8 Sustainable Fashion Designers To Support

The global fashion industry is undergoing a radical transformation as sustainability takes center stage. With increasing awareness of the environmental impact of fast fashion, sustainable fashion designers are changing their ways. Many are embracing ethical practices, innovative materials, and zero-waste techniques to redefine style for a better future. 

Many of these brands were founded on slow fashion principles, prioritizing quality over quantity and ensuring fair labor conditions across their entire supply chain. Some focus on eco-friendly materials, such as organic cotton and recycled fabrics, while others push boundaries with cutting-edge alternatives like mushroom leather and algae-based dyes. 

Beyond materials, leading designers are also embracing methods that reduce waste, support inclusive and petite sizing, and collaborate with other climate-focused organizations to amplify their global-scale impact.  

This article explores sustainable fashion pioneers—how they built their brands, key innovations, and influence on the industry. From luxury labels to emerging designers, these visionaries are shaping a future where fashion aligns with planetary health.  

8 Sustainable Designers in the Fashion Industry

Here is a quick list of fashion designers following sustainable practices:

1. Bethany Williams: A Socially Conscious Designer

First on our list of sustainable fashion designers is Bethany Williams, the founder of a London brand. She gained a bachelor's degree in Critical Fine Art Practice from the University of Brighton and a master's degree in Menswear at the London College of Fashion. 

Shortly after graduating, she set up her fashion brand in 2017 with the creative vision to connect art and social and environmental issues. She explores these connections by providing new ethical production practices, which include incorporating eco-friendly materials and prioritizing fair labor practices.

With her strong passion for making the fashion industry more sustainable from the inside, Bethany Williams only uses organic and recycled materials for her products. Some of the recycled materials used include fruit packaging waste and deadstock materials. 

She created some of her collections with local organic fibers like houndstooth wool from the horned Manx Loaghtan sheep, a breed native to her hometown, the Isle of Man. Bethany also worked with social projects and local manufacturers in Italy and the United Kingdom to produce her released collections.

Her brand is community-oriented. She has worked with charities, provided employment opportunities for female inmates, and employed models from the TIH homeless agency. Bethany Williams tries to shed light on social issues like hunger and homelessness, especially among society's youth. 

Bethany's dedication to promoting sustainable fashion practices won her the Queen Elizabeth II Award and Emerging Menswear Designer of 2019. It has also earned her the support of the British Fashion Council's NEWGEN program and recognition by the Business of Fashion in 2020 as one of the people shaping the Global Fashion Industry.

2. Gabriela Hearst: A Sustainable Luxury Powerhouse

Next on our list is Gabriela Hearst, a sustainable fashion designer born in Uruguay in 1976. She founded her sustainable fashion brand in 2015 after spending a decade in the design industry in New York. 

The creative force behind the launch of her brand was to create a slow fashion brand that reflects sustainable production processes, emphasizing where the materials come from and who is making them.

Gabriela aims to produce luxury fashions with a conscience. Her stance on sustainable fashion was imprinted on her from a young age. She grew up on a 17,000-acre ranch where luxury meant things were crafted with gentle dedication and craftsmanship and were made to be durable.

So, Gabriela Hearst became a luxury designer who wanted to pass on the tradition of long-lasting durability instead of following just a trend, as is common with the fast fashion industry. 

Her brand uses sustainable materials like aloe-treated linen, merino wool, deadstock fabrics, and natural dyes. In her first runway show in 2017, she even eliminated the use of plastics.

Some of her other sustainable initiatives include: 

• Introducing TIPA flexible packaging provides bio-based alternatives that decompose within 6 months. 
• Gabriela built her first store on Madison Avenue in the Carlyle House without using synthetics and chemicals. She only used natural, non-treated reclaimed oak and built-in light occupancy sensors to reduce electrical consumption.
• About 90% of the construction waste generated during the construction of her first store was recycled.
• In April 2019, Gabriela Hearst introduced recycled cardboard hangers to her stores. 
• She used reclaimed wood, vegetable-dyed leather, and linen curtains instead of organic cotton to create her London flagship store. 
• Gabriela is also known for creating carbon-neutral shows. In 2020, she pioneered the first-ever carbon-neutral runway show.

Gabriela Hearst is a big fan of using recycled materials. For her Autumn Winter 2020 collection, she recycled antique Turkish rugs, cashmere outerwear from older collections. She shredded paper bales from a Brooklyn recycling facility. 

From her collections to how she handles her brand, you can tell Gabriela is concerned about implementing zero-waste and eco-friendly production methods.

