Despite frustrating setbacks, the past decade has also seen measurable wins that are easy to miss amid the many negative headlines. As Good On You marks its 10th anniversary, this deep dive from journalist Megan Doyle looks at 10 concrete signs of progress.
Where sustainability is at in 2025
I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with other journalists and industry peers who feel worn down and disenfranchised by the snail’s pace of progress in the sustainable fashion space. Set against a turbulent political landscape, ongoing economic uncertainty, wars and genocides, it’s a real challenge to maintain a sense of hope and drive for a more equitable future for the fashion industry. Whether it’s building new infrastructure, shifting consumer behaviour, or developing legislation that mandates responsible business practices, systems change is an arduous process that can take decades. So how do we reconcile the frustrating reality that change takes time, a commodity the world is running out of in the face of the climate crisis?
In the pursuit of systems-level change—the kind the sustainable fashion movement advocates for—progress is painstakingly slow, non-linear, and hard-won. Often it seems that the positive change we’re working towards isn’t happening, or lately, is regressing.
But while we’ve had our heads down, focused on the next step in the journey, the tectonic plates of fashion have slowly begun to shift.
As Good On You celebrates its 10th anniversary, I wanted to take this opportunity to look back on the last decade of sustainable fashion and identify, with the help of a dozen industry thought-leaders, the signs of positive progress.
I say this not to undermine the very real, persistent issues perpetuated by the industry—fossil fuel-derived virgin polyester is still fashion’s most used material, making up 57% of global fibres; the rise of ultra-fast fashion has kicked overproduction into a new gear; and garment workers around the world are still not paid a living wage. For the first time since 2019, apparel sector emissions actually increased by 7% in 2023, according to new research by the Apparel Impact Institute.
In 2015, a burgeoning sustainable fashion movement led by NGOs and citizen activists was gathering momentum. That year, in the wake of 2013’s Rana Plaza factory collapse, The True Cost documentary was released and received widespread attention from the media and general public. Until then, few had been exposed to the devastating human and environmental impact that the shiny world of fast fashion was having behind the scenes. These two events have been credited by many as the catalysts of both personal and professional reckonings with fashion. “Ten years ago, sustainability in fashion was not part of the mainstream discussion from an industry perspective,” says Sandra Capponi, co-founder of Good On You. “When we started rating brands, many were completely silent on these issues, so we were responding to the very early groundswell of consumer sentiment.”
When we started rating brands, many were completely silent on sustainability issues
Sandra Capponi – co-founder, Good On You
The industry has changed remarkably in the last decade, but while the negative changes are more blatant and headline-grabbing, it takes a little more digging to find the signs of positive progress. “It’s easy to get caught up in the challenges still facing fashion, but it’s just as important to pause and celebrate progress,” says Capponi. With that, I reached out to 12 industry leaders for their help to identify evidence-backed indicators of change (vibes and anecdotes don’t make the cut), and here’s what they said.
10 signs of progress in fashion
Since Rana Plaza, factory safety inspections have reached 66,000 facilities through the International Accord
The Rana Plaza factory disaster had a profound effect on the fashion industry, but what happened on the ground in the aftermath of fashion’s deadliest industrial incident was significant, too. The Bangladesh Accord was created in 2013 (it has since evolved into the International Accord for Health and Safety), and, unlike many voluntary commitments before it, the Accord is a legally binding agreement between brands and unions to ensure the safety of garment makers and their workplaces through worker training, remediation programmes, and complaint mechanisms.
The Accord has since trained 2.5 million workers on workplace safety
The Accord has since trained 2.5 million workers on workplace safety, extending into Pakistan in 2022. It has now been signed by 276 brands—with the Bangladesh program having a record number of signatories to date—which has been achieved through collective campaigning from over the last decade from worker rights groups, citizen activists, and organisations like Clean Clothes Campaign.
