Why Fashion Isn’t Backing Away From Climate Commitments- Even When Governments Do

As governments retreat, fashion’s biggest groups are quietly treating sustainability as long-term risk management.

In an increasingly volatile political climate, sustainability has become an easy target. In the United States, the rollback of federal climate policies, from emissions regulation to clean-energy incentives, has given corporations plausible cover to slow or soften their environmental commitments. Some have done so publicly.

Yet across the luxury fashion industry, the response has been more restrained. While rhetoric has cooled, action has not disappeared. Instead, many of the world’s largest luxury groups are continuing their climate strategies quietly, embedding them deeper into operations rather than marketing. For global fashion businesses, sustainability is no longer a values exercise - it is structural risk management.

By Ridhi Sofat

January 2026

Luxury Operates Beyond National Politics

Unlike purely domestic companies, luxury groups operate across jurisdictions with very different regulatory expectations. A rollback in Washington does not neutralise pressure in Paris, Brussels, Milan or London.

European regulation remains the industry’s most powerful anchor. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) now requires large fashion and luxury companies to disclose detailed environmental data across their value chains. Carbon border taxes, extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws, and stricter waste and packaging rules directly affect how fashion products are made, transported and sold.

For conglomerates like LVMH, Kering, and Richemont, compliance with European climate regulation is not optional. It is the price of market access. As a result, sustainability targets are increasingly designed around the most demanding jurisdiction, then applied globally.

How Luxury Groups Are Responding

Luxury’s approach to climate action is notably conservative: incremental, controlled, and long-term.

LVMH, the world’s largest luxury group, has committed to reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions across its maisons and has invested heavily in renewable energy, eco-design and traceability systems. Rather than making sweeping public declarations, the group has focused on standardising reporting and supplier requirements across brands as diverse as Louis Vuitton, Dior and Tiffany & Co.

Kering, long positioned as a sustainability leader, continues to refine its Environmental Profit & Loss (EP&L) framework, which quantifies environmental impact across the supply chain. Even as the political climate becomes less favourable, Kering has maintained science-based targets and expanded regenerative agriculture initiatives, particularly in raw materials like leather and wool.

Prada Group has taken a similar path, investing in circular nylon through its Re-Nylon programme while embedding ESG targets into executive remuneration, signalling that sustainability is tied to governance, not branding.

Meanwhile, Hermès, often viewed as conservative by design, has focused on durability and longevity rather than speed or scale. Its vertically integrated supply chain allows greater control over materials, waste and production standards. Its approach that aligns naturally with climate resilience without requiring public activism.

The Supply Chain

For fashion, climate impact is overwhelmingly concentrated upstream - in raw materials, manufacturing and logistics. As a result, luxury brands exert influence less through public commitments and more through procurement standards.

Groups like Adidas and Burberry have pushed emissions tracking and reduction requirements onto suppliers, knowing that factories serving multiple global brands will adapt systems once and apply them broadly. This creates a multiplier effect: even brands that soften their messaging still enforce standards contractually.

As in the wider corporate world, pressure now travels down the supply chain, quietly but forcefully.

Why Sustainability Still Makes Financial Sense

Beyond compliance, luxury brands increasingly see financial logic in climate investment. Energy efficiency, material innovation and cleaner logistics reduce exposure to volatility, particularly as climate-related disruption affects cotton yields, leather supply and global transport routes. Investment in clean technology is no longer speculative; it is defensive.

Luxury groups are also acutely aware of reputational risk. While consumer appetite for overt sustainability messaging has cooled, expectations around responsibility have not disappeared. For high-end brands built on trust, heritage and permanence, environmental backsliding carries long-term brand cost.

What distinguishes luxury’s response is tone. Rather than loud pledges, brands are opting for discretion, continuing initiatives while avoiding politicisation. This mirrors a broader shift within luxury toward restraint: quieter branding, longer product cycles, and a renewed focus on longevity. Sustainability fits naturally within this framework. It is not positioned as virtue, but as continuity.

The Long View

In today’s fashion industry, sustainability is no longer driven by optimism about rapid transition. It is driven by realism. Luxury brands understand that political cycles are short, but supply chains, assets and reputations are long. Even as governments step back, the structural forces, regulation, capital markets, procurement pressure and environmental risk, remain.

For luxury, continuing climate action is not about signalling progress. It is about protecting value. And in an industry built on endurance, that may be the most luxurious strategy of all.