Climate change: will young shoppers stop buying luxury goods to help save the planet?

Flygskam, or ‘Flight shame’, has stopped people flying because of the environmental damage it causes, and the fashion industry is now under scrutiny

Driven largely by Chinese shoppers’ huge appetite for classic brands, more natural resources are being used than ever before

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Would buying Gucci footwear make you feel ashamed? The fashion industry is now under scrutiny for the harm it is doing to the environment. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 2:00pm, 10 Oct 2019Updated: 2:00pm, 10 Oct 2019

“Flygskam” (or flight shame) has made some people too embarrassed to fly because of the damage to the planet. Might fashion be the next business to suffer as consumers put on their environmental hair shirts?

Bernard Arnault, chairman of luxury behemoth LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, has criticised the 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg as being “demoralising for young people.” She is probably a bit of a downer for him too.

Arnault’s business depends on shoppers, especially young ones, buying lots of unnecessary stuff, from Dior saddlebags to expensive lipsticks from the pop star Rihanna’s Fenty range. Fretting about an impending environmental catastrophe, and worrying that your purchases are contributing to it, is hardly conducive to a spot of retail therapy.

The clothing and footwear industries (of which luxury is only a part) contribute about eight per cent of global C02 emissions, according to Quantis, an environmental consultancy. The Ellen MacArthur foundation, a non-profit organisation, estimates that the textiles business generated more greenhouse gas emissions in 2015 than all international flights and shipping combined. There’s plenty here to infuriate Thunberg.

Louis Vuitton executive vice-president, Delphine Arnault (left), and its chairman and chief executive, Bernard Arnault. The LVMH boss criticised teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg as being ‘demoralising for young people.’ Photo: AFP

Reliable data on the luxury industry’s environmental performance isn’t easy to come by, but one group (made up of Global Fashion Agenda, an industry forum, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition and the Boston Consulting Group) has had a go at creating a scorecard. This “Pulse Score” is based on elements such as the ecological smartness of product design, raw material use and manufacturing processes. Getting 100 would be perfection on sustainability; nobody comes close to that.

Overall, fashion had a pretty underwhelming score of 42 out of 100, although the big luxury companies scored a slightly more respectable 54. While this isn’t exactly cause to celebrate, it does show that the financial clout of LVMH – and its big peers such as Gucci-owning Kering SA and Switzerland’s Compagnie Financiere Richemont SA (home to Cartier) – might be an advantage when it comes to trying to mitigate their impact on the planet and its resources.