Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas

Author:Dana Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

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NONE OF THESE initiatives would’ve flown were it not for McCartney’s sustainability and ethical trade chief, Claire Bergkamp. A brainy brunette in her thirties, who hails from Helena, Montana, Bergkamp is the one who finds sheep herders in New Zealand and organic cotton farmers in Egypt, liaises with pro-environment NGOs and associations, crunches the numbers for the EP&L she helped craft, and figures out how to bring impact percentages down, and down further. “I can’t even really see life without Claire,” McCartney said.

Like McCartney, Bergkamp is a lifelong fashion follower. She subscribed to Vogue throughout her youth (“I can tell you, in Montana, I was a freak!”) and shopped in Idaho malls when on soccer team trips (there were no decent malls in Helena). She knew early on, however, that her interest lay more on the sociological side of dress—“What it means to wear something,” she told me—than fervent consumption or preening.

After graduating from Emerson College in Boston in 2007 with a BA in costume design, and spending four years in Los Angeles working in film and television, she enrolled in London College of Fashion’s master’s program, with a focus on sustainability. Shortly after her degree, she landed at McCartney. Her mandate: make the company more efficiently green. “Everyone had been to our factories,” Bergkamp told me, “but no one had looked at them through the lens of social and environmental impact.”

We were sitting in a small conference room in McCartney’s airy headquarters, situated in a 1920s brick edifice in the west London neighborhood of Shepherd’s Bush. As with most luxury fashion offices, the walls were white, the furnishings were modern, and the rooms were awash in natural light—even on a dark winter morn.

One of Bergkamp’s tasks at McCartney was to set up the environmental profit and loss system that Kering developed with PricewaterhouseCoopers. The EP&L analyzes six major categories—greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, water pollution, water consumption, waste, and land use—and places a monetary value on environmental changes caused in each by the company’s practices. Negatives on the balance sheet come from sourcing raw materials in a traditional manner—taking, without giving back. The plus column records actions in the “mitigation hierarchy.” In order of value: avoid impact; minimize impact; restoration; offset. For example, “you can offset river impacts by cleaning up rivers,” Bergkamp explained. You can “restore degraded ecosystems—like grazing land that’s been wiped out—and reverse desertification by changing grazing practices.” Such exercises are assigned positive monetary values and are calculated on the balance sheet.

The EP&L “allows us to set new, ambitious targets and gives us an unprecedented level of visibility and traceability into our supply chain,” McCartney stated. All Kering companies now have EP&Ls.

Once the EP&L was up and running, Bergkamp could see what changes would have the greatest positive impact. They adopted the use of “Eco Alter Nappa,” a new polyester-polyurethane substitute for Nappa leather sealed with a coating containing vegetable oil made from the remnants of cereal production; organic cotton for almost all denim and jersey; and ECONYL, a regenerated nylon, for handbag linings.

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