Fashion promised to go green. Here’s how the New York Climate Week, behind closed doors, exposed the challenges of transforming the industry

Sustainability in fashion has been promised for years, with fashion brands coming up with emissions targets, sourcing recycled materials and making sustainability promises within their supply chains. However, at New York Climate Week 2026, one challenge stood out: fashioning a more sustainable future is turning out to be far more difficult than making sustainability promises, according to a report by Vogue.

Finding an alternative material or coming up with another net-zero target cannot solve the problem. This is because the fashion industry is a mammoth global industry based on complex networks of farms, fibre companies, manufacturing firms, logistics firms, retailers and consumers.

Changing one part of that system can affect everything else.


Also Read | Mars had a secret water history: NASA rover finds ancient groundwater and hot fluids that reshaped the planet after its ancient lake vanished

The size of the issue at hand is becoming clearer. Vogue reported that World fibre production peaked at 139 million tons in 2025, compared to 132 million tons the previous year, as per Textile Exchange. Polyester continued to be the world’s most commonly produced fibre, making up 59% of total world fibre production.

This presents the fashion industry with a rather contradictory situation. Fashion is creating more sustainable substitutes, yet producing ever more fibres.

New York Climate Week put that tension at the centre of discussions around fashion, climate and materials.

Fashion’s green transition has a scale problem

There are challenges associated with making the fashion sector sustainable, but this begins way before the piece of clothing makes its way to the store.

A T-shirt, dress or pants is the culmination of a lengthy process that includes raw material collection, fibre making, spinning, weaving/knitting, dyeing, finishing, manufacturing and transportation. Emission reductions at one point may not fix other issues in the chain.

Also Read | Could astronauts on the Moon manufacture their own tools? NASA tests lunar dust material that could reduce supplies from Earth

The latest fibre data shows why scale matters. Global production grew by seven million tonnes just in 2024 and 2025. The production of polyester increased from 77.7 million tonnes to 82.5 million tonnes. Of those, 72.8 million tonnes of polyester produced was virgin, fossil-based polyester.

That growth makes the industry's transition more complicated.

There are recycled fibres, regenerative agriculture initiatives, alternative forms of cellulose and other materials that are less impactful. The challenge lies in producing enough of them at a competitive price compared to existing materials.

Vogue reported that it was among the major problems tackled by the Climate Pledge Fashion Coalition, founded during New York Climate Week by Amazon, Stella McCartney, Canopy and the World Economic Forum. This organisation includes over 60 fashion brands, manufacturers, retailers and material innovators working on scaling down lower-carbon technologies and materials.

According to the founders of this organisation, there is a problem that has often delayed sustainable fashion, namely the fact that some new materials and technologies are not available at competitive prices and in sufficient amounts.

That means the next stage of fashion's climate transition is increasingly about scale rather than discovery.

New materials will not matter if brands cannot buy enough of them

For years, sustainable fashion discussions have placed considerable attention on finding better materials.

That remains important, but the industry is discovering that having a promising material in a laboratory is very different from supplying it to millions of garments.

There must be factories to produce the new fibre. Companies will need a reliable source of supply; the manufacturer will need the means and the know-how; the trader will need to know the price and quantity; the financier will need the security of demand.

The Climate Pledge Fashion Coalition is designed around precisely this gap.

According to its organisers, the initiative will work on financing mechanisms, collective purchasing demand and tools that help companies identify technologies suitable for their individual supply chains. Its Fashion Coalition Lever Library covers more than 100 established and emerging solutions, while Canopy's Next Gen Now programme connects companies with next-generation fibre producers and innovators.

It is an obvious concept: when several big companies pledge their intention to buy a certain material, the producers are assured that there will be a demand for that material.

This increases the chances of attracting investment into its production.

The issue is especially important for materials that are currently more expensive than conventional fibres. Without sufficient demand, production stays small. Without larger production, prices can remain high. That creates a cycle that can prevent promising alternatives from becoming mainstream.

Breaking that cycle may require fashion companies to cooperate in ways that are unusual for an industry built around competition.

Fashion’s sustainability problem starts with what it produces

There is another uncomfortable part of the equation: fashion is not simply trying to make the same amount of clothing more cleanly.

The level of production of fibre around the world keeps rising.

According to Textile Exchange, global fibre production rose from 58 million tonnes in 2000 to 139 million tonnes in 2025. Moreover, it is evident from Textile Exchange’s statistics that the production of polyester is leading, followed by cotton.

That makes the industry's sustainability debate partly a question of volume.

Even if individual products become less resource-intensive, rising production can make it harder to reduce the industry's overall environmental footprint.

Recycling illustrates the problem.

From the previous report by Textile Exchange, it was clear that recycled fibres contributed a small proportion of the world’s fibre production. In 2024, textile-to-textile recycling was just 1% of the world’s fibre market.

Thus, the fashion industry is faced with two challenges that are related; they have to lower the effect of the materials used and establish processes that can handle the huge amount of material already circulating within fashion.

These include improving the recycling process, cutting down on the virgin fossil-based fibres, and increasing the use of preferred natural fibres.

Simply changing one fibre for another does not solve the whole issue.

Climate Week puts supply chains under the spotlight

As far as fashion labels go, it is often those emissions that are hardest to tackle, which are not within the offices or shops of those fashion labels themselves.

This is because the manufacturing of factories, raw materials, and their production process can take up a large chunk of the environmental impact of the item being produced.

This is why climate discussions around fashion increasingly focus on suppliers and production systems.

The Fashion Coalition is seeking to get some of those links to talk to each other, involving brands, manufacturers, retailers, and tech firms.

According to the organisers, this initiative will also investigate blended financing, which mixes development finance and private money to make investment feasible where it otherwise may not be.

NY Climate Week also paid much more attention to the issue of nature and natural resources, which are important for all industries.

For the fashion industry, this means that besides the question of carbon emissions, the issues related to water, agriculture, forests, soil, and material production need to be considered.

Cotton, for instance, requires land and water resources. Cellulosic fibre requires plant materials. Synthetic fibre is still heavily dependent on fossil-based inputs.

Environmental impacts start long before material arrives at the factory.

This broader view is changing the definition of sustainable fashion. A garment cannot be assessed only by what happens after it leaves a brand's warehouse. Its environmental story starts with the resources used to create its raw materials.