More than 500 brands shifted 70% of viscose producers away from endangered forests
This has been achieved in collaboration with Canopy, an NGO working to protect the world’s forests, biodiversity, and climate. Its CanopyStyle initiative launched in 2013 in response to fashion’s reliance on at-risk forests for Man-Made Cellulosic Fibres (MMCF) like viscose or rayon. While viscose makes up a small percentage of fashion’s overall material mix, the industry produced 6.3 million tonnes of viscose in 2023.
In the last decade, CanopyStyle has expanded its reach, resulting in a huge reduction of endangered forests used for textile production. CanopyStyle began releasing an annual Hot Button report in 2015, indicating steady year-on-year progress in the number of viscose producers demonstrating more responsible sourcing practices. “Seventy-one percent of the world’s viscose producers, representing more than half of global MMCF production, have shifted sourcing out of Ancient and Endangered Forests to meet the demands of more than 550 brands that have collaborated with Canopy,” says Nicole Rycroft, the NGO’s founder.
Animals killed for fur fashion declined 85%, from 140 million to 20 million annually
This is according to Humane World for Animals, an animal rights charity that has been part of the fight to bring down the fur trade since the 1950s. The fur industry’s decline can be attributed to a range of factors, including growing consumer awareness and the availability of faux fur alternatives, says PJ Smith, director of fashion policy for the organisation.
Brands and governments around the world appear to be putting the final nails in fur’s coffin, as the import and sale of fur is increasingly restricted. “Policies being announced by leading fashion brands and the laws being passed at the local and national levels are the main drivers behind the fur trade’s fast fall from fashion relevancy,” Smith says.
Now, 22 countries have banned fur farming, most recently Bulgaria in 2025. And dozens of fashion brands, retailers, and industry organisations have made public commitments against fur in the last decade. They include London and Copenhagen Fashion Week, Kering, Yoox Net-a-Porter, and even Canada Goose, once synonymous with fur-trimmed outerwear. “This progress has provided a glimpse at how a once-thriving trade will soon have little choice but to close its doors to make room for more innovative and humane alternatives,” says Smith.
A traceability technology sector emerged to map fashion supply chains
Fashion supply chains are notoriously convoluted and opaque by design. When the industry ramped up offshoring of fashion production in the 1990s, local factories shuttered and production moved to countries like China and Bangladesh. As a result, many brands took an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude in the years leading up to 2015, enjoying the speed, flexibility, low-cost production, and the resulting high margins that offshoring gave them.
According to Baptist World Aid, which has been releasing its Ethical Fashion Guide for over a decade, 48% of fashion companies hadn’t traced any of their suppliers in 2013. By 2022, that number had shrunk to just 4%. This is in no small part thanks to traceability technology platforms that saw the opportunity to build greater visibility into supply chains. With a few exceptions, almost all of the industry’s biggest fashion traceability platforms have emerged in the years since 2015, including Haelixa (2016), Trustrace (2016), EON (2017), TextileGenesis (2018), FibreTrace (2018), FairlyMade (2018), Renoon (2018), Retraced (2019), Become (2019), Ettos (2019), and Tex.Tracer (2020).
These systems collect and manage vast amounts of data, allowing brands to not only streamline their production and inventory management, but also identify high-risk products and suppliers for environmental and social compliance, with certain pieces of legislation now making this level of traceability mandatory. “Traceability has been bubbling in the background for the past decade, but recently we’ve observed an increase in the momentum, with several new players entering the market, particularly over the last five years,” says Amy Tsang, head of Europe at Mills Fabrica, a global innovation platform that has worked with TextileGenesis. “This has likely been influenced by stricter incoming regulations within the EU, which will ultimately affect any brand that wants to sell within Europe, regardless of where they are headquartered.”
US fashion resale market grew from $15.6 billion to an estimated $55.3 billion
Undoubtedly one of the big evolutions over the last decade is the ways in which we buy our clothes. In 2015, secondhand fashion was largely relegated to charity and vintage stores, as well as early online players like eBay and Poshmark.
