Fashion’s accountability gap is widening. Here’s what we’re doing about it

Hey there, it’s been a few months since we launched anxiety.eco, so we’re taking a moment to share where we’re at right now, and what we’re building for you. 

We’ve been publishing the kind of accountability journalism about fashion that mainstream media increasingly will not touch. Behind the scenes, we’re making updates to the site (including a new search function), launching new editorial features (like our Ultra Rich List tracking fashion’s billionaires’ wealth) and welcoming a growing community of readers who care about style, culture and justice. 

Below, you’ll find a reading list of some of your favourite reporting so far (the anxiety.eco starter pack, if you will), alongside reader testimonials and a reminder of why this work matters.

Whether you’ve been here since the beginning or you just found us, consider this your essential reading guide. Bookmark it, return to it, share it with your friends.

Thanks for reading,

JD and Amy

You’ve come to the right place. anxiety.eco is a new worker-owned media outlet from the editorial team behind Good On You, where we’ve spent years holding fashion brands accountable for their impacts on people, planet and animals. 

In doing that work, we realised how fashion media is itself part of the problem. Fashion media is as unsustainable as fast fashion, as we wrote in our launch essay in November 2025. 

But what if fashion media could be a part of the solution? What if fashion media took a brand’s supply chain as seriously as the creative director merry-go-round, reported from the perspective of planetary boundaries, and advocated for the human rights of garment workers in the process? What if fashion media existed to foster community, spotlight solutions, and value style over trends? 

That’s why we started anxiety.eco. Because we’ve been on the inside of fashion and legacy media and, well, we feel the eco-anxiety, too. We believe the antidote is collective, as our tagline goes. 

In February, Remake, the nonprofit behind the #PayUp campaign that recovered an estimated $22 billion in stolen garment worker wages during COVID, announced it was closing after a decade. Its founder Ayesha Barenblat cited a sharp decline in funding for labour and climate justice work. As JD reported on anxiety.eco, the closure arrived alongside cuts to worker rights organisations in garment-producing countries, and a broader retreat by journalists who once covered this beat but increasingly struggled to find the commissions or funding. The NGOs, nonprofits and accountability groups that held this industry’s feet to the fire are under extraordinary pressure.

Big Fashion, like Big Oil and Big Tech, relies on gaps in citizens’ knowledge to continue its systems of exploitation in the name of profit. They’ll say consumers aren’t interested in knowing. But hundreds of our readers told us that’s not true. They'll say the money isn’t there to implement solutions. But we’ve calculated the wealth of fashion’s leaders and we know it is. When the watchdogs disappear, those gaps widen. Somebody has to do this work. But building a different kind of media to counter the system requires real independence, and we’ve concluded that independence has to come from readers.

So here’s how we work: We don’t take money from fast fashion, full stop. We’ve published our editorial policies so you can see exactly where we draw the line. We keep going thanks to readers like you who decide this work should exist in the world.

Co-founder JD Shadel has spent five years at Good On You, where they have held positions including head of content, editing data journalism about fashion’s sustainability failures that’ve gotten extensive media coverage. Before that, over a decade of editorial leadership across lifestyle, tech and LGBTQ+ culture, with bylines in the Washington Post, Vice, various Condé Nast titles, and more. 

Amy Miles is Good On You’s fractional managing editor and co-founder of anxiety.eco. Before moving into sustainability journalism, Amy worked as a pattern cutter and in fashion editorial at luxury platforms like Net-a-Porter and Show Media. She’s been inside the system from the factory floor to the editorial desk, and brings a journalist’s eye and a maker’s knowledge.

Together, we’re building this because we’ve seen the people doing actual accountability journalism in this space keep losing the resources to do it. That’s the gap we’re trying to fill.

We acknowledge that amongst all this, you still need clothes to wear and love the creativity behind fashion and style. Our mission is to help you connect the dots and make sense of it all while holding all these things to be true. Here’s where to start.

Since we launched, people from our global community have been telling us how this work is helping them. Here’s just a sample.

When we read testimonials like these, we’re reminded how beautifully intergenerational this space is: young climate justice activists, fashion design students, burnt-out journalists, teachers, parents, and at least one mum who voice-messages after every issue. 

Our mission is not to tell you everything’s going to be fine. It’s to help you connect the dots and feel less alone in the chaos. We do this for you, not for the billionaires who run most of fashion’s media.