What: At the annual Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen, fashion leaders gathered to discuss circularity, carbon, community, and pre-competitive collaboration.

Why it is important: The overlying message that came from the conference was that the industry needs to work together in order to make any progress.

Individual goals are a great start to approaching sustainability topics, but the industry is limited on how much progress can be made without more collaboration among players. The industry does have several alliances at play, but they are disjointed like The Fashion Pact and the UN Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action.

The Global Fashion Agenda shared the GFA Monitor which is a new report to guide fashion brands towards a net positive industry. GFA also unveiled the Global Circular Fashion Forum, a global initiative to scale the recycling of post-industrial textile waste in textile manufacturing countries. Supply chain transparency and traceability platform TrusTrace released an open-source traceability playbook in collaboration with campaigning organization Fashion Revolution and Amsterdam-based change agency Fashion for Good.

The conference was the opportunity for several major fashion brands to introduce new business models; a common thread was the concept of “timeless design” that is no longer seasonal as a sustainability solution.

While collaboration and exciting progress and announcements were greatly highlighted at the conference, there seemed to be some criticism about the lack of conflict between panelists on stage, remarking that collaboration often involves difficult conversations.

Key takeaways from the Global Fashion Summit: More diversity, more collaboration