In the years since, the market has exploded in popularity—platforms like Depop, Vinted, and the RealReal have made peer-to-peer resale an abundant alternative to buying new. ThredUp’s 2024 Resale Report estimates the global market value to reach $367 billion by 2029. “Resale has been one of the fastest growing parts of the fashion market,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at Globaldata. “A lot of the stigma around secondhand clothing has dissipated, and more consumers have gravitated to resale because it’s more sustainable, allows for interesting and unusual finds, and saves money.”
Resale has been one of the fastest growing parts of the fashion market
Neil Saunders – managing director of retail at Globaldata
Why is this good news? Making use of what already exists is a fundamental tenet of the circular economy which would, in theory, help to tackle overproduction and consumption of virgin resources. Whether buying secondhand actually stops shoppers from buying new (the displacement rate) is up for debate, but according to a recent Depop and WRAP report that surveyed 3,700 secondhand Depop users around the world, in markets like Australia the displacement rate was as high as 72%.
Legislation is on the agenda, even when what gets regulated splits opinions
While views differ on what should and should not be regulated, one clear sign of progress is the fact that rising consumer and stakeholder concern for fashion brands’ impacts has put it on the legislative map. Take greenwashing, for instance. “We’ve seen long-overdue action on greenwashing—regulators are finally hitting brands where it hurts,” says Urska Trunk, senior campaigns manager at Changing Markets Foundation. In the EU, SHEIN was hit with a €1m fine from Italy’s competition authority for greenwashing this year, while in 2022 both H&M and Decathlon were fined by the Dutch competition authority.
But brands aren’t just having the book thrown at them for greenwashing. After decades of non-regulation and ineffective voluntary commitments made by the industry, global governments have begun to pay attention to fashion’s high-impact areas. Back in 2015, fashion was impacted by a few non-industry-specific regulations like consumer protection laws, the Modern Slavery Act (in the UK), and REACH regulations for chemicals and dyes.
We’ve seen long-overdue action on greenwashing—regulators are finally hitting brands where it hurts
Urska Trunk – senior campaigns manager at Changing Markets Foundation
In the decade since, a host of legislative initiatives have launched in the US, EU, and UK, tackling everything from human rights and environmental due diligence to circular products, environmental reporting, forced labour, ecodesign, packaging and waste, microplastics, and more. Initially, these regulations were considered ambitious and potentially game-changing for fashion. However, as deadlines have crept up, a number of key EU legislations have been delayed or diluted by powerful industry voices pushing back against regulators. Despite this, the conversation has evolved from if we’d regulate fashion to how we should regulate fashion.
Industry watchdogs have promoted greater transparency across fashion
Don’t get me wrong, advocacy groups have been around for decades. NGOs like the Clean Clothes Campaign (1989), Fair Wear Foundation (1999) and Labour Behind the Label (2001) and The OR Foundation (2011) have been working to hold brands and retailers accountable for their treatment of workers and the planet long before ‘sustainable fashion’ hit the collective consciousness.
The Rana Plaza disaster spawned a notable new wave of advocacy organisations, including Fashion Revolution (2013) and Remake (2016), with others like Collective Fashion Justice and Action Speaks Louder (both 2021) following a few years later. These digital-first organisations have built communities online, encouraging everyday citizens to become activists in their own right, often by harnessing social media to speak directly to brands and call out bad behaviour, or protest and petition. Demands for greater transparency are at the heart of campaigns like Fashion Revolution Week and The OR Foundation’s #SpeakVolumes.
“In the early days of Fashion Revolution, just 32 of the world’s 100 biggest fashion brands disclosed their first-tier supplier lists. Today, more than half of 250 do, thanks to the diligent efforts of many,” says Liv Simpliciano, head of policy and research at Fashion Revolution. “Transparency has given rights holders the tools to confront wage theft and abuse, but progress is fragile. With sustainability regulation under threat, watchdogs are a vital line of defence.”
