Fashion's next frontier

Forget eco-friendly plant dyes, upcycled fabric scraps and paper packaging — the answer to fashion’s sustainability problem lies in tech, finds Grace O’Neill.

- Grace O'Neill

Of all the potential saviours of the fashion industry, Christopher Wylie — the green-haired tech-head with a penchant for camo print best known for his role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal — seems an unlikely candidate. And yet here we are. Post-Analytica, the data specialist made an unexpected pivot into fashion, accepting a consultancy gig with H&M. His appointment came as part of a sweeping big-data-focused strategy launched by the high-street giant to help tackle its waste issue, which had landed it in hot water in 2017 when it was reported that the company sent millions of dollars’ worth of unused product to a power-plant incinerator (the brand said it was unsellable and unrecyclable for safety reasons, but it was not a good look, regardless).

The basic idea of H&M’s new strategy was this: better insights into customers’ shopping habits means less dead stock and therefore less waste. Wylie’s role was to use sophisticated data-gathering technology to better forecast what the brand’s consumers wanted from H&M’s collections. “We can’t help people if we don’t know who they are,” he told The Guardian in August. “With the use of data, we can make sure our customers get what they want.” Wylie is one of a growing number of data analysts arguing that the answer to fashion’s wastefulness — a huge factor in the fight for a more sustainable industry — lies in technology.