The fashion industry enters 2025 facing a diluted mix of economic volatility, deregulation, and escalating environmental and social crises. Luxury sales are slowing, supply chains remain fragile, and millions of consumers are cutting back on spending. Against this backdrop, the Fashion CEO Agenda 2025, developed by the Global Fashion Agenda (GFA), sets out a clear framework for action, calling on brands and retailers to embrace responsibility over short-term cost savings.
At the heart of the agenda are five critical sustainability priorities:
Circular Systems
These priorities are not new, but their urgency has sharpened. The report emphasises that the pace of change remains too slow, urging leaders to make much needed, long-term decisions that integrate sustainability into core business strategy.
Looking past the more broader initiatives, the 2025 agenda outlines immediate steps companies can take, such as advancing worker protections, achieving pay equity, cutting greenhouse gas emissions across entire supply chains, and scaling circular business models like resale and textile-to-textile recycling.
To accelerate progress, the agenda highlights five enablers: Innovation, Capital, Courage, Incentives, and Regulation. These, the report argues, are essential levers for moving past incremental change and achieving systemic transformation.
Federica Marchionni, CEO at Global Fashion Agenda
Another key message is that progress cannot come at the expense of workers. With more than 300 million people employed across the fashion value chain, ensuring safe workplaces, fair pay, and human rights safeguards is non-negotiable. An often forgotten principle when discussing sustainability.
The Fashion CEO Agenda 2025 is designed as a practical checklist for executives, offering tools, case studies, and supporting resources to help companies adapt strategies to their specific context.
As the industry pushes towards a net-positive fashion industry by 2050, this agenda provides a guiding hand on how the fashion industry can work towards net-positive by the 2050 goal.
Download the full report and resources here.
The Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) is the non-profit organisation behind the Fashion CEO Agenda. Since 2009, GFA has been driving collaboration across the fashion industry to accelerate sustainability and create a net-positive future for fashion. Their vision is to mobilise, inspire, and educate stakeholders to embed responsibility at every level of the value chain.
GFA leads several key programmes, including the Global Fashion Summit, the world’s leading international forum on sustainability in fashion, and the Innovation Forum, which connects solution providers with brands to spark systemic change. They also publish influential thought-leadership tools such as the GFA Monitor, the Upstream Circularity Playbook, and the annual Fashion CEO Agenda. On the ground, initiatives like the Circular Fashion Partnership and the Renewable Energy Initiative focus on practical impact, from scaling textile recycling systems to supporting the transition to clean energy.
For businesses, policymakers, and individuals, GFA offers opportunities to get involved, by joining collaborative networks, accessing resources, or attending global events that shape the sustainability agenda for fashion.
Learn more and explore their programmes at globalfashionagenda.org.
