ChangeNow summit shifts focus to remaking fashion’s economic model with digital passports and textile recycling

PARIS , At this year’s ChangeNow summit the conversation around fashion shifted from searching for fixes to questioning the sector’s very economics: industry leaders argued the challenge is no longer finding solutions but remaking the model that produces and values clothing.

The three‑day event, held at the Grand Palais Éphémère and attended by tens of thousands, featured a dedicated fashion programme that placed circularity, transparency and services at the centre of debate. HEC Paris, the summit’s academic partner, said the edition drew about 35,000 participants, 1,200 investors and 450 speakers, underscoring the broad interest in rethinking supply chains and industrial decarbonisation.

Speakers traced the roots of the crisis to the long‑standing linear “take, make, waste” system that prioritised volume growth over material, social and long‑term commercial value. With European regulation tightening and the physical costs of waste mounting, panellists urged brands to pivot from selling more garments to unlocking the value already embedded in products through resale, repair, rental and data‑driven services.

Digital product passports emerged as a practical example of that shift. “We really believe that this is the future,” said Vanessa Barboni Hallik, founder and chief executive officer of Another Tomorrow. She argued linking physical goods to persistent digital identities lets brands extend relationships beyond the point of sale and build first‑party data. “The DPP is a CRM tool,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to create those first‑party data relationships. There are a lot of next-generation consumers encountering brands for the first time [on] secondhand [platforms], not first hand. So for all of these reasons, the DPP has enormous power. It also has tremendous power from a lifetime value perspective.”

Industry initiatives are moving beyond pilot stage. According to the Aura Blockchain Consortium, backed by luxury groups including LVMH and Prada, more than 80 million products have been registered on its platform, and executives said brands are increasingly looking to add services , repair, extended warranties and personalised engagement , that monetise transparency. “What we see now is that brands are moving more and more into the service-level area,” Aura CEO Marcel Härtlein said. “The whole luxury industry is really at an inflection point, because trust, transparency, sustainability, customer engagement on an additional digital touchpoint are becoming super relevant.”

Yet practical hurdles persist. Panellists noted that vital data sits across fragmented supply chains and multiple tiers, complicating activation. “It’s super complex, because the data actually exists, but it’s everywhere,” said Laure Dervaux, cofounder of Fairly Made.

Beyond data and disclosure, the summit showcased signs of industrial‑scale textile recycling emerging in Europe. Circ, a recycling start‑up, is building a large textile‑to‑textile facility in eastern France with the capacity to process 70,000 tonnes of textile waste a year and an expected opening in 2028. “It’s a great illustration of how technology in the circular economy can rebuild old economies, sometimes dirty economies like coal,” Circ CEO Peter Majeranowski said, describing the project as a roughly $500 million investment that also aims to retrain local workers. He cautioned, “The bottleneck now is not technology , it’s coordination.”

Speakers drew attention to the global unevenness of the fashion system. Traders in Ghana, for example, receive around 15 million used garments each week from the Global North; many items cannot be resold and become a local waste and economic burden. “We should be considered at the table when decisions are being made,” said Yayra Agbofah, founder of The Revival at Kantamanto Market, calling for firmer EU export rules to address the embedded costs borne by receiving countries.

Policy was framed as a critical lever for change. Industry and NGO voices pointed to recent French action: coalition En Mode Climat pushed for anti‑fast‑fashion measures that passed the National Assembly in March 2024 and were approved by the French Senate in June 2025 before moving to the European Commission for final review. Julia Faure, cofounder of sustainable brand Loom and president of the coalition, highlighted how low wages and a largely female workforce underwrite cheap overproduction. The sector’s environmental scale was also reiterated: fashion accounts for nearly 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and an estimated 30 percent of garments never sell.

Economic signals and regulatory shifts are reshaping corporate strategy. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has argued fashion must decouple revenue from material use and has modelled how resale, repair and rental could expand faster than traditional sales if structural barriers were removed. “We simply can’t make the case they are competitive compared to linear,” Alice Bodreau, head of corporate partnerships at the foundation, said, noting tax treatment and logistical frictions as examples.

Large consultancies and technology firms present at ChangeNow emphasised cross‑sector solutions for industrial decarbonisation. According to Capgemini, its sessions addressed carbon reduction strategies, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and climate technologies relevant to industrial transitions, reflecting the broader imperative to align fashion’s value chain with decarbonisation pathways.

Speakers also flagged geopolitical and operational risks that could slow change. Supply interruptions and power cuts in manufacturing hubs, exacerbated by regional conflicts, were cited as immediate pressures that may compress margins and consumer spending, complicating investment in long‑term circular infrastructure.

Despite uneven progress and competing commercial pressures, the summit conveyed a clear message for corporate leaders in industrial decarbonisation: sustainability must be reframed from compliance to value creation. Platforms that convert product provenance into services, automated sorting and textile‑to‑textile recycling facilities, alongside tighter regulation and international coordination, were presented as pieces of a transition that would require alignment across brands, financiers, regulators and the communities that shoulder fashion’s externalities. Lewis Akenji, CEO of the Hot or Cool Institute, summed up the political dimension: stronger regulation will be needed if entrenched interests resist deeper change.