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 Maya Caine.
As an American woman living through a moment of overlapping crises, climate collapse, overt authoritarianism, and deepening inequality, I keep returning to the wisdom of James Baldwin (1972, p. 196):
An old world is dying, and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born.
But rebirth is not automatic. It requires us to recognise that the norms formed in collapse, no matter how deeply embedded they are in the status quo, must be dismantled and redesigned. Nothing should be beyond questioning within a system built on extraction and harm. This understanding has followed me throughout my journey as a social entrepreneur in fashion. It echoes Audre Lorde’s (1979) reminder that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” If we are serious about a just transition in fashion, we cannot rely on the same ownership, governance, and business models that created today’s exploitative and extractive system to deliver something fundamentally different.
As a Master’s student at the Yale School of the Environment, I have studied the fashion industry through a lens of relational systems thinking, examining how power, value, and decision-making move through global supply chains. This work forced me to confront an uncomfortable reality: the industry’s deepest failures are structural. We continue to define value almost exclusively as financial, while ecological health, labor dignity, cultural meaning, and community well-being are treated as secondary, optional, or expendable.
This realization sent me on a side quest, what I came to think of as soil work. Before planting my new venture that seeks to support a just transition in fashion, I wanted to understand the ground it would grow in. I did not want to build something with care and intention, only to watch it get degraded by the toxic soil of the status quo.
Before this work, venture design was framed to me as the technical foundation of a business: how it raises capital, who controls decision making, and how it generates returns. What was missing was the recognition that these choices are not neutral and that, without intentional design, even the most well-intentioned ventures can reproduce the harms of the status quo. Life-affirming venture design begins by naming these foundations and treating them as deliberate choices that demand careful design. It asks us to rethink ownership as stewardship, governance as shared decision making, and business models as tools for care rather than engines of endless growth.
This lens has fundamentally reshaped how I see “sustainable fashion”. For years, the industry has treated large brands as the solution to a crisis they helped create. We are told that change must flow through big companies because of their scale. This belief has constrained imagination and actively delayed the transformations we actually need.
Expecting large, publicly-traded fashion brands to slow down, reduce production, or fundamentally redesign their ownership, governance, and business models is unrealistic and a distraction. These companies are legally bound to profit maximisation. They cannot and will not carry us to a just transition. Clinging to the idea of incremental change has weighed down real progress, producing a familiar pattern of greenwashing campaigns, pilot projects, and partnerships that appear meaningful on paper while leaving the industry’s extractive core intact.
It’s simple. We need new systems.
I believe the future of fashion will not be delivered by retrofitting large corporations. It will be built by life-affirming ventures that create social, ecological, cultural, and economic value together, and embed harmony and enoughness into their foundations from day one. These enterprises are committing to new forms of ownership, governance, and value creation that make a life-affirming future possible.
This belief is not theoretical for me. It is what I am actively building with Helix, a storied fashion resale marketplace launching in spring 2026 that keeps clothing in motion, memories alive, and value in the hands of the people. Helix treats garments as living archives, rewards stewardship over volume, and circulates value back to the people and places that sustain them. Life-affirming venture design sits at its core.
If we truly believe a new world is being born, then our responsibility is not to ask whether existing systems can stretch a little further. It is to ask what deserves to be funded, protected, and platformed next. The just transition will not come from polishing the master’s tools. It will come from having the courage to set them down and build something new.
About Maya, Next Gen Assembly 2025 member
Maya Caine is a Master of Environmental Science candidate at the Yale School of the Environment, specializing in Industrial Ecology and Green Chemistry. With a background in corporate strategy, she has spent the past seven years building slow and circular fashion solutions. She is currently developing Helix, a city-first fashion marketplace designed to counter fashion’s culture of anonymity and wastefulness by restoring memory and social connection to clothing. By tracing the human stories of garments across owners, Helix treats clothing as living archives, extending their lives through reuse community stewardship.
Baldwin, J. (1972) No Name in the Street. 1st edn. Michael Joseph.
Lorde, A. (1979) ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.’ Second Sex Conference. New York. 2 October. p. 99. Available at: [Accessed: 23 February 2026].