What’s the point when the world is literally on fire?!

Hey there! As fashion month drew to a close, the media has gone through its merry go-round of trend reports once again. Don’t get us wrong, we admire the creativity on fashion runways — of note this season was Kazna Asker’s streetwear channeling her British-Yemeni heritage, in a presentation inspired by her travels. It was one of the NewGen shows Amy and I attended at London Fashion Week.

But this year, the big events in the world’s fashion capitals arrived amid worsening polycrisis. 

I’m sure we could’ve printed that sentence last year and it might still be relevant next year if things don’t change. And yet in some parts of the world, we keep talking about “sustainable fashion” like it’s still the Obama-era 2010s; in our most nihilistic moments, we might wonder why we’re even talking about, I don’t know… hemp?!

Or at least, those are the conversations we’ve been having with burnt-out colleagues, journalists tired of the beat, and you, dear readers. Below, we grapple with this in the first installment of a new essay series called Worry Diary (you know we do our CBT).

Thanks for reading!

JD and Amy

Let’s say you’re an editor at fashion week. You’re sat on the first or second row, and the catwalk show is off to a late start, as they often are. Anticipation heightens in those sprawling minutes before the collective hush, when the first model steps into the maze of benches filled with content creators, buyers, stylists, high-profile customers and we, ahem, comparatively underpaid journalists. In these moments, we’re doing one of three things: doomscrolling through our inboxes; listening to the person sat next to us moan on about their exhaustingly glamorous schedule; or staring into space and wondering, “What’s the point of all of this fashion while the world is, quite literally, on fire?!”

I might’ve been doing the third thing at London Fashion Week, where I am at the same time always honoured to attend shows and presentations from the NewGen cohort of designers. It’s always an energising experience. The British Fashion Council’s scheme provides funding, mentoring and catwalk opportunities to emerging talent, the kind we so rarely see as big luxury brands cycle through the same few creative directors (Demna’s Balenciaga is Gucci now; Matthieu Blazy’s Bottega Veneta is Chanel now; the list goes on). NewGen shows are more often the bright spot on the schedule: designers engaging with culture, with real diversity of thought, with more considered approaches to making clothes.

London has now become the first of the big four fashion weeks to enforce minimum sustainability requirements for all NewGen brands. Compared to a few years ago, there are more visible initiatives, more standards. And in case you missed it, Susan Bender Whitfield, writing for Marie Claire, clocked a few brands upcycling and prioritising bespoke models. 

But “sustainability” doesn’t feel like a real priority outside a few select shows. Zoom out and 2026 looks less like a return to pre-sustainability denial and more like a cooling of the 2010s performative phase: an opportunistic backtracking in a political climate where there are fewer perceived risks in dropping the pretence. In fashion media, if your coverage doesn’t align with the business, it’s the first to go. (See the effective death of Teen Vogue’s politics coverage in late 2025. Or Condé Nast quietly ditching Them, its LGBTQ+ publication, days ago, after long preaching about the importance of representation.)

Fashion week is undeniably expressive, hedonistic, in rare cases radical. When I “read” a collection, I am motivated by style, by design, by aesthetic. Anyone reading this probably cares about those things too; you care about taste. But I also judge a brand by what it leaves behind, its attention to the impact beyond the first impression. That’s the least we should expect of fashion. And of fashion media.

In 2026, though, I have to make a confession: I, too, am asking myself what the point is.

I mean, we know intellectually the reasons fashion justice matters — that’s justice for workers, for communities across the value chain, for respecting planetary boundaries and our fellow animals. But with non-profit Remake closing its doors due to funding issues, it makes me wonder how this work carries on when a polycrisis (many bad things happening at once) makes it nearly impossible to get traction. 

Megan Doyle, writing for Vogue Business, described it as an “existential crisis”:

Underpaid accountability journalists are fatigued by the beat. Independent brands are closing at a worrying rate. Activists find themselves struggling to keep focused on the material issues when everything closer to home feels so pressing.

How do you stay focused on the problem of, say, polyester when you’re also legitimately scared about your loved ones in the United States being targeted by ICE, or your colleague in Iran facing American and Israeli bombardment? Even though an oil war and an industry that runs on crude are obviously linked; even though fascism is designed to overwhelm us into inaction; despite all that, I get it.

