Next Gen Reflections is a series of articles written by members of Next Gen Assembly, an impactful advocacy programme for talented students and early-career professionals, led by Global Fashion Agenda and Centre for Sustainable Fashion’s Fashion Values programme, supported by Target. This article was written by 2025 member Bronte Contador-Kelsall.
Language as both a bridge and a boundary
Sustainability, circular economy, regeneration, responsibility, transparency. These words are now deeply embedded in fashion’s collective vocabulary. As the negative impacts of the global fashion industry have intensified, so too has the language designed to address them. Shared terminology has helped align actors, inform policy, and create a sense of direction.
At the same time, these terms can generate confusion, fatigue, and even undermine the progress they are meant to drive. As sustainability language proliferates, it can obscure as much as it clarifies, sometimes standing in for action or flattening complex ideas into neat, marketable claims.
Language does more than describe change – it shapes our capacity to imagine it. The words we use influence not only how problems are framed, but which futures appear possible, desirable, or realistic. When sustainability language remains bound to dominant industry and growth logic, it risks reinforcing business-as-usual rather than opening space for more transformative ways of thinking and doing fashion.
This tension invites a deeper question. Not whether sustainability terminology is useful – but how we relate to it, how we navigate it, and how we apply critical thinking to the values and aspirations that sit beneath the words we encounter. Because language is never neutral and its meaning is never fixed.
Why these terms exist and what they do
Shared sustainability language has emerged in response to the sheer scale and complexity of fashion’s challenges. Globalised supply chains, scattered responsibility, and uneven regulatory landscapes make coordination difficult. In this context, terminology functions as a kind of infrastructure: enabling dialogue across sectors, informing policy development, and supporting measurement, comparison, and accountability. Without some degree of shared language, collective action can quickly fragment, and responsibility becomes hard to assign.
At its most effective, sustainability language translates values into action through clear expectations and shared parameters. In Australia, the Seamless national clothing stewardship scheme demonstrates this. In December 2025, Seamless released its Circular Clothing Definitions to establish a shared language “by industry, for industry.” Terms such as repair, remanufacture, and recover are defined as practical strategies to move beyond the dominant “take-make-dispose” model. Here, language actively shapes decision-making, guides investment, and supports coordination across a complex and transitioning system.
A similar logic underpins Copenhagen Fashion Week’s (CPHFW) Sustainability Requirements Framework. These Minimum Standards set out what constitutes responsible practice for participating brands on a highly visible global stage. Importantly, the framework is not positioned as a claim of perfection. Instead, CPHFW describes it as a way to “create a basis and common language”, establishing shared expectations while signalling a clear collective direction for change.
CPHFW also creates space to move beyond surface-level buzzwords through its Small Talks – Big Conversation programme with Vogue Business. At the Autumn/Winter 2026 season, the panel Exploring Innovation in Design featured practitioners such as Sarah Brunnhuber of STEM. STEM embodies a holistic and experimental approach to fashion, guided by principles of sufficiency, community, and care. The brand pioneers zero-waste textile production, works with pre-order models to challenge overconsumption, and foregrounds craft and process over speed or scale. In doing so, STEM shows how familiar sustainability terms can move beyond business-as-usual to open genuinely different possibilities for design, commerce, and fashion.
When language loses its meaning
However, not all uses of sustainability language are anchored in meaningful practice. Fast fashion brands promoting “conscious collections” or in-store recycling schemes illustrate how easily language can be co-opted or diluted. These campaigns often spotlight marginal improvements – such as recycled fibres – while sitting alongside the ongoing production of billions of garments each year. Overproduction, overconsumption, and a lack of responsibility for garments at end of life remain largely unaddressed, with textile waste accumulating in places like Accra’s beaches, in Ghana.
Data from the European Commission suggests that 40% of “green claims” made in the EU have no supporting evidence, while 53% are vague, misleading or unfounded. In these cases, sustainability language functions less as a guide for transformation and more as a substitute for it. At the same time, many practices now framed as innovative or sustainable in fashion have long histories. As First Nations fashion advocate Yatu Widders Hunt explained in a 2020 Fashion Journal article:
The language and narrative piece is important – we are not inventing something, we are returning to something that has always existed…For Aboriginal designers, caring for each other and caring for Country are cultural values. Not separate things. It’s actually embedded and part of everything we do.
Practices such as re-purposing or composting textiles, low-waste production, and place-based design – seen in First Nations labels like Liandra Swim and Aarli – are not responses to industry trends or targets. They flow from value systems rooted in relationships with community and Country. Many sustainability terms are naming what has existed for millennia under different knowledge systems. Learning from these examples allows fashion to engage with language in ways that go far deeper than surface-level adoption.
Navigating the noise through critical inquiry
Collectively, these examples show how sustainability language can clarify, coordinate, and inspire action, while also being co-opted, diluted, or emptied of meaning. The challenge then is not to abandon these terms but to develop more critical ways of engaging with them.
For me, this starts with inquiry. Critical thinking means interrogating not only the claims we encounter, but also our own assumptions and positions within the systems we inhabit. When approached this way, language becomes contextual and relational rather than fixed or self-evident. Questions that can help orient this inquiry include:
● What context surrounds the use of this term?
● What values and assumptions are embedded in this term?
● Who benefits from its use, and who or what is rendered invisible?
● What practices or outcomes are supported, and which are obscured?
Alongside these questions, a range of tools can support more informed engagement. Resources such as Good on You and Fashion Revolution’s Transparency Index help look beyond headline language by assessing labour conditions, supply chain transparency, and environmental impact. The UNEP Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook complements these by providing principles for responsible, values-driven communication. It demonstrates how messaging can align with sustainability targets, support systemic change, and empower consumers, reinforcing that language must be guided by values to contribute meaningfully to the solution. The Sustainable Fashion Glossary by Condé Nast and Centre for Sustainable Fashion is a compendium of terms to develop and strengthen sustainability literacy, grounded in an extensive set of academic, scientific, industry, and NGO sources.
While no single tool provides a complete picture, together they form part of a broader critical toolkit helping to cut through noise and test whether language and practice are truly aligned.
Anchoring language in values
During my time as a member of the Next Gen Assembly (NGA), we developed the NGA 2025 Manifesto. It became an essential reference point for navigating sustainability language without getting trapped in it. Co-created with my fellow cohort members – a diverse group of fashion designers, system thinkers, social entrepreneurs, and storytellers from across the globe – it has served as a kind of “North Star.” The Manifesto has expanded our imagination and fostered dialogue across disciplines, geographies, and lived experiences.
Its seven calls – from recognising nature as a living partner to reclaiming the narrative – offer anchors for evaluating alignment between words, action, and systemic impact. In this way, the Manifesto transforms sustainability language from an end in itself into a practical guide for decision-making and collaboration.
Sustainability language can be both a bridge and a boundary. Holding it lightly means staying open, attentive, and reflexive. Holding values firmly means grounding our work in relationships, accountability, and care for people, for place, and for the systems that sustain life.
Ultimately, it is not the terms themselves that will shape the future of fashion. It is how we use language, guided by inquiry, principles, and imagination, that will determine our ability to enact and sustain meaningful change.
About Bronte, Next Gen Assembly 2025 member
Bronte Contador-Kelsall is an interdisciplinary designer and strategist dedicated to driving positive social change. With a background in political science and design, she combines curiosity, analytical rigour, and creative problem-solving to investigate complex, interconnected challenges.