CFOs Lead Sustainability Talks at Global Fashion Summit 2026

COPENHAGEN — At this year’s Global Fashion Summit, sustainability discussions were focused not on ambition or environmental effects, but on whether the fashion industry can make innovation and impact commercially viable at scale.

With the conference themed “Building Resilient Futures,” C-suite executives — many from the finance corners — took to the stage to frame sustainability more as a question of long-term business resilience, efficiency and survival. It was a palpable shift for a sector that, in recent years, often emphasized aspirational climate commitments and industry-wide pledges.

This emphasis was coupled with the conference’s report, in partnership with BCG, that implored chief financial officers to integrate capital allocation and climate change risk management into their core business decisions, rather than placing it on the side with siloed teams.

Speaking onstage, Marie-Claire Daveu, chief sustainability and institutional affairs officer at Kering, said innovation had become essential to meeting the luxury group’s climate and biodiversity targets, particularly in areas such as NextGen materials, traceability and lower-impact manufacturing processes, which she outlined as her three pillars.

But she also emphasized that sustainability initiatives must ultimately generate economic value.

“We are not only doing philanthropy,” Daveu said. “We have to run a business. We have to earn money.” She added that “resilience” has become a buzzword, but means companies have to build that into their businesses, and not just latch onto it as the latest buzzword.

Mulberry chief executive officer Andrea Baldo said he joined the company when it was in dire financial straits. Rather than treating sustainability as a cost, he has moved to position it as a cornerstone for the brand’s recovery.

He reframed the heritage brand as completely U.K. based, and emphasized regenerative farm-to-product traceability, while circular principles, such as allowing consumers to choose between new or pre-owned versions of signature styles at proportional price points, as core offerings rather than add-ons. Quality is also at the core.

Baldo added that brands must move from “volume to value,” but noted that many luxury brands have equated that with less volume and higher price to increase their margins. “But the consumer is not buying into it,” he said about the idea of “value creation.”

He called it “stakeholder capitalism,” which links sustainability directly to product and revenue.

“It’s moving from a transactional point to a more long-term relationship in which circularity has a huge part,” he said. “That’s the responsibility that you have toward the shareholders — to create that type of value. If you think about sustainability in that way, it’s not as hard to balance short-term and long-term [financial gains].”

Daveu and Baldo’s comments reflected a broader mood across the summit, where the money talk played a central role on almost all of the panels. It was a pointed turn for GFA, and speakers frequently framed it in terms of profitability, supply chain bottlenecks, coming regulation and future competitiveness.

That shift was especially visible in discussions around emerging materials start-ups, many of which continue to struggle with industrial scaling despite growing industry interest in alternatives to conventional leather, synthetics and resource-intensive textiles.

“It’s not only capital,” said Faiza Seth, cofounder of PDS Ventures. “It’s also scalability.”

Seth argued that many sustainability start-ups face what she described as a “chicken and egg” problem. Brands want proof from start-ups that their materials work at scale before committing to large-scale orders, while start-ups often need those brand commitments in order to lock down financing and expand production.

“It’s so easy to do pilots,” said Helena Helmersson, former CEO of H&M Group, who has now moved into a series of advisory and board roles, and serves as the chair of Swedish materials company Circulose, among others.

“Companies can do pilots year after year after year. And if you think of sustainability as something that is critical to your business, I think it’s more value creation if you collaborate with others and go deep on the implementation,” she said.

Helmersson also noted that circularity struggles not because it is technologically impossible, but because virgin materials remain artificially cheap. Without changes to incentives — including a concept she called the “pricing of nature” to be built into cost structures — circular models will remain at a disadvantage.

Throughout the summit, executives repeatedly returned to the idea of collaboration, though the term was often framed less through activism than through business operations such as shared traceability standards and reporting, supplier partnerships and coordinated investment to move start-ups beyond pilot stage.

The positioning makes sense in the current poly-crisis political environment, said Sustainable Markets Initiative CEO Jennifer Jordan-Saifi, when sustainability has been sidelined.

“Many of us know that language has shifted, talking about ‘energy efficiency,’ ‘energy abundance,’ rather than saying things like ‘climate change’ and ‘nature biodiversity,’” she said. But this is an opportunity for the C-suite executives to reframe issues such as renewable energy, energy efficiency and transport as cost-savers on a local level, and industry-wide collaboration and systems thinking, rather than piecemeal individual brand-level action.

For many attendees, that change in language shows how “sustainability” is now finance, using the language of risk, resilience and ROI.

For Patrick Chalhoub, resilience is fundamental. The executive chairman of Dubai-based luxury retailer Chalhoub Group framed the Middle East’s current geopolitical instability not simply as a business challenge, but as a long-term test of adaptation, resource management and collective responsibility.

He recalled his family’s journey from Syria to Lebanon, Kuwait before the Iraqi invasion and eventually to the United Arab Emirates through decades of regional upheaval, civil war and displacement. “Our story is a story of the Middle East and a story of resilience,” Chalhoub said. Once he made that connection, he “started to learn, to listen, to follow, to be active and to become, perhaps, an activist,” he said.

