Copenhagen Fashion Week and I shared major firsts as snow blanketed the city in February 2023. I made my debut covering the Danish style capital's runways as an editor for another outlet. Copenhagen Fashion Week, more meaningfully, unveiled its first calendar where organizers required every brand meet minimum sustainability requirements to participate.
Collections from Saks Potts to Stine Goya displayed all the charms of Nordic fashion that have earned fans around the world: statement winter coats, playful hair accessories, functionally fun footwear. But this time, they did so with a vetted commitment to fur- and exotics-free designs and eco-friendly production practices (among other benchmarks). While Copenhagen Fashion Week CEO Cecilie Thorsmark emphasized the minimum standards were just that—a minimum—their presence felt like a revolution for a notoriously fast-churning, and at times wasteful, industry. By the time I wrote my runway report from the plane home, I had one question: "Will the rest of the world catch on?"
I've gotten my answer two years later. The British Fashion Council, London Fashion Week's organizing body, announced Jan. 13 that it is rolling out Copenhagen's minimum requirements to its biannual calendar. After a 2025 pilot program in collaboration with the BFC NEWGEN, an incubator for emerging talent, the full suite of sustainability requirements will be in place by January 2026.
By next year, London Fashion Week will follow Copenhagen's mandates with the overall purpose of reducing brands' ecological footprints—without restraining their creativity. The 19 minimum standards including the total ban of exotics (fur, feathers, and reptile skins), emission reduction investments, and a workplace code of conduct. No star on the London Fashion Week calendar will be exempt from rewiring its design programming. Upstart labels (like Ahluwalia and Tolu Coker) cult-followed favorites (Simone Rocha, JW Anderson, Chopova Lowena), and heritage houses (Burberry) all must meet the minimums laid out in the framework—or risk losing their place on the calendar.
"This partnership is a significant step in ensuring that sustainability becomes integral to the future of fashion," Caroline Rush, the recently-appointed CEO of the British Fashion Council, said in a statement. "Together, we are creating a framework that empowers emerging designer fashion businesses to lead the way and contribute tangibly to a more sustainable and responsible industry."
On a designer-by-designer level, the minimum standards ensure more than a runway reservation each season. They push participating labels to explore more eco-minded innovations, guaranteeing a longer lifespan for their clothes and, hopefully, the planet. (Textile waste from the fashion industry is considered an "environmental crisis." So are nightmarishly high greenhouse gas emissions.)
They also exert some necessary peer pressure on an industry that's notoriously slow to change. Danish fashion is buzzy, but it's a much smaller market than London. With one of the major four fashion weeks on board, Copenhagen's minimum sustainability standards have some much-needed support—potentially enough to make the likes of New York and Paris get involved. The more designers who commit, the more impact the minimum standards will have. "With the British Fashion Council, as an influential player in the global fashion landscape, we see a lot of potential to further amplify the impact of our collective commitment to sustainability," Thorsmark said in a press release.
I've observed London Fashion Week labels—and designers the world over—make marked sustainability improvements over the past decade. In 2015, designers regularly burned their unsold merchandise for the sake of "saving" their brands. By 2025, a move like that would solicit global outcry if it came to light. Experimenting with deadstock and vintage fabrics isn't just for thrifty newcomers; it's for thriving luxury houses. Recycled materials, zero-waste fashion shows, and emission offsets, while imperfect, are also increasingly common.
There's significantly more peer pressure for other large markets to change their ways now that London Fashion Week is following Copenhagen's lead. And when the next domino falls, it'll start an even bigger cascade: As I know from years of style reporting, it takes at least three to make a trend.
