Both the sustainability regulations and the language to describe them are changing “almost as fast as fashion”, Lehmann says. “On top of geopolitics, we also have this kind of volatility where you don’t even know where lawmakers are taking us.”
In the US, lawmakers seem to be going the way of deregulation. On Thursday, the Trump administration announced plans to toss out the long-standing federal assessment that climate change harms people and the environment, removing the government’s authority to curb the emissions accelerating global heating.
The rollback is “deeply alarming”, adds Lehmann. “Cheap, reliable renewable energy isn’t just climate policy — it is economic strategy. It drives job creation, attracts investment, and underpins future-proof industrial leadership,” he says. “Meanwhile, stepping back from climate safeguards risks ceding markets, innovation, and economic resilience to nations that see the clean energy transition as the next frontier of global competitiveness.”
Politics aside, the volatility — and at times the confusion — surrounding sustainability is tying things up in the supply chain, as brands grapple with what to do first, suppliers get stuck with the bill, and developing new business takes longer as both sides work out whether their relationship will be a compliant one.
For brands to be compliant, they need data from their suppliers; for suppliers to be compliant, they have to put in the work — upskilling workers to use new data collection systems, installing both hardware and software that facilitates this, and sometimes operating multiple systems at once, before even considering the actual sustainability improvements needed. All of this comes at a cost. Add tariffs to the mix and things get even messier. “The pressure is on manufacturers to eat part of those tariffs, so you’ve got lower prices but more work,” says Matthijs Crietee, secretary general of the International Apparel Federation (IAF). “That’s a difficult equation.”
At Ereks-Blue Matters, a circular garment manufacturer in Istanbul that counts Fiorucci and Wrangler among clients, the new reporting requirements have been a boon and a bane. While they have “definitely improved conditions”, in terms of providing benchmarks that make year-on-year environmental improvements easier to see, head of strategy and innovation Romain Narcy says, they also require a significant increase in time and staff to manage data collection, as well as to get production going. “The onboarding process for clients now takes significantly longer, as comprehensive social and environmental audits must be completed and assessed before production can begin.”
The ESG regulations have seen brands asking Narcy for “comprehensive documentation”, including DPPs, Life Cycle Assessments (LCA), and Social Life Cycle Assessments, he says, and “with the exception of one brand that covers the cost of a single audit, our factory is currently absorbing the majority of these compliance costs”. The factory needs more support to pay for these ramped-up demands, Narcy continues, because, without it, brand-supplier relationships could become further strained at a time when partnership is what’s keeping things moving in an already plagued supply chain.
But beyond cost, there still isn’t enough harmonization where data collection is concerned. “If you’re a supplier, you have 20 clients and they’re not aligned enough in what they ask and how they ask it, and what format you should deliver it in. That just multiplies the work you have to do,” Crietee says. “This is really an industry challenge.”