Beyond the Front Row: What Fashion Month Reveals About Traceability

Every September, Fashion Month turns the industry’s attention to New York, London, Milan and Paris. Collections debut and brands compete to define trends for the season ahead, but the runway is also becoming a place to make the systems behind those collections more visible.

At London Fashion Week last season, sustainable couture label TAMMAM presented the first garment made from U.K.-grown cotton, documenting the fiber’s journey from a vertical farm at the University of Nottingham through ginning, spinning, weaving and final construction in London. Designer Patrick McDowell also embedded a Digital Product Passport powered by Certilogo into every look in his Spring 2026 collection, allowing audiences to access information about materials, production and the journey through the supply chain.

These examples reflect a broader shift taking shape across Fashion Month. The British Fashion Council has begun adopting Copenhagen Fashion Week’s sustainability requirements for emerging designers, while material innovation, responsible sourcing and circular design are becoming progressively more visible alongside the collections themselves.

Together, these developments are bringing conversations that once happened primarily within sourcing and supply chain teams into a much more visible cultural setting. The shift extends beyond any one technology or regulation. Fashion is increasingly creating space for consumers to understand the materials, partnerships and production decisions behind what they wear.

Pulling back the curtain on the supply chain

Fashion has always been a reflection of cultural change. You can’t value what you can’t see. As new generations become more deliberate about how they spend and how they build identity, traceability creates an opportunity to pull back the curtain and make the supply chain part of the fashion experience. 

Fashion Month puts that opportunity on one of the industry’s most visible stages. By the time a collection reaches the runway, decisions around materials, suppliers and manufacturing have already shaped what consumers ultimately see. Making more of that journey visible gives people a fuller understanding of the product, the people and systems behind it.

Supply chain teams have been having these conversations for years. What’s changing is that they are becoming part of how brands communicate with consumers, investors and regulators. As traceability becomes more visible, the systems supporting those claims become just as important as the claims themselves.

The brands creating the most value from traceability aren’t treating product information as something they collect at the end of development. They’re using it to shape decisions throughout the product lifecycle, building a language from sourcing and supplier collaboration through to commercialization. That’s when transparency stops being a reporting exercise and starts becoming a business capability and a storytelling opportunity. 

People might not connect with the details of each material, but they can connect with the journey of a product and the role they play in it. In sneakers, for example, the more foam visible in the sole, the more comfort the runner perceives. In the factory, meanwhile, the maker knows how many grams of the exact polymer were needed to build that pair, information captured in the spec sheet. That is where the story of the shoes begins. 

Material innovators like Gen Phoenix play an important role in making that possible by working across brands, manufacturers and other supply chain partners. Its relationship with Coach is one example of this approach in practice. The relationship began with Coachtopia, where Gen Phoenix recycled leather was incorporated into the lining of the collection’s bags, and the companies worked with manufacturing partners from the factory floor through to the final product. That kind of collaboration can give brands greater visibility into the materials and processes behind their products and create a stronger foundation for telling the story of how those products are made.

Designing for transparency and accountability

Transparency, traceability and behavior are different things, yet they are often treated as though they are interchangeable when digital systems are being built. Each involves different incentives, pain points and benefits. When the focus is on collecting every possible data point, the cost and complexity of gathering that information can be overlooked. And when the goal becomes tracing the true origin of every molecule, it is easy to lose sight of why the information is being gathered in the first place: to tell the story of the future and enable better decisions. 

The same principle can be applied to product design. A product may be built to last as long as possible, but that does not mean consumer preferences will remain unchanged. Durability is important, but it is only one dimension of a product’s lifecycle. Effective strategies need to recognize these different dimensions and connect them instead of treating them as separate problems. 

These systems need to be designed around real business needs. Rather than imposing additional complexity, they should create value for the organizations using them. The challenge is not simply collecting data, but creating systems that make participation easier and support better decisions over time.

The Footwear Collective’s Footwear Futures Project offers one example of what designing interconnected systems around real business needs can look like. The project is the first multi-brand-led take-back initiative in the U.S. footwear industry to collectively explore pathways for end-of-life footwear. Last October, 30,252 pounds of used shoes were collected across Los Angeles. Working with partners in resale, sortation, data collection and material processing helped create clarity around what was entering the system and which pathways offered the greatest potential value at the end of use. 

Programs like the Footwear Futures Project connect organizations already working in circularity to build a shared infrastructure and a common framework for collecting data. The goal is to make consumer participation easier while giving brands and other partners better information to understand what happens to their products, where opportunities exist and how each shoe might be given in its next life. 

Building a common language across the industry

It is in human nature to tend toward fragmentation before alignment, and that is often reflected across industries as well. Different stakeholders develop their own definitions, priorities, incentives and systems, which makes alignment around shared standards and long-term goals difficult.

Even something as universal today as the USB only emerged after years of competing formats and collective coordination. As an industry, fashion has not yet established a universal language for materials and product information, but data can provide a common framework that helps unify stakeholders regardless of the language they speak. 

What we have learned in circularity is that progress toward alignment happens when spaces are created where stakeholders can connect, build trust and identify mutual benefits. The goal is not to remove healthy competition, but to find the pathways where collaboration can accelerate solutions and create value for everyone. 

Traceability starts long before the runway

A single footwear product can involve dozens of materials, suppliers and manufacturing processes across multiple countries. The strongest progress happens when conversations across those groups begin early. Material choices, supplier capabilities and product information all influence one another, making long-term collaboration critical. 

The Footwear Collective has identified the core materials used to build footwear products and is on course to develop standard operating procedures that will help align companies, ultimately lowering barriers to traceability. This is especially important because the same factory may already share infrastructure across different brands. This can enable the creation of the “USB of shoes”: a standardized way to make material information accessible, allowing material providers to understand which specifications and volumes are available for use or repurposing. 

Gen Phoenix offers another example of how that collaboration can work in practice. Bringing new materials to market requires coordination across brands, tanneries and manufacturing partners from the earliest stages of development, so materials can move successfully through existing supply chains and into commercial production.

The material innovator’s multi-year GENIX NAPPA collaboration with Dr. Martens illustrates that approach. Today, the partnership spans several collections, has diverted more than 15 tonnes of leather offcuts from waste and demonstrates the sustained coordination required to scale new materials commercially.

Fashion Month may be where consumers see the finished product, but meaningful traceability is built much earlier, through the relationships and decisions that shape how that product comes to life.