3. Vivienne Westwood: Punk Icon Turned Fashion Climate Activist

Vivienne Westwood, born on April 8, 1941, was a self-taught designer focused on provocative clothing. She also worked as a school teacher until she met her husband, Derek Westwood, in 1962. 

After her marriage, Vivienne and her partner, Malcolm McLaren, got into fashion by selling secondhand 1950s vintage clothing. They named their store Let It Rock. Vivienne's designs, which were often riddled with anti-establishment slogans and graphics, were based on Malcolm's provocative ideas.

They created their first commercial ready-to-wear collection in 1981 and ended their professional partnership five years later. 

Vivienne Westwood became an independent designer who focused the next two decades of her career on creating garments inspired by classical sources, such as paintings by Francois Boucher and Thomas Gainsborough and historical British dress. 

Her sustainable brand was founded on social responsibility. Vivienne used her fashion pieces to communicate ideas and ideals confronting political and social injustice. She often used graphic design to make calls to action and political slogans on garments. Some of her areas of political activism were climate change, nuclear disarmament, and civil rights.

Vivienne Westwood has warned against excessive consumption of fast-fashion clothing throughout her career. She encouraged slow fashion—using and wearing clothes we love for as long as possible instead of replacing them the moment we are bored with them. 

In early 2014, Vivienne said climate change was her priority. She included messages about climate change and sustainable fashion practices in her collections. She created one of the first runway protests on global warming and Brexit. In 2013, she took her activism out of fashion and created an environmental foundation that works with charities and NGOs.

Vivienne's Spring-Summer 2013 and Autumn-Winter 2013/2014 collections were titled Climate Revolution and Save the Arctic, which eventually became a campaign movement in 2015. She joined other sustainable fashion collaborations, which include: 

• Vivienne collaborated with Burberry to support a UK-based non-profit, Cool Earth, in 2018. 
• Vivienne Westwood and Eastpak collaborated, launching a bag collection titled Save Our Oceans in July 2020.
• She also collaborated with Canopy, a non-profit organization, to protect forests using natural fabrics for the 2020 World Earth Day.
• She pushed the boundaries of traditional fashion practices by running full-on digital fashion shows. Her last physical runway show was the Autumn-Winter 2019 show.

4. Stella McCartney: Pioneer of Sustainable Luxury Fashion

Stella McCartney is next on our list of sustainable fashion designers. Born on September 13, 1971, the British designer is popular for her ability to create fashion items without using animal fibers like fur and leather. 

Stella is all about ethical sourcing of sustainable materials—her stance is born out of animal rights activism. She worked at Christian Lacroix, a French couture house, and interned at British Vogue. Then, she studied at the Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design in London.

McCartney released a vegan fragrance line in 2008 and launched the Falabella vegan bag in 2009. She also introduced kids' and eco-friendly eyewear lines in 2011. Stella went on to hit more milestones in the fashion industry. One of these milestones includes designing the first-ever vegan Stan Smith trains in 2018. 

A further show of Stella's dedication to sustainable fashion is the Stella McCartney Cares Foundation, launched in 2018. It is a non-profit charity organization created to support breast cancer and sustainability education. Later, in 2018, she partnered with the United Nations on a sustainable fashion charter.

In 2019, she served as a sustainability special advisor to Bernard Arnault and the LVMH executive committee. Stella hit another major milestone as a promoter of slow fashion by being the only fashion designer to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). 

The Prince of Wales Sustainable Markets Initiative invited her to the G7 summit and COP26 in 2021, where she hosted an exhibition on the Future of Fashion material innovations. McCartney became a sustainability leader in the fashion industry because she constantly used innovative materials. 

In 2021, she created the world's first mycelium leather clothes and runway bag. In 2022, the Stella McCartney brand released the world's first-ever Mylo Luxury handbag from mushroom leather.

5. Eileen Fisher: The Queen of A Timeless, Sustainable Wardrobe

Eileen Fisher was one of the sustainable fashion designers who contributed to ensuring a sustainable future within the fashion industry in the late 1900s. She started her sustainable fashion company to solve a problem she faced as an interior and graphic designer. 

She designed her first four pieces from simple shapes: a box top, cropped pants, a shell, and a vest. With just $350, she founded the Eileen Fisher brand. Eileen's initial goal was to create a comfortable and timeless wardrobe. Her ethical production practices were way ahead of the eco-conscious fashion curve.

