For Joshua Katcher, proprietor of Brave GentleMan, a nearly decade-old luxury men’s wear brand that traffics in sustainable, animal-friendly materials, the search for the perfect vegan suiting might finally—mercifully—be at an end. It wasn’t an easy journey. After experimenting with everything from organic cotton canvas to a recycled cotton-polyester blend he dubbed “future wool,” Katcher,…

2018 might go down as the year the circular economy hit the big leagues. Once an entirely novel concept, the idea of keeping clothing, textiles and fibers in use for as long as possible—through strategies like reuse, repair, remanufacture, and, as a last resort, recycling—is finally percolating through the mainstream fashion industry despite its flagrant…

Size inclusiveness may be trending in the fashion industry, but petite women are still falling short of options. The muse of Seventh Avenue is thin, leggy and Amazonian. Just look at Kendall Jenner, Forbes’ freshly crowned highest paid model, who stands at 5 feet 10 inches. She’s in good company, too. Of the professional clotheshorses…

Fur is out, at least at Chanel, which last week became the latest in an expanding roster of luxury brands to declare animal pelts déclassé. The announcement marked a stunning reversal for creative director Karl Lagerfeld, who claimed as recently as 2015 that he didn’t understand the fuss over fur. “For me, as long as…

In the grand hierarchy of animal fibers to ban—foremost of which would be fur, obviously—silk doesn’t seem to warrant as much attention. Animal-rights crusader Stella McCartney deploys silk “from traditional sources in Como, Italy,” regularly at her luxury house, so how heinous can it be? Well, plenty heinous, if you care at all about living…

Christina Dean remembers the precise moment she realized attitudes about clothing in Hong Kong were finally shifting. As the founder and board chair of Redress, a nonprofit that tackles the problem of waste in the apparel industry, Dean had spent more than 10 years chipping away at what appeared to be an insurmountable issue. Roughly…

If the spate of department store and mall closings across the country has taught retailers one thing, it’s that brick-and-mortar business cannot continue as usual. Indeed the centralized, top-down approach that defines globalized trade and manufacturing is already beginning to cede ground to newer, more viable business models that better meet the needs of today’s…

There’s a good reason why home workers are known as the “invisible workforce” or the “shadow economy” of the garment industry. Far less regulated than factory work, home-based work—that is, work performed in households and small workshops rather than the traditional four-wall setting—is little understood by brands and retailers and virtually unknown to the general…

At a meeting in 2014, a PrimaLoft product manager recalled stumbling upon a piece of “compostable” packaging. Sitting in a boardroom at the company’s Latham, N.Y., headquarters, a sudden brain wave seized her: “Why can’t we just make a jacket insulation that we can bury in the backyard?” she asked. PrimaLoft is no stranger to…