Key Takeaways:
- Circular fashion could be picking up a new pace, not because of a new moment of moral clarity, but because economic conditions have left both brands and consumers reckoning with a different reality. As new product pipelines contract and costs rise, reuse, rental, and resale will no longer be fringe behaviours – they’re likely to become functional responses to market pressure.
- Despite years of sustainability discourse, industry commitment remains inconsistent. Only 6% of large brands invest in circular R&D, and 88% of those with emissions targets disclose no progress – illustrating the growing gap between ambition and execution.
- New models are emerging to fill the vacuum. Peer-to-peer platforms like Pickle are making everyday fashion rental accessible and frictionless, while Vivrelle’s Revolve partnership reframes luxury as a service – offering consumers symbolic affluence without ownership.
- Institutional momentum is building. eBay’s Circular Fashion Innovator prize and Visa’s nationwide creator search show that circularity is gaining legitimacy, not as an ethical stance, but as a structural necessity in fashion’s evolving business model.
This week’s “Good On You” report (based on the body’s own brand rating rubric) offers a sobering analysis of fashion’s environmental performance. Just 6% of large brands, according to the report, are investing in research and development for circular innovations. Only 21% of large brands have set science-based greenhouse gas emissions targets. And a substantial 88% of brands who do have emissions targets do not disclose any progress towards meeting them.
For long-time observers of the sector, these figures are perhaps, not unexpected. Yet the broader implications are profound. The fashion industry isn’t just failing to meet its own benchmarks, it is increasingly being shaped by forces that lie outside its traditional ethical and regulatory frameworks. A sector once guided by sustainability pledges is now responding, however unevenly, to financial and geopolitical stressors.
Put simply: where ethics, legislation, and activism have struggled to effect systemic change, economic pressure may now succeed.
For anyone who has been watching the news, it should hardly be a novel idea that the volume of product entering circulation might be about to decline. New tariffs are rendering imported apparel increasingly expensive. Global supply chains are contracting under the weight of geopolitical strain. Consumer purchasing power is shrinking. For a growing segment of the market, the question is no longer whether sustainable fashion is preferable, but whether any new purchases are economically feasible at all.
Taking these different variables into account, fashion’s next major growth driver might not be newness, but circularity – not because the industry, or the consumer base, has undergone any sudden moral awakening, but because of more prosaic, mounting operational constraints.
While fast fashion remains resilient (Gen Z still fuels plenty of it), the persistent rise in secondhand commerce is a structural signal here. Vinted’s rapid growth, and the proliferation of closet-sale culture point to a consumer segment that values access, availability, and cost over newness and ownership.
This isn’t just a peer to peer reselling. In the last 30 days, two stand out platforms – Pickle and Vivrelle – each capturing headlines that offer a window into how circular fashion is fracturing into distinctive consumer pathways.
Pickle announced a $12M Series A raise last month, highlighting investor confidence in its vision: a rental economy that’s community-driven and extremely accessible. While the platform itself manages the logistics and distribution of items, it’s still very much a peer-to-peer fashion exchange. Users list their own garments, others rent them. It meets the market exactly where it is: people with wardrobes full of items they rarely wear, and others who want access without commitment.
While there’s no doubt a lot of logistical complexity behind the scenes, its appeal lies in its simplicity. Consumers aren’t renting from a retailer but from their peers. It’s friction light, and community first. Pickle doesn’t solve fashion’s emissions problem, but it does create a new behaviour loop that de-emphasises ownership. That’s important. In a world where consumers are growing more cost conscious and climate aware – but still want to express individuality and style – Pickle introduces a viable alternative to both fast fashion and luxury splurging. In an inflationary environment, this behavioural shift is not merely cultural, it’s economically deterministic.
At the other end of the spectrum is Vivrelle. This week, it announced a tech driven ‘smart closet’ collaboration with Revolve – an AI driven styling solution integrated with its luxury rental membership. Where Pickle offers convenience and community, Vivrelle sells aspiration. The model is vertically integrated. Items are warehoused, maintained, and shipped by Vivrelle, enabling the kind of logistical control that makes high-end service scalable. Customers borrow directly from Vivrelle’s curated inventory, with AI tools helping suggest pieces to match style preferences and occasion based-needs.
Basic membership starts at $45 per month and grants access to borrow one luxury accessory at a time from brands like Chanel, Dior, and Gucci. Prestige decoupled from ownership: symbolic affluence on a subscription plan.
Vivrelle doesn’t fix fashion’s waste problem, it aims to tackle the aspiration element that underpins newness. It offers an economic workaround to consumers navigating aspirational fashion in an era of declining affordability. It delivers status, visibility, and trend alignment, at a fraction of the cost. It is, in essence, the democratisation of luxury image-making.
These developments are not confined to startups. Last week, Ebay awarded its inaugural Circular Fashion innovator of the Year prize to Refiberd, a company focused on fibre-level recycling through AI and spectroscopy. Meanwhile, Visa launched its nationwide search for creators in circular fashion, encouraging designers and entrepreneurs to develop new business models rooted in reuse, repurposing, and repair. While these actions may appear symbolic, they are harbingers of institutional engagement, a clear indication that circulatory is moving from the periphery a little closer to the centre.
This matters, because the transition to a circular model is often misunderstood as a single behaviour (resale, rental upcycling). In reality, it’s a cluster of economic and emotional shifts that will need to combine for a more wholesale sea change to take place. A change in how value is perceived. A decentralisation of authority. A recalibration of what it means to participate in fashion at all. And these all have as much of a cold financial and affordability element to them as they do an emotional component.
This also helps explain why circulatory is gaining traction now, not because the industry has become ethically awakened, but because the economic model is, right now, being redrawn from the outside in. With fewer new products flowing in, rising production costs, and escalating tariffs on import apparel, consumers are no longer simply choosing to keep items in circulation longer, they’re adjusting to the idea that this could become the norm out of necessity, not just because it is “the right thing to do” And as a corollary effect, brands that once viewed circular business models as a distraction could now be facing a market where they may become a necessity – not because they are mandated by regulation, but because extracting royalties from resale, rental, and other ways that products persist could be required to offset a shortfall in new sales.
When platforms like Pickle offer everyday rental convenience, and Vivrelle offers prestige-as-a-service, it becomes harder to argue that renting is an outlier. When companies like Refibred win industry awards, and brands race to partner with circular entrepreneurs, it signals that circularity is no longer a fringe discourse. It’s a system response.
Circular fashion is gaining momentum not because the industry wants it to, or even because consumers and regulators believe in it – but because keeping products around longer may become necessary. That alone, might be enough to move circularity from a niche narrative to the foundation of fashion’s next operating model.