Beyond Sustainability: Building a Nature-Positive Fashion System

Session Overview

Held at 1 Hotel Mayfair during London Climate Action Week, THE NAT brought together 35 guests from across the fashion supply chain — farmers, brands, waste-market operators and financiers — with Woolmark and ARMEDANGELS as partners, moderated by Sophia Li. The conversation reframed ‘nature-positive’ as systems transformation rather than a label, tracing how decisions made at the design table lock in a garment’s environmental fate long before it reaches a farmer or a factory. Ghana’s Kantamanto market was held up as a hidden, undervalued circular economy already operating at scale, with the group agreeing that circularity is a market test, not a theory: ‘if your product doesn’t sell in a second-hand market, it’s not truly circular.’ The session closed on adoption, not invention, as fashion’s real bottleneck — producing fewer garments, using them longer, and reconnecting value chains from farm to design table.

Speakers included:

• Sophia Li — Moderator
• Rebecca Kelley — The Woolmark Company
• Charlie Heal — Australian Woolgrower
• Julia Kirschner — ARMEDANGELS
• Sammy Oteng & Neesha-Ann Longdon — The Or Foundation

Convening Partners: Woolmark, ARMEDANGELS