Nicole Rycroft, Founder and Executive Director of environmental not-for-profit Canopy, and Steven Kolb, CEO of the CFDA, co-hosted an exclusive Jeffersonian Dinner last week. The goal of the intimate, 15-person evening was to bring together visionaries and spark conversations around a new vision for fashion, one that values forests, champions circularity, and drives industry-wide transformation. The shared vision focused on advancing Next Gen fibers globally.
Guests, including CFDA members Hillary Taymour, Jacques Agbobly, Maria Cornejo, Mara Hoffman, Gigi Burris O’Hara, and Jonathan Cohen with Sarah Leff, explored how the fashion industry at large must shift away from a “take, make, waste” model toward a circular approach—embedding sustainability into every fiber and safeguarding the world’s vital forests.
One topic honed in on was the relationship people have to garments. “I live in my father’s clothes…feeling so deeply connected to the material and the object,” Hoffman said. “One of my greatest things as a designer is creating something for a woman and having that relationship as a vehicle or a language in the world. It’s just the best. It’s a really hard thing to let go of.”
Referring to the constant production cycle and industry expectation to make more, Hoffman likened it to “a conflict of interest.”
“How,” she said, “do you tell this young woman, ‘You don’t need to buy a single other thing for the rest of your life?’ The statistic is that there are enough clothes for the next 150 years – six generations — on this planet, or 100 billion pieces of clothing.”
“My struggle,” Hoffman added, “still sits in how I can continue to run a conventional model … meeting delivery points, answering to the buyer, and yet still teach another person that you don’t need anything else to feel whole. How do we do less, but make it more meaningful in the now?”
“The environmental impact of the fashion industry is a complex issue, and it requires a variety of ideas and solutions to address it,” said Rycroft, when discussing options, “Circular textile solutions, like what Circ is offering, are amazing and achievable options that solve two problems at once – controversial sourcing, like making viscose textiles from vital forests, as well as the mounting impacts of fashion waste.”
Guests received an exclusive, forest-inspired finch bird scarf, created in an innovative supply chain collaboration. The process began with U.S.-based textile-to-textile recycling innovator Circ and Hot Button Green Shirt producer Ace Green providing fiber derived from 40 percent recycled textile waste from polycotton blended fabrics. Italian manufacturer Tessilgodi then crafted it into a silk-like material known as Circ Lyocell. Resonance, the first AI-powered operating system for on-demand, waste-free fashion production at scale, transformed this material into the finished accessory.
The future is indeed here.
