Bridget Foley’s Diary Views on Sustainability: Paul Hirsch

WWD: How does a manufacturing-based industry like fashion reconcile growth with sustainability? Paul Hirsch: On one hand, you’re positing this trade-off or this tension between growth and sustainability, and there are certainly cases where that’s the case. But I think that what industries are recognizing is that people are looking more and more to reconcile their choices as consumers with their values as citizens. When they do that, their choices as consumers reflect their values. To that degree, a business won’t be able to succeed unless it’s allowing consumers to express those social values, those environmental values in their choices. If a company is just giving lip service to this idea, it will have trouble reconciling the two. You have to create things consumers can buy that actually serve their values. WWD: Regarding sustainability, consumer values are changing rapidly. Companies, and full industries, have to adapt. P.H.: I don’t know much about the fashion industry, but I know, for example, in the food-packaging industry there are models being developed that allow you to have a package that you send back to the company and it refills it. Isn’t it the case that we can have cutting-edge fashion without continually having to produce more and

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