This is an episode of the Glossy Fashion Podcast, which features candid conversations about how today’s trends are shaping the future of the fashion industry. More from the series →
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On the Glossy Podcast, senior fashion reporter Danny Parisi and international reporter Zofia Zwieglinska break down some of the biggest fashion news of the week.
This week, we’re talking about the CFDA banning the use of fur in shows on its official New York Fashion Week calendar, following similar decisions by fashion weeks in London, Copenhagen and Berlin. We also discuss the U.K. banning ads from brands like Nike, Superdry and Lacoste over misleading sustainability claims.
Lastly, we discuss the Prada-Versace deal, which officially closed this week, just a day before creative director Dario Vitale departed the company. Vitale served as Versace’s creative director for only nine months.
Later in the episode, Zofia is joined by Leanne Elliott Young, CEO of the Institute of Digital Fashion, to discuss the growing use of digital passports in the fashion industry. Digital product passports, or DPPs, embed product data into a scannable code that lets both retailers and customers track an item’s provenance. The idea is to make authentication easier and keep a record of the chain of possession of an item, particularly a luxury item, over the course of its life.
The E.U. recently passed a regulation requiring all products sold starting in 2027 to have a DPP, forcing brands to start thinking about implementing this feature. The Institute of Digital Fashion is consulting with brands to help prepare for that rollout.
Below are a few highlights Young shared, lightly edited for length and clarity.
On early confusion about DPPs
Young: “There’s a lot of complexity with the rollout of DPPs, and it’s one of the big issues we advise brands on. There’s a delightful smorgasbord of features you can layer into a DPP, but it comes with a lot of questions and confusion about what’s most useful: Is it something for the design team? For the sustainability team? So we are building this kind of discovery process in which we can hopefully get to those questions as quickly as possible by having all of the mandated information for brands. And we work with teams that deal with the traceability verification, the factory audit and the physical validation, as well as the tech stack.”
Brands should start thinking about DPPs now
Young: “The regulation starts in 2027, and we are still seeing a worrying amount of hesitation from brands, kind of waiting around for formal information from the E.U. on what the compliance standards look like. Brands are seeing this as something to worry about later. We are building DPPs with some brands and we have NDAs with them, but building them can take weeks and weeks of work. It’s a lot of work to set one up. So I think we are going to see, as we get closer to the deadline, a lot of brands with their tails between their legs, in pandemonium, trying to figure out how to get there at speed.”
