LVMH's Antoine Arnault: Luxury rivals must work together to tackle sustainability

Luxury fashion brands need to work together if the industry is to bring about meaningfully sustainable change, said Antoine Arnault, the head of image and environment at French luxury giant LVMH.

“I think it is important that we aggregate the leaders of this industry, the luxury industry, to work together,” he said at the Global Fashion Summit, which is taking place from June 27-28 in Copenhagen.

Arnault, who is also the chief executive of Berluti and the son of LVMH chair and CEO Bernard Arnault, noted that LVMH hosted a forum last year for its Wines and Spirits business bringing together industry experts. “We worked, as we say, in open-source. We tried to exchange best practices. We tried to think about how we can help suppliers to get better on many issues.

“And this is an issue in fashion that we need to work on as well. So I would say maybe getting everybody, not only LVMH, but the entire industry on the same ship would be something that we could try to do.”

He said that LVMH is holding out its hands to its competitors “to try to find the right standards, the right way of doing business”.

While luxury houses may not churn out the same quantity of clothing each year as fast fashion giants, they can still have vast supply chains and enormous carbon footprints.

LVMH - which is the parent of fashion houses Louis Vuitton and Dior - is the world’s biggest luxury group. Last year, it made record net revenue of 79.2 billion euros, and profit from recurring operations of 21.1 billion euros.

Fashion Pact

The group has faced criticism in the past for poor sustainability practices and lack of transparency across its supply chain. At the Global Fashion Summit, Arnault responded to the company’s decision not to join The Fashion Pact, an initiative launched four years ago aiming to drive environmental change across the industry.

“I know we were very much criticized a few years ago when we did not sign the famous Fashion Pact. Simply because it was, in our opinion, not the right thing to do at that time to be associated with the actors of fast fashion in this industry.

“We felt that, without criticizing what they do, we were not doing the same thing. And we felt that we could not all be thrown in the same basket - we could not have the same objectives, and we didn't have exactly the same mindset.”

In terms of sustainable targets, Arnault said the group has decided to get rid of “very long-term objectives that were impossible to either validate or sometimes even comprehend”, and instead have short- and medium-term objectives.

Environmental targets

The company set a target this year to cut its energy consumption by 10 percent between October 2022 and October 2023, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from energy consumption by 11 percent, and cut scope 3 emissions by 15 percent. It also previously pledged “full traceability” for all of its raw materials by 2025.

Whether the company will hit those targets is yet to be seen.

Arnault said he was “very optimistic” about what will happen in terms of sustainability at LVMH in the coming years.

He noted that designer Stella McCartney - whose namesake label LVMH snapped up a stake in back in 2019 - is also helping to push the pace with her “hyper-innovative” approach to new materials. “She has all the solutions, we just need to be able to scale them and to make them work not only for smaller brands but for big maisons as well,” he said.

Arnault is just one of many industry figures attending the Global Fashion Summit this year - other heavyweight fashion companies in attendance include rival Kering, sportswear giant Nike, Tommy Hilfiger parent PVH, and The North Face parent VF Corp, among others.

Keep an eye out for more of FashionUnited’s coverage of the event.