Textile-to-textile recycling moved closer to commercial viability
Currently, less than one percent of all fibres on the market come from pre- or post-consumer textile waste. But there are plenty of companies working to change that. While the most common recycled textile on the market is made by turning PET plastic into polyester, it won’t be long until T-2-T (textile-to-textile) recycled cotton, MMCFs, and polyester are in our products. US-founded Circ was one of the first chemical recycling startups developing a solution in 2011, followed by Ambercycle in 2015, then Reju, Syre, Samsara Eco, Circulose (previously Renewcell), and others in the last few years.
They’re moving quickly to address fashion’s overwhelming textile waste crisis. This year, a number of startups have announced the development of industrial-scale facilities, and T-2-T recyclers are partnering with leading brands, investment firms, and forward-thinking governments to scale the precarious journey from a small-scale project to a commercial-scale circular business.
It won’t be long until textile-to-textile recycled cotton, MMCFs, and polyester are in our products
“Circular fashion is on everyone’s minds, we know there is still a lot of work to do and in many cases, knowledge hasn’t equalled power, but compared to 10 years ago, the general understanding has increased massively,” says Patrick McDowell, eponymous designer and brand founder whose next London Fashion Week collection is set to include Circ recycled materials. “We’re entering an era of incredible new fabric innovation, which in the long run is great for the planet because it means fewer pieces produced.”
Child labour rates have slowly declined in the last decade
Fashion, with its aforementioned opaque supply chains, is rife with subcontracting in its deep raw material tiers—this is often where child labour is found. Child labour rarely happens in a brand’s direct factories that are regularly audited, but typically occurs when children live and work on farms, or support their family by working from home on tasks like beadwork, sewing button holes, and trimming loose threads off garments.
This can make it extremely difficult for brands to identify and remediate, but fashion has made some progress with the issue over the last decade. According to HACE, a firm dedicated to eradicating child labour from supply chains, global child labour numbers are slowly declining from 151.6 million children in 2016 to 137.6 million in 2024. While this is still a small reduction and a persistent problem for the industry to address, HACE founder Eleanor Harry credits fashion with making notable progress in addressing child labour.
“The fashion industry, as a result of facing significant scrutiny, has become a leader in increasing supply chain transparency and setting a precedent for other sectors, such as technology and mining, to follow,” says Harry. “These efforts, which include publicly disclosing child labour instances and detailing remediation efforts, have contributed to a global reduction in child labour.”
Consumer awareness increased even as the attitude-behaviour gap persists
Shoppers have never had so much information about fashion’s impact and the credentials of their favourite brands at their fingertips—empowering them to make stronger values-led purchasing decisions in a way that wasn’t possible in 2015.
According to 2025 research by Berlin-based online retailer Zalando, which surveyed more than 5,000 people across Europe, more than 70% expressed a desire to buy and wear more sustainable products in the future. While the attitude-behaviour gap is a real challenge to overcome, the report identifies that the cost of more eco-friendly products and a lack of knowledge about brand practices are preventing alignment here.
There’s still so much work ahead, but the past decade has shown that consumers are increasingly aware of the issues
Gordon Renouf – co-founder, Good On You
“For consumers, it should be as easy to understand the way a brand and its products impact the issues they care about as it is to know the price and features of a product. This is why Good On You came to be: to help people better understand the impact of what they buy, starting with their clothing,” explains Good On You co-founder Gordon Renouf.
“Ten years later, we have rated more than 6,800 brands and extended from fashion to beauty and more verticals. And our brand rating methodology has become the benchmark not only for millions of consumers but also for businesses and civil society, as well. There’s still so much work ahead, but the past decade has shown that consumers are increasingly aware of the issues. And that’s the sometimes messy, sometimes imperfect arc of progress.”
