Changing the game, not the shop window
What fashion needs today is probably not another shop window or another glossy story, but a different system. The sector has spent years getting used to consuming fast, producing fast and normalising a permanently changing collection cycle by calling it a trend. Overproduction, invisible labour, craft stripped of its value and a heavy bill sent to nature are all part of that arrangement. The question now is not how to make fashion look a little greener. It is whether the rules of the game can actually change.
The numbers are striking enough on their own. Studies report that the textile and fashion sector is responsible for somewhere between 2 and 8 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions; that it produces around 92 million tonnes of textile waste a year; and that, every second, the equivalent of a rubbish truck of textiles is burned or sent to landfill. In Europe, textile consumption remains one of the most critical areas of pressure on the environment and the climate, and consumption per person in the EU passed 20 kilograms in 2024.
Sustainable fashion is no longer a communications heading. It is a systems question: design, production, the supply chain, material choice, local development, entrepreneurship and the business model all have to change together.
The model we designed for Derimod
That was the motivation behind the Sustainable Fashion Entrepreneurship Centre we designed for Derimod. We built it not as a programme but as a strategic model, one capable of igniting the transformation potential already present in the sector. The aim was to take sustainability out of the boundaries of corporate discourse and place it at the centre of entrepreneurship, production and new business models.
The centre exists to support entrepreneurs with a sustainability-led idea or product aimed at environmental and social innovation. Local production, craftsmanship, environmental impact, social innovation and new thinking are brought inside one frame, and we defined that frame as an original model capable of shaping the sustainable fashion entrepreneurship ecosystem in Türkiye.
What the sector needs is courage
The part that matters most for a brand starts exactly here. Fashion needs fewer shop windows and more courage. Fewer declarations of good intent and more workable solutions. Less polished language and more real effect.
The initiative Derimod has put in place turns communities of entrepreneurs who place sustainability at the centre of their business model into an ecosystem that can be supported and grown. The programme's 2026 call makes that concrete: entrepreneurs who want to build a brand in sustainable fashion are offered mentoring and support with market access, supply chain, marketing and technology, in a structure open both to those at the idea stage and to those who have already developed a product or a service.
Real change does not start by saying what is wrong. It starts by designing what is possible.
Why a European brand should read this as a method
Textiles and leather sit at the centre of the value chain questions European brands are now being asked. A company in scope of the CSRD has to describe its value chain and the impacts inside it; the Voluntary Standard adopted alongside the revised ESRS defines the ceiling of what a smaller supplier can be required to provide, which we set out in our CSRD and ESRS guide. The EU Deforestation Regulation brings a separate obligation for large and medium companies from 30 December 2026, and leather is a commodity it reaches.
The usual response is to send a longer questionnaire upstream. The model here is the opposite, and that is why it transfers: the brand invests in the capability of the suppliers and entrepreneurs it depends on, so that the data, the materials and the production practices exist before anyone asks for them. Capacity built this way is cheaper than capacity demanded, and it survives an audit, because it is real.
A well-designed programme changes a sector's tomorrow today
We do not see Derimod's step as a communications effort that makes a brand's sustainability approach more visible. We see it as an act of sustainable development, aimed at a smarter, fairer, more local and more resilient future for the industry.
If fashion is genuinely going to change, that change will be made possible together with courageous brands and responsible entrepreneurs. The work of turning it into disclosure — materiality, data, the report itself — is what we cover on our sustainability reporting page.