Looking Forward to Your RSVP

There is a particular quality to the air in a Copenhagen conference hall in May. The temperature has been calibrated to twenty one degrees, the lighting calibrated to flatter both keynote speakers and the salmon being plated for lunch, and the acoustics calibrated so that the phrase “systemic transformation,” now delivered for the fourth time before noon, lands with the appropriate gravitas. Outside the building the air is crisp, while inside it the audience nods, well rested and well fed, and agrees that the industry must do better. Someone proposes more cross value chain collaboration. Someone else proposes a coalition. By coffee break the consensus has settled comfortably around the idea that what we really need is more dialogue, more pilots, and possibly another working group, and nobody in the room is impolite enough to ask whose dialogue, whose pilot, or whose working group will actually be doing any of the work.

I have spent enough time at these gatherings to have developed a deep appreciation for what they are good at, which is producing the feeling of progress. The lanyards are well designed, the decks are well lettered, the canapés are competently sourced from a hyper local artisan whose name nobody will remember by Friday, and the conversations, while substantive, take place in a particular register that is only available to people whose immediate physical comfort is not in question. This is not an incidental detail, because the room itself quietly determines the kinds of conclusions people feel comfortable arriving at, and rooms engineered for comfort tend to produce arguments that are similarly comfortable. Arguments that ask very little of the people making them, arguments polished enough to survive until the next conference season, where they will return with slightly updated terminology and a new set of logos on the backdrop.

There is also a recurring agenda item that I have grown rather fond of, which is the panel titled some variation of “bringing the supply chain closer to the conversation.” It is delivered with great earnestness, usually in a hall built for around eight hundred people, in a city that is at minimum two flights away from anywhere garments are actually made. The supply chain, as a concept, is treated rather like a shy creature that lives in a forest and must be coaxed into the room with a sufficiently well curated agenda. The supply chain, in actual practice, is already doing the work somewhere very specific, sweating through it, inhaling the chemistry, absorbing the margin pressure, managing the impossible timelines, navigating unstable electricity grids and a worsening water table, and increasingly enduring heat conditions that the panellists discussing its future would struggle to tolerate for a single afternoon.

So I would like to propose an experiment for next summer. Same speakers, same agenda, same exhaustively negotiated themes around innovation, collaboration, and the need to scale next generation solutions. The only variable we are going to change is the venue. Plural venues would in some ways be ideal, because the supply chain is not a single building and pretending otherwise is part of how we got here, but flying a delegation between sites would rather elegantly defeat the entire premise of the exercise, so we pick one and we stay there. The candidates are not in short supply. They could be a cotton field in Punjab during peak picking, where the global apparel system’s most basic input is still gathered by hand in forty plus degree heat, a polymerisation plant in Jiangsu where polyester begins its life as a petrochemical fraction long upstream of every sustainability story anyone has ever attached to it, a spinning mill in Coimbatore where the machinery is radiating heat back into air that is already failing to cool, or a knitting unit in Tiruppur. They could be a dye house outside Faisalabad whose ventilation will form part of the curriculum whether the agenda lists it or not, a composite wet processing mill in Gazipur where the dyeing floor and the boiler hall together produce conditions that the EHS slide deck has never quite managed to convey, a cut and sew complex in Phnom Penh where the closing dinner could be served at the same time and from the same kitchen as the workers’ meal, or a garment finishing and laundry unit outside Ho Chi Minh City where the wash chemistry that determines this season’s denim aesthetic is operating at the temperatures it actually operates at, rather than the ones the supplier audit imagines it does. The conference would take place in summer, ideally during what climate scientists are already warning could become another severe El Niño driven heat season across parts of South and Southeast Asia, when the air across much of the region is doing the thing it now increasingly does every year, which is something the brand sustainability deck has been calling “climate exposure” for several years without most in the room having to actually be exposed.

The catering will be revised accordingly. There will be no premium coffee station, no oat milk, and no signature cocktail in the evening, only the same lunch served on the same shift cycle in the same conditions. There will be no breakout room, because the breakout room is whichever working surface we happen to be adjacent to, whether that is the cotton farm, the polymer reactor hall, the spinning floor, the knitting bay, the dyeing yard, the boiler line, the cutting table, or the wash drum. The panels will be conducted on plastic chairs arranged between sewing lines or beside dyeing vats, microphones optional, and the moderators will be invited to ask their carefully prepared questions about long term industry transformation while the people whose long term transformation is being discussed are visibly, audibly, exhaustingly present. I am genuinely interested in what gets said, because I suspect the priorities articulated under those conditions will look rather different from the priorities articulated in a hall with a working HVAC system, and I suspect the difference will be instructive in ways the industry has been very careful to avoid.

Specifically, I suspect another blockchain traceability platform might begin to feel slightly less urgent than whether workers can safely operate inside a facility during a prolonged wet bulb event. I suspect the debate over which next generation fibre most deserves a press cycle might begin to feel less load bearing than whether the local grid can maintain stable supply when peak cooling demand collides with peak production demand. I suspect “human capital,” that uniquely bloodless unit of measurement, might start to look rather more like actual human beings whose tolerance for ambient temperature is not, in fact, unlimited. There is a growing body of behavioural research showing that thermal comfort, calorific intake, and ambient sensory conditions influence cognition, judgement, and social decision making, and the abbreviated version is that people deliberating in pleasant conditions often arrive at less demanding conclusions than people deliberating in uncomfortable ones, which implies something rather inconvenient for an industry that has decided to outsource much of its strategic thinking to its most comfortable participants. The priorities produced in air conditioned conference halls are often very different from the priorities produced on a factory floor at forty five degrees, and I suspect the distance between those two realities explains far more about why two decades of sustainability conferences have generated so much consensus and so little change.

So this is a genuine invitation, and if there are conference organisers, supply chain partners, mill owners, dyers, finishers, manufacturers, or industrial groups anywhere across Asia who would consider hosting a leg of this for a couple of days next summer, I would very much like to speak with you. If the industry genuinely believes proximity to suppliers matters, then this should not be a difficult invitation to accept. If collaboration is truly the priority we claim it is, then collaboration should survive heat, discomfort, noise, unstable electricity, factory air, and physical exposure to the systems we keep discussing from a distance. And if our sustainability strategies become less convincing the moment they are tested inside the environments they are supposedly designed to improve, then perhaps the problem is not the supply chain’s lack of readiness for transformation, but our own.

P.S. The dress code is whatever you happen to be wearing the moment you decide you are still coming.