She championed environmental responsibility by ensuring the use of organic and recycled materials, fair labor practices, and recycling programs. Here is a timeline of Eileen Fisher's sustainable initiatives and ethical production processes:

• In 1996, she released her first eco-conscious fashion collection, using undyed wool for production. 
• Her brand launched a Human Rights program and joined Social Accountability International to further enforce ethical labor practices in the workplace.
• In 2004, she launched her brand's first garment made from organic cotton. 
• In 2007, the Eileen Fisher brand built a transparent supply chain by joining the fair-trade movement and purchasing supplies from the Textile Exchange. 
• She turned her New York City company branch into a zero carbon footprint company, which earned her an AIA award the following year.
• By 2009, she had created Green Eileen, her brand's first take-back program, to reduce its environmental impact. Then, in 2013, Elieen launched The LAB, using recycled materials from the Green Eileen take-back program. 
• In 2014, she started working with Canopy. This company uses tree-based fibers from ancient forests and non-endangered tree species. Furthermore, she joined the Sustainable Apparel Coalition to advocate for the transparency of the fashion industry's supply chain.
• Eileen Fisher announced VISION202o in 2015. A significant part of her sustainability goals is to use only eco-friendly materials for all her products by 2020.
• By 2020, she updated her sustainability goals in VISION2020 to Horizon 2030. She hopes to incorporate circular fashion principles and implement more ethical practices.

6. Patrick McDowell: An Innovator and Upcycler of Luxury Fashion Brands

The next sustainable fashion brand founded recently came from the young designer based in London, Patrick McDowell. Patrick caught the sustainability fashion industry and the regular public's attention with his graduation fashion show in 2018, where he repurposed old Swarovski crystals and Burberry fabric.

Burberry's creative director, Christopher Bailey, donated these recycled fabrics and materials. Patrick's affiliation with slow fashion started when he was thirteen and needed a short school bag that wouldn't graze his knee. He hand-sewed a bag out of an old pair of jeans.  

Patrick McDowell interned at Burberry after graduating from Central Saint Martins. During his third year there, he learned that he only uses 30% of the fabric purchased for production. To make Burberry's production processes more eco-friendly, he began using fabrics meant for trash.

He believes designers should also redesign the faulty systems in the fashion industry instead of creating only beautiful clothes. Patrick is working with Pinko to start a sustainability program providing scholarships and internship opportunities.

In 2025, he was the latest recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design.

7. Mara Hoffman: An Advocate for Ethical Labor Practices and Transparent Supply Chain Among Sustainable Brands

Mara Hoffman is a sustainable designer who changed her business model to a circular fashion business model after 15 years of running a swimwear brand. She is implementing eco-friendly practices and sustainable fashion policies to foster a 100% transparent supply chain. 

Hoffman became a designer after graduating from the Parsons School of Design in 1999. She became popular by wearing her designs. Since her pivot in 2015, Mara has incorporated eco-friendly materials like recycled and organic fiber and ensured the implementation of ethical labor practices, such as fair wages and safe working conditions.

As a slow fashion company, Mara launched a resale program to help curb the environmental impacts of textile waste and reduce her company's environmental footprint. She uses recycled polyester but avoids using fabrics made from animal skin or fur. 

She is also an advocate of the New York Fashion Act, legislation whose goal is to reduce the industry's reliance on fossil fuels and, by extension, its carbon footprint. To mitigate her brand's carbon footprint, she stopped using traditional techniques to create fabrics and switched to digital printing techniques.

8. Nia Thomas: A Champion of Eco-friendly Practices

Next on our list of sustainable fashion designers is Nia Thomas, a designer who studied Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She founded her ready-to-wear brand in 2018. Her knitwear collections are meticulously designed to reflect artistry, empowerment, and individuality.

Artistic genius has always been part of Nia's ancestry, evident in her late maternal grandmother's elegant fashion sense. She champions a movement that encourages the use of innovative materials like silk, TENCEL, responsibly sourced cashmere, and wool. Nia also advocates for ethical labor practices. 

For instance, her brand employs and supports a community of skilled artisans in Mexico and Peru. Nia Thomas also uses natural dyes from food scraps, such as indigo, walnut husks, wild marigolds, and cochineal.

Conclusion 

The rise of sustainable fashion brands marks a pivotal shift in the industry that prioritizes the planet without sacrificing style or creativity. By integrating eco-friendly materials,  zero-waste techniques, and fair supply chain practices, these designers prove that fashion can be beautiful and responsible. 

Events like New York Fashion Week have become platforms for brands to showcase how sustainable practices can redefine luxury and accessibility.  

The movement is expanding globally, from slow fashion advocates to brands partnering with other climate-focused organizations. Whether through inclusive and petite sizing or embracing methods that minimize environmental impact, these designers are setting new standards for the industry.