Contrary to the general spirit today, sustainability has not failed. It might be worse: it has been set aside.

Across industries, the retreat is quiet but unmistakable. ESG reports are shelved, postponed, or left online with last year’s date and a discreet tag: “under review”. Editors tell PR teams, almost apologetically: “readers don’t click on sustainability anymore.” The language has shifted — from ambition to fatigue, from urgency to caution. What once carried moral weight now feels like homework.

That fatigue would already be troubling on its own. It becomes intolerable when set against the climate trajectory.

The planet has never been in worse health. And the fashion industry — to which I have devoted a large part of my professional life — has made remarkably little progress over the past twenty years. Instead of shrinking, as required by the Paris Agreement, fashion’s carbon emissions and other negative externalities continue to rise. Not slightly. Not marginally. Structurally, year after year.

But this is only part of the story. At the same time, the industry itself has been profoundly destabilized. Its economics have shifted, its supply chains stretched, its internal dynamic distorted. And despite all the former hype surrounding “sustainable fashion”, there are remarkably few examples of companies operating at scale that have succeeded by placing sustainability at the core of their business model.

In other words, we are not on the right trajectory. And something, somewhere went obviously wrong. Actually, a lot of things in a lot of places went wrong.

I use we deliberately. We are all consumers. And many of the people who will read this book are also fashion professionals. We are in the same boat — a boat that is pitching violently — and we could all point fingers at one another. In the end, the bill will be shared. And it will be steep.

This is why I decided to tell my story and to share the takeaways of this journey.

This story is firstly the one of an insider: a fashion entrepreneur who, with a group of friends, built Adore Me, a lingerie brand, from a scrappy New York startup in 2012 to joining Victoria’s Secret & Co. in 2023 in the largest direct-to-consumer brand acquisition in fashion history. That deal mattered not only financially but symbolically as well: joining forces with one of the most iconic names in fashion to push the intimate category toward a more inclusive, tech-driven, and sustainable future.

It is also the story of an outsider. I never quite fit the mold of the New York Garment District and Adore Me was an outlier from the beginning — a rare mix of talent, boldness, and purpose. Most of us were not “fashion people”, nor fascinated by fashion’s spotlights. We came with fresh eyes, data-first instincts, and a technology-driven approach to almost everything. That outsider mindset was our edge. It allowed us to question assumptions, experiment relentlessly, and sometimes succeed where traditional players barely dared to try.

This is also the story of a sustainability enthusiast — not born from ideology but from proximity. It comes from years of meeting fascinating people all over the world who were trying, often quietly and imperfectly, to make things better in their own way. It stems from seeing how much intelligence and goodwill already exist inside the system, and recognizing how rarely it is allowed to compound.

Becoming a father changed the texture of the question. Climate change stopped being an abstract trajectory and became a temporal one: not “what kind of industry are we aspiring to?” but “what kind of world am I handing over?”. It sharpened my intolerance for symbolic progress and strengthened my appetite for things that actually work.

At Adore Me, this combination of exposure and urgency pushed us to take risks early. We pursued B Corp certification at a time when it was still a marginal movement in fashion. We invested in data-centric decision-making long before sustainability dashboards became fashionable. We built numerous tools, experimented with product-level impact accounting, and attempted several industry firsts. Of course, we also made mistakes. But those failures were not wasted. They revealed friction points no report could capture and taught us something essential: transition is not blocked by a lack of solutions, but by the absence of systems capable of absorbing them.

And finally, this is also the story of a rising anger. Frustration at the distance between the urgency of the situation and the pace of real change. Skepticism toward theories that sound profound but fall apart in real operational and economic terms. Rage at watching consequences settle in slowly but relentlessly, even as the conversation circles endlessly around hollow intentions.

Over time, I became uneasy with the gap between elegant sustainability narratives and the messiness of implementation. Too many frameworks assume away cost structures, ignore supply-chain physics, or underestimate organizational inertia. Too many slogans confuse moral clarity or Manichean alignment with practical effectiveness.

What troubles me most is not that progress is hard — that was always expected — but that so much energy has been invested in the wrong places. In declarations rather than design. In promises rather than plumbing. In visibility rather than viability. The result is not only disappointment but fragility: teams and customers grow increasingly disillusioned, and a growing cynicism mistakes frustration for realism.

I do not claim to hold the blueprint for a peaceful fashion industry transition. But I am convinced of this: the changes required go far beyond well-meaning yet ineffective slogans — they demand much more. They are more uncomfortable than most organizations realize. Sustainability, if it is to matter, must be built into the operating system — not layered on top as a moral accessory.

This book is written by a builder, not a preacher. You will find real projects tested within Adore Me and other fashion companies as well as the broader lessons they reveal about what it actually takes to move this industry.

And yet, despite everything, I still believe there is a path forward.

Fashion can reinvent itself and perhaps, along the way, inspire other industries to do the same. That is what this book is about.

Part One examines how good intentions of the industry went wrong — moral postures, capsule collections, ESG promises, and other well-meaning efforts that produced unintended consequences.

Part Two dives into today’s fashion ecosystem — fragile, fragmented, full of contradictory signals — and the disruptions already reshaping it.

Part Three explores how the industry should act now: cash-positive levers, technology, smarter collaboration, and organizational resets.

This is not a manifesto. It is a field guide — messy, grounded, and rooted in lived experience. A diary of experiments and small breakthroughs that others can hopefully build upon.

Fashion, with its resources, creativity, and visibility, has the potential to move faster and better, but only if it stops pretending we are already heading in the right direction and steps out of its comfort zone.

This book is for anyone who wants to look at the system with clear eyes, to understand why it is stuck, and to explore how we might improve it — together.

It is now time to reset fashion.

In fashion, like in many other industries, cost is central.

It is the quiet metric behind every product, every runway, every headline campaign — the invisible engine of the industry’s survival. And yet, amid the grand conversation about transformation, purpose, and innovation, the word “cost” almost never appears. You will hear “impact”, “mission”, or “responsibility”, but rarely “COGS”. That omission is not accidental; it conceals the industry’s most uncomfortable truth. Sustainable fashion is also stalling because the economics generally do not add up and the business model is not working yet.

COGS: Cost of Goods Sold, the accounting cost of a product.

The Green Premium Myth

“Green premium” is the belief that consumers would willingly pay more for sustainable products. The logic was that cleaner products — either for your health or for the planet — would command higher prices that consumers were willing to accept.

But the numbers never really supported that optimism. Across surveys and market studies, consumers consistently declared that they cared about sustainability, that they wanted to “vote with their wallet”, and that they were ready to pay more — but “more” usually meant a modest 3 to 5%. Beyond that, good intentions faded.

The Cost Cascade and the Green Penalty

As brands expected consumers to ultimately pay more, they themselves became willing to invest more in their own production costs, in particular to source better components for the planet. Many brands therefore accepted higher raw-material prices, longer lead times, or complex certifications. The assumption of a green premium justified inflated COGS. Except this inflated cost turned out much higher than the green premium accepted by most customers.

What began as a hopeful equation therefore turned into a structural trap: a self-reinforcing cycle in which companies spend more to do better and the market refuses to reward this. The green premium quietly transformed into a green penalty.

The Middle-Ground Dilemma

Luxury brands can better absorb extra costs generated by better raw materials. Their high margins, control over production, and ability to charge a premium for craftsmanship allow them to experiment without fear. Sustainability fits naturally within their narrative of quality, heritage, and scarcity.

At the other end of the spectrum, a few emerging mission-driven brands embedded responsibility within their identity from day one. Their customers expected to pay more, and their limited scale made that easier. A handful of pioneers, like Patagonia or Allbirds, managed to build lasting loyalty around purpose and quality. They became examples that a conscious business was possible.

But between these two extremes lies the vast middle ground — the part of the industry where most people work and where most products are made — and it is here that the green penalty bites hardest. Mainstream brands operate under relentless economic pressure: fierce competition, globalized sourcing, permanent discounting, thin margins. They cannot raise prices without losing volume, nor can they compromise ethics without losing reputation. It is precisely this middle — the segment big enough to change the world — that is least equipped to afford extra costs or missing sales.

Inside the Trap

I once shared a panel on sustainable fashion with the CEO of a mid-market, trendy brand. She told me that 10% of her assortment used sustainable materials. Those products cost more to make but could not be priced higher, so the margin was thinner. “If this segment scales to 25% of total sales,” she said, “my business model breaks.”

That single sentence captures fashion’s contradiction: sustainable brands that are not financially sustainable. Large corporations face a version of the same problem. Surrounded by layers of stakeholders and short-term KPIs, they resist anything that threatens quarterly returns. So many turn to sustainability hacks: a collection made from recycled nylon, a marketing partnership with an NGO, a glossy report. Enough to demonstrate awareness, not enough to transform practices in depth.

These gestures are sometimes cynical, but this is rare. More often, they result from genuine goodwill colliding with economic gravity. But the outcome is the same: a cycle of green rhetoric funded by shrinking margins and growing frustration.

Adore Me’s Cost Discipline

At Adore Me, we learned this lesson the hard way. We were part of that middle ground — neither luxury nor mission-brand — and we knew our customer well. The typical cost-conscious girl next door was looking for beautiful lingerie at our $39.95 fair price. She might have appreciated sustainability, but she was not going to pay a premium for it.

So, we made an early, deliberate decision: no green premium.

If we wanted to make a difference, it had to happen within our existing price points. That constraint became our discipline. We re-engineered materials, pushed suppliers to innovate, optimized energy use and logistics, automated inventory to avoid waste — anything that could offset the higher costs of better production. Through trial, error, and iteration, we learned to move forward without raising prices or losing margin on sustainable products, and therefore make them economically viable.

Somewhere along the way, we realized that this was the real frontier of sustainability: not finding ways to charge more for sustainability but finding ways to deliver it for the same price.

The Unintended Consequence

The fashion industry’s initial approach — upgrading to more expensive raw materials to offer greener alternatives — ultimately failed. The math did not add up between the green premium acceptable to the bulk of customers and the extra costs incurred.

But instead of re-engineering their cost structures or internal processes, brands switched to symbolism. They replaced sustainability progress with narrative. As a result, a movement that began as an urgent call for change evolved further into a contest of claims and slogans.

Fifteen years into fashion’s sustainability awakening, cost remains the elephant in the fitting room. As long as the economics of responsibility are built on wishful economic equations, the industry will keep circling the same paradox and applauding progress it cannot sustain.