Or, as climate reporter Amy Westervelt recently framed the feeling:

I’ve been tracking how people in and around our consumer culture are responding to this feeling, and you can group them into four camps. 

The first camp goes something like this: Fashion is trivial, burn it all down, why talk about textile waste when there’s [gestures at everything going on]. The second: Fashion is expression and expression is always political, full stop. The third: No ethical consumption under capitalism, so nothing matters. Fourth: These crises are connected, and the connection is the point.

Each captures something true, but each, on its own, is incomplete. The dismissal treats seriousness as a finite resource, as if caring about garment workers and caring about a war are competing priorities. The expression argument becomes a gift to luxury brands the moment it stops asking who profits from all that self-expression. The nihilist position is demobilising by design: if nothing matters, nobody organises. And even the structural argument needs specifics, or it stays abstract enough to ignore.

So here are some specifics. Fashion is a trillion-dollar industry that largely runs on fossil fuels, built on exploitation, controlled by billionaires, several of whom attended a presidential inauguration and then rolled back their sustainability commitments. Polyester is petroleum. The overproduction model needs cheap energy and cheaper labour to function. The criminalisation of climate protest back at Standing Rock is the same playbook applied to anti-ICE protestors. As we reported in anxiety.eco’s Ultra-Rich List in January, the money to fix fashion’s biggest problems already exists in the system. Those are a few of the facts. 

And yet, fashion is also a sector where consumers in richer, whiter countries often struggle to connect with the humanity of the workers — the majority of whom are women of colour — who make their clothes. A lot of that is, simply put, colonialism. Powerful people also know that solidarity is harder to maintain at a distance, so they exploit that. That distance is how the system is intended to function. If every crisis feels disconnected from every other, you can’t build coalitions. If fashion feels trivial compared to war, nobody scrutinises the modern slavery behind the High Street brands. 

I don’t have a simple resolution for this. I don’t think there is one, at least not the tidy kind. But the people I know who are still doing this work, the ones who haven’t burned out or checked out, tend to share one thing: they started in one corner, focused on something specific, and built outward from there. Not waiting for a silver bullet or someone else to go first.

Along such lines, I’ve been returning to the roots of movements that’ve achieved things against odds. February in the UK is also LGBT History Month, and I’ve been reflecting on what radical queer activism, and decades-long movements like it throughout history, have always understood about holding contradictions. You need joy and you need rage and you need direct action, sometimes all three in the same room on the same night. ACT UP didn’t choose between grieving and organising. The point was to survive and keep fighting.

Fashion is identity and tradition. Anyone who dismisses that is underestimating what it means for a trans person to get dressed in the morning, or for a designer to put their heritage on display. 

But that truth does not exempt the industry from accountability. Expression and exploitation coexist in the same supply chains, sometimes in the same garments. Joy and accountability are not opposing forces. Joy, too, has to be conscious. 

Which brings to mind the one event I keep coming back to from London Fashion Week this season.

On a Monday evening in the NewGen space at 180 Strand, as the sun set at half five, designer Kazna Asker opened her autumn/winter presentation with an iftar, the meal marking the breaking of fast. Ramadan coincided with the schedule for the first time in 16 years. Author Yassmin Abdel-Magied recited a poem and explained the significance of the moment. Then came the food: Palestinian dates, flatbreads, lentil soup, biryani.

Asker is British-Yemeni, raised in Sheffield. Her earlier collections fused Adidas tracksuits with traditional Middle Eastern textiles. This season’s collection drew on fabrics from her recent travels in Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, India and Zimbabwe: exploring, as she told Emily Chan at British Vogue, how storytelling through cloth happens in every culture. It was her final NewGen season. Her first presentation, two years ago, had recreated her grandmother’s living room. “It’s back to family,” she said, “and back to the basics of everything.”

In a room full of people who hadn’t eaten all day, during a fashion week where the question “what’s the point” felt heavier than usual, someone chose to begin with a shared meal and a sunset poem. The intentionality of that, the care, and the insistence that fashion can start with feeding people and end with telling their stories.

The world outside 180 Strand was exactly what it was before we walked in. But at sundown, we broke bread; we paused to ponder our intentions, the purpose; and we carried on the work that matters. 

“What’s the point when the world is literally on fire?” I remind myself that the fire is the point.