?
Several sessions addressed this head-on. In a session about business within planetary boundaries, former Unilever CEO Paul Polman summed it up neatly. “Most — if not all — businesses depend on the health of our planet. If that health is in a precarious state, we all pay the price. But most of the money we spend is destructive, not restorative.” Polman now serves as co-founder and co-chair of The Fashion Pact, and as senior advisor to the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures, among other advisory roles. He says he has lost patience with incremental change — a feeling many other seasoned conference-circuit speakers expressed this week. “We have more knowledge than we have ever had. We have the tools and proven technologies to solve 98% of these problems. We have enough money, but we’re not putting it in the right direction,” he says. “What we’re missing is leadership. There’s a lot of inertia in the system right now.”
Others took aim at the system itself. “We have an over-financialized economic system that is driven primarily by shareholder value, dictated by profits for the few, not the many,” says Sandrine Dixson-Declève, honorary president of non-profit Club of Rome, and chair of Earth4All, an initiative aimed at redesigning the economic system to benefit people and the planet. “We are so inefficient in many of the ways we run our economy, because it is based on productivity rather than optimization, and we think that growth means prosperity, which is absolutely flawed. We will never stay within planetary boundaries if this is how we do business.” The call to rethink GDP as the ultimate metric of success was reiterated across multiple sessions, and not just by people on the radical fringes of the industry.
Kering’s long-time chief sustainability and institutional affairs officer Marie-Claire Daveu spoke about the luxury group’s environmental profit and loss framework, followed by a panel discussion on how to quantify the value of nature, and make it visible on balance sheets, so it can be factored into long-term financial decision-making. On a panel about scaling regenerative agriculture, Laurent-David Charbit of Tikehau Capital shared the company’s approach to investing in the infrastructure and solutions around regenerative agriculture, making it easier for farmers to access the tools to transition. And Patagonia board member Barbara Martin Coppola encouraged other companies to consider alternative forms of governance such as steward ownership, which the outdoor brand famously adopted in 2022.
In a standout session that had everyone talking, Donut Economics economist Kate Raworth attempted to break the rinse-and-repeat conference format by turning it into a circus show. Dixson-Declève was plucked from the crowd to play the role of Finance, with an impressive mime-like commitment to the bit. While another audience member danced around the stage decorated in leaves to represent Mother Nature, Raworth guided Finance through a mock therapy session, unpacking the base emotions stopping Finance from reorganizing itself in alignment with Nature (the crowd shouted out suggestions here, landing on greed, fear, and loneliness). There were serious moments peppered throughout, including readings of famous speeches by botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer and Martin Luther King Jr. But for the most part, it was an unexpected dose of high-octane silliness, which ended with Raworth leading the audience in a song about the benefits of Donut Economics.
There is a future beyond climate doomism
Throughout the summit, speakers attempted to offer an alternative to climate doomism, not just for the sake of keeping sustainability professionals sane, but as a key tool for driving broader engagement with the topic.
On Monday, insurance company AXA presented its latest foresight report: The Atlas of New Futures. The report channelled research around climate adaptation and resilience strategies into five imagined future communities shaped by the climate crisis. First was the Amadare Network: a mobile community led by women, navigating climate volatility with satellite data and mutual aid networks. Then, there was Studio Odgrod: a rural accelerator welcoming unemployed city dwellers who have pledged to restore degraded land, while live streaming and vlogging about it. It made for a thought-provoking session, designed to help attendees picture alternative futures “beyond the flying cars and robots”, says Cédric Flazinski from design future studio Normals, who illustrated the report.
The need to envision alternative futures was underscored in a particularly well-attended session with environmentalist and writer Rob Hopkins, whose book titles give a clear indication of his stance on climate action: The Power of Just Doing Stuff (2013), From What Is to What If (2019), and How to Fall in Love With The Future (2025). Hopkins describes his work as “an experiment in evidence-based dreaming”, pushing back against what he calls the “poverty of imagination” and attempting to “paint such extraordinary pictures of a world where society is reorganized around care and well-being, that people can’t help but run toward it”. The packed-out auditorium, and the rush of attendees pining to talk to Hopkins afterwards, gave a clear indication that he’s onto something.
For sustainability and systems change strategist Rachel Arthur, the emphasis on radical imagination as a driver of systems change was a rallying cry for the fashion industry, which she says is uniquely positioned to help shift aspirations. “We often have a hard time imagining a fashion industry without endless volumes of new products, or the idea of desire and aspiration tied to constant newness. And sustainable fashion today is deeply tied into the technical, operational, and logistical elements of how we make circularity and regeneration a reality,” she explains. Sustainability doesn’t need to be about regulation and restriction; it can be an opportunity for creativity and abundance. “We risk missing the creative element of making this possible, yet this is something so inherent to our industry.”
