Iconic cap brand New Era has named Dao-Yi Chow its creative director. The co-founder of Public School and former co-designer of DKNY will develop the iconic cap brand’s first apparel line — “Brand New Era” — set to launch later this year, the company said in a statement.

New Era’s caps have long been an important signifier in sports and streetwear culture. The Buffalo, New York-based company is best known for producing headwear for NBA, MLB and NFL teams, including its iconic New York Yankees fitted “59FIFTY” cap. Recently, New Era has pursued partnerships in Formula 1, as the competition undergoes a cultural revival and its teams have increasingly explored streetwear collaborations.

Chow, whose work is inspired by streetwear and sports silhouettes, did a decade-long stint as creative director of Sean John, the label started by American rapper Sean Combs (also known as P. Diddy), before co-founding the celebrated start-up Public School with fellow New York native Maxwell Osborne. In 2015, the duo were hired to helm Donna Karan’s DKNY line, but stepped down less than two years later after LVMH offloaded the Donna Karan business to G-III Apparel.

”Dao-Yi’s unparalleled creativity and passion for sportswear makes him the perfect fit to lead our brand to the next level of product evolution,” said Jim Grundtisch, New Era’s president of global brand.

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Are Hats the New Sneakers?

Drawn by street cred and a sense of community, New York City youth are lining up for fast-selling fitted baseball caps with the same fervour they have for limited-edition sneakers.

Over the last two weeks, leaders from 175 countries gathered in Ottawa, Canada to hash out the details of a global treaty to end plastic pollution which is expected to be finalised in a last round of negotiations set to be held in Korea in November.

The issue is urgent. A new study by the US-funded research and development centre, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, found that plastics have grown by more than any other bulk material on earth over the past decade, with significant and damaging consequences for human health and the environment.

Carbon pollution created by plastic production is responsible for 2.24 gigatons of CO2 per year, or nearly five percent of all global emissions. Microplastics, some of which shed from synthetic fashion, are entering our bodies through the food we eat and the air we breathe, with dangerous health implications. According to the UN, more than 2,400 chemicals that are associated with plastics are of concern to our health or the planet. And because they do not biodegrade, products like nylon tights and polyester sneakers can remain in landfills for generations. Incinerated plastics release heavy metals and toxins.

According to Ecuador’s chief negotiator, Walter Schuldt, the talks on global plastics treaty are “about the survival of the future of life, not only human life but all sorts of life on this planet.”

Big stakes. And ones in which fashion is complicit.

Plastic Fashion

Plastic, in the form of polyester, acrylic, nylon and elastane, has fused with fashion. Cheap, durable, functional and plentiful polyester is now the world’s most used textile, accounting for more than half of global production. This was not always the case; before 2000, natural fibres dominated the fashion industry.

The most contentious element of the ongoing negotiations over a plastic pollution treaty could help redress that balance. Some “high ambition” countries are pushing for targets to reduce global plastic production, similar to the agreement to keep a cap on global warming reached under the UN Paris Agreement in 2015.

But reduction is not a focus of the fashion industry. Instead, big brands, industry trade groups and NGO-backed consortia that are still dominated by corporate interests are focused on the promise of recycling and reuse, leaning into technologies that have yet to be proven at scale, aren’t cost competitive and fail to tackle the root issue of overproduction.

A recent Lululemon-sponsored report published by trade group Textile Exchange highlighted this view. The report, titled “The Future of Synthetics” said that the industry must shift away from the use of virgin fossil fuel-based plastics to meet its climate goals, recommending a switch instead to alternatives that include textile-to-textile recycling, biosynthetics and materials made from captured carbon.

Unfortunately, these steps won’t come anywhere close to delivering on Textile Exchange’s stated ambitions.

Why not?

None of these emerging technologies can compete with virgin polyester on price, efficacy or volume. All preferred solutions require decades and billions of dollars of investment to scale — capital which will not flow to financially bootless options. It’s also not yet proven which, if any of these options will meaningfully reduce the industry’s carbon emissions, or curb the toxic levels of chemicals and microplastics released by today’s plastic fashion.

What Can Be Done

While the first step of Textile Exchange’s plan to reduce the fashion industry’s growing dependence on plastics is fanciful, the report proposes a second step: to reduce the overall volume of stuff produced and sold.

Adoption of this recommendation would have a profound and immediate impact. Unfortunately, the report does not make any suggestions for how to accomplish this dramatic turn.

Just as other big fossil-fuel producing countries are pushing back against any proposal to cap global plastic production, the fashion industry is unwilling to entertain ideas that would restrain growth. After all, for brands like report sponsor Lululemon, their valuation depends on growing output.

But, if caps on fashion sales are inconceivable, a sufficiently high tax on plastic inputs would represent a step in the right direction. Such a measure would discourage the use of plastics by increasing their cost and make less damaging natural alternatives more attractive. It would simultaneously create a pool of funds to address the negative environmental and health impacts caused by plastic pollution.

Consider, for example, that taxes on cigarettes have caused prices to balloon and consumption to plummet.

For those who nonetheless insist that such a proposal is fantasy, look to France, which is already considering a sin-style tax on fashion. Rather than recommend dubious “solutions,” the fashion industry ought to support credible paths to reduce its negative impacts, thus restoring its standing as a creative and constructive force for good.

NEW YORK — On a recent Thursday afternoon at Zara’s SoHo store, dozens of tourists and urban professionals shuffled along a checkout line that snaked halfway across the sales floor.

Upstairs, there was no line. Here, just two customers navigated a self-checkout station at a sleek, L-shaped white bar. Built into the bar are crates that automatically scanned their purchases and rang up the total on a screen above in a matter of seconds.

It wasn’t completely seamless. There were hiccups involving hangers and security tags. There were no instructions.

Even so, when asked if they’d use the self-checkout system again, the answer from both customers was a resounding yes. A little confusion about the security tag removal device, which only worked after the products were paid for, was a small price to pay for skipping the queue. “It was easy enough,” said one woman.

Self checkout has an image problem. Many consumers still associate the technology with clunky self-scanning kiosks at the grocery store. Walmart and Dollar General have scaled back their use of the technology in recent months, citing operational efficiency and theft prevention, respectively. Target is limiting its self-checkout lanes to 10 items or fewer. After a 2018 trial, Spanish fast-fashion retailer Mango decided against offering self-checkout.

The technology is slowly gaining traction in fashion. Fashion retailers like Zara and Uniqlo typically install sleek stations that allow shoppers to place items in a bin to be priced using radio frequency identification, sidestepping the dreaded barcode scanner. At Uniqlo’s SoHo flagship, self-checkout bins have completely replaced cashier-operated registers. The bins will eventually be installed in all of the retailer’s roughly 2,400 stores globally.

Champions of the technology say self-checkout can make stores operate more efficiently — where Uniqlo has installed them, machines have cut transaction times by half, according to Takahiro Tambara, chief information officer at Uniqlo-parent Fast Retailing. The machines also have the potential to reduce labour costs by eliminating the need for cashiers and even drive sales in high-traffic locations where long lines can deter purchases.

But rollout has been slow and retailers are being cautious about fully embracing the technology, which has also been associated with an increase in theft. Self-checkout equipment is also expