Luxury Briefing: Are luxury products ‘sustainable by nature,’ like Antoine Arnault said?

During the conversation, Arnault said, “Luxury products are sustainable by nature. That’s what makes them so special. They are made from the highest quality materials; they are durable; they are repairable. That is what separates us from the rest of the fashion industry.” 

It was a big statement from the biggest luxury maison in the world. That’s especially considering that the luxury market is growing at a faster rate than the rest of the fashion industry, at 5-8% in 2023, with production ramping up to meet the demand for luxury products. In total, the global fashion industry produces and sells somewhere between 80 billion and 150 billion annually, according to the World Economic Forum.

Kering’s chief sustainability officer, Marie Claire Daveu, commented on luxury’s supposed inherent sustainability in an interview with Glossy in March. “Luxury brands are more sustainable [than other brands] because you order quality, beautiful raw materials. Sustainability is in your DNA. […] But even luxury brands can continue to become better,” she said.

Sustainability issues in fashion largely remain the same across the premium and mass consumer segments. Among them: overproduction, resource-intensive materials, rising carbon emissions and biodiversity. Some designers, like veteran shoe designer Marco Scoccia, have left the industry to create more sustainable brands. For his part, Scoccia, who formerly designed for Bottega Venneta and Tory Burch, stepped away in 2019 and started O2 Monde, a shoe brand that leverages plant-based materials.

As a result, there is more demand from sustainability experts, including consumers, for holistic integration of sustainability education and principles across luxury. In recent years, brands including Nike, Prada and Loro Piana have added chief sustainability officers to their C-suites. And increasingly, ensuring this role is not siloed has been prioritized.

Diana Verde Nieto, co-founder and co-CEO of sustainability agency Positive Luxury, which helps luxury brands achieve ESG+ objectives according to an accreditation program, said, “Up to now, sustainability has been a burden for everybody because, although people get really excited about it, it’s extra work for everyone. What we see now is an incredible appetite [among brands] to understand how to look at sustainability beyond the compliance piece and how to start integrating it into everyone’s job descriptions.”

“Sustainability departments have grown for a while, and you do need somebody who understands the entire discipline,” said Nieto. “But you need specialists [of other departments], too. So the question becomes: How do you get the best procurement person [who works] with sustainability [in mind] and the best marketeer and the best supply chain management?” 

For British luxury jeweler Stephen Webster, sustainability when sourcing raw materials has been a priority for over 25 years. “We make sure that all the sourcing information is available to the customer,” said Stephen Webster, founder of his 34-year-old namesake jewelry brand. “People [have become] way more interested; the questions [about our sustainability] are way more frequent from clients — enough so that my whole team has to be very conversant in everything that we supply and the way it is sourced.”

Twelve members of the company’s 30-person head office team are part of a “green team,” which was formed in 2020 to facilitate the understanding and implementation of sustainability measures across different areas of the business. Stephen Webster’s global head of marketing and sustainability, Samantha Chapman, is the green team chair. 

“The first port of call is your consumer-facing team. {For example] if somebody’s in sales, they’re going to be in direct contact with the consumer, so they need to be right up to speed on what we are, who we are and what we do [around sustainability],” said Webster. “When it comes to more operational roles, … our head of logistics is on the green team. They’re the one driving net-zero domestic shipping, among other projects.” 

Along with customers, another driver for the prioritization of sustainability across a luxury company is demand from younger employees. “For employees today, especially in the younger generations, sustainability is a key topic,” Daveu said in March. “Human resources people will tell you that, during interviews, many people ask what you are doing [in terms of sustainability]. And they want to know how quickly you’re doing it.”

For established companies with a sustainability-focused culture, it’s easier to attract like-minded employees. “We do tend to attract those kinds of people,” said Webster. “It comes up a lot at the interview stage, where people will say that they really like the fact that we take sustainability and sourcing seriously.”

The same is true for accessible luxury apparel brands like U.K.-based L.K. Bennett, a favorite of the Duchess of Cambridge. In May, the 33-year-old company reported a 40% rise in gross profit for the year ending in January 2023, to more than £30 million, driven by a post-pandemic boom in occasionwear.

“When we’re hiring for the product development team, we ask about [candidates’] experience and about passion, [when it comes to sustainability]: Does that person really want to make a difference? For us, it’s not about tick-boxing,” said Lynette Bradford, the brand’s head of technical and creative development who leads its sustainability efforts.

She added, “We want to know, ‘Will you actively work with our suppliers and your colleagues to influence them? If you recognize that something in the business can be improved [to be more sustainable], will you help us change that?”

At the 80-person L.K. Bennett head office, working together across departments to clean up the way the business is run is prioritized. Younger staff members drive this collaboration, despite the fact that they don’t have “sustainability” in their job title. And the brand’s communications team works with the sourcing and design teams to convey accurate information about the brand’s materials.

“In this day and age, there are a lot of brands that are greenwashing, and we are so conscious of not being in that space,” said Sharna Thomas, PR and influencer officer at L.K. Bennett. “That means making sure everything from our marketing to our communications doesn’t say anything like, ‘We are the most sustainable brand in the world.'” 

The move to integrated sustainability roles has been expedited, considering the need for brands to respond quickly to changes in sustainability-related regulation, standards and research. Without clear communication and constant education throughout the business, it could suffer both reputational and financial damage.

“In sustainability, things change every month,” said Thomasine Jordan, global product and design director at L.K. Bennett. “You think you’ve found a great fabric, but actually, when you look into the details, it’s not sustainable. So you have to continuously move and push to make changes.”

Bradford said there are equal challenges for luxury, compared to other industries. And having an integrated approach that goes beyond the sustainability team is beneficial, regardless of the sector.

“Just because you’re at a premium level, that doesn’t mean you’ve got all the answers or you’ve got everything right,” said Bradford. “That statement from Arnault is probably a bit controversial. Maybe for LVMH, they feel that they are in a very confident position. But for L.K. Bennett, it’s important to say that sustainability is [requires] transparency across the whole business.”