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Global Fashion Agenda CEO Eva Kruse to quit in February
Eva Kruse, the co-founder and CEO of Global Fashion Agenda (GFA), the organisation that runs the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, is stepping down after 15 years in charge. She is set to leave in February 2021, but she will still sit on the organisation's board of directors.
Over the years, the Copenhagen Fashion Summit has grown in status from a get-together of sustainable fashion activists to a major event attended by the top executives of the industry's leading groups. Personalities like Emanuel Chirico, president of PVH Corp., and François-Henri Pinault, CEO of Kering, have expressed their opinions speaking at the Danish event.
“Eva has shaped Global Fashion Agenda around the notion of creating an influential fashion industry body, through a foundation managed by industry professionals that focuses on sustainable fashion, underpinned by a conference promoting sustainability in the industry.
“She has also built a robust leadership team that will continue to run the organisation together with a new CEO. While we regret Eva's departure, we are delighted she will be joining Global Fashion Agenda's board of directors, and we wish her the best for the future,” said Niels Eskildsen, board chairman of GFA, cited in a press release. Together with COO Travis Peoples, Eskildsen will take charge of the organisation until a new CEO is appointed.
GFA is an influential voice within the fashion world on the subject of sustainability. However, being sponsored by names like ASOS, Bestseller, H&M, Kering, Li&Fung, Nike and PVH Corp., GFA has been frequently lambasted by industry players which criticise it for being too accommodating towards leading fashion groups. Kruse and her staff have always opted for encouraging the sector to improve its practices, rather than denouncing the latter as not responsible enough.
Since the Copenhagen Fashion Summit in 2017, GFA has been urging the industry's top executives to commit to making progress in adopting more environmentally friendly practices, and especially in promoting recycling and re-using products and materials. An improvement process which 86 companies of varying size have pledged to undertake as signatories of GFA’s 2020 Commitment.
On November 30, GFA presented its 2020 results. “We launched our 2020 Commitment because we wanted to turn intentions into concrete action, and urge the industry to shift towards a circular fashion system. When we began, in 2017, circularity was still an entirely new notion for many industry players. We are impressed by our signatories’ achievements. They have shifted their strategies to accelerate the transition, and have tackled the challenges posed by Covid-19 in a highly creative way, adopting tools that are rooted in a circular fashion mindset,” said Kruse, commenting the results.
The chart shows the targets achieved by the 2020 Commitment signatories related to boosting circularity in fashion GFA
The 2020 Commitment signatories undertook to take action in four main areas: implementing a circular design approach; increasing the volumes of used apparel and footwear they collect; increasing the volume of used apparel and footwear they resell; and grow the share of apparel and footwear made using fibres derived from recycled products. Of 207 individual targets set as part of GFA’s 2020 Commitment, 132 were reached by the signatories.
The job of Kruse’s successor at GFA will be to further boost the sustainability commitment of fashion’s global players.
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