That mindset has shaped his group’s approach to sustainability, particularly after the pandemic. While fashion companies once prioritized speed, efficiency and cost reduction, the domino effect of successive crises has exposed the fragility of global supply chains and accelerated discussions around localization, circularity and resource security.

He added that the eruption of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran and its wider regional implications has forced the company to think not only about operational, but about the long-term sustainability of life and business in the region itself.

Chalhoub noted the vulnerability of Gulf desalination plants, which could be subject to bombing, and said executives in the region were planning for the possibility of water shortages if the facilities were attacked.

“Without water, we could not survive,” he said, noting that the region has a six-month drinking water reserve.

However, environmental use and planning is an existential economic issue tied not only to business planning but survival.

“We cannot be sustainable if everything around us is not sustainable,” Chalhoub said, adding that businesses in the region must adopt a longer-term perspective on resource use amid continued instability.

Within fashion, that framing quickly collided with commercial reality.

Many panelists shared a similar message that sustainability must recenter itself into the economics of the apparel industry, or it will forever be sidelined.

However, Mulberry’s Baldo implored the industry to look at the longer-term effects and not just short term market gains.

“Stop putting shareholders in front of everything, because these shareholders are hypothetical shareholders,” he said. Many smaller investors actually believe in the company and that it aligns with their values, while CEOs can cater to markets and institutional investors.

“I don’t think [individual shareholders] are just in it for a small, short return.…We have to have a clear point of view that [shareholders] are much more broad. And that’s what the leader of the future should be trying to achieve — it’s difficult — and implement well,” he added.

Elsewhere, Philip Konopik, Visa’s senior vice president of commercial and money movement, said that payment systems can no longer be seen as a back-end function, but the core infrastructure that makes the entire circular economy possible. Speaking on a panel about re-commerce, he said that resale, repair and recycling models are becoming more fragmented as brands want to individually extract value — which is exactly the opposite direction of where re-commerce needs to go.

He said the sector needs more multiactor collaboration and along with that, payments need to evolve into flexible, scalable systems — particularly through micro and distributed transactions that can follow a product through its life cycle. In this framing, finance will not simply enable re-commerce; it will help it to grow at scale.

Overall, the tone was less about disruption and more about coordination. Sponsors, including the major luxury groups and corporate partners such as eBay, were highly visible throughout the agenda. The programming keyed into how the big industry players now shape the sustainability conversation.

Several attendees noted the absence of NGOs as narrowing the range of perspectives in the room, particularly as those groups are facing funding shortfalls or closing altogether. Tough questions were absent from the main stage, a loss that may have long-tail effects on future voices, participants said.

However, that dynamic sat alongside the excitement of many first-time attendees, particularly from the U.S., who said they came to the summit in search of supportive and constructive conversations around sustainability, which has been mostly sidelined in the U.S. One brand public relations executive said they’ve moved away from all sustainability messaging due to the political climate in the U.S., but found the theme of “collective action” encouraging.

There were also several closed door sessions for the executives to meet and discuss their needs and objectives, no holds barred. But one participant said that by the time competitive corporate guards were let down the sessions were already over, signaling a need for even more in-depth and honest discussion amongst peers.

The summit also brought a touch of star power to Copenhagen, with Arizona Muse serving as host, and an appearance from longtime animal activist and vegan Pamela Anderson on the Pandora panel, which is the only session that really packed the auditorium seats. (In a nice touch of synergy, the Danish brand bought out all the ads at the closest metro station, so attendees were greeted with Anderson’s smile in Pandora jewelry.)

LVMH Marks Strategic Partnership Debut With Germanier Fashion Show

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton made its first appearance as an official strategic partner of the summit, after joining last September. It marked a visible step forward for the group’s push to engage with other industry players.

Environment development director Hélène Valade noted that director of image and environment Antoine Arnault appeared at the summit in 2023, when he argued that luxury brands must work together if the industry is to achieve lasting environmental change.

On stage, Valade revealed the planned creation of a “Raw Materials Prospective Observatory,” expected to be implemented by September following a series of talks with other luxury houses.

The initiative will function as an open-source data platform mapping raw materials exposed to long-term climate risks, with the aim of identifying vulnerabilities across global supply chains and guiding collective prioritization of action, particularly regenerative models or work in specific material ecosystems, such as cotton.

She said the project is part of a broader shift within LVMH to build shared infrastructure and collective intelligence at the supplier level, arguing that climate and supply chain risks can no longer be managed at brand level alone.

Valade then welcomed Swiss designer Kevin Germanier on stage, who discussed his work with the group to source materials for his collections. While he started with Nona Source, his latest project utilizes material from unsold garments, prototypes, archival pieces and store uniforms sourced from multiple maisons. These include Berluti uniforms from the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.

Within his own atelier, these are dismantled, studied and reconstructed into new couture-level pieces. The initiative has evolved from his early work with Nona Source deadstock, expanding to working with two maisons in 2021 and seven today.

While labor-intensive, Germanier said that value is recovered through extended material life cycles, plus creating exclusivity and therefore new desirability. LVMH, he noted, is not yet operating this as a commercial model, but together they are exploring how they could scale this system into a production pipeline.

Germanier also staged a runway re-run of his spring 2026 couture collection, which sparkled on the stage of the Copenhagen Concert Hall.