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.

- 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 like an unlikely candidate. Post-Analytica, the data specialist makes an unexpected pivot into fashion, accepting 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 products to a power-plant incinerator.

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 collections. “We can’t help people if we don’t know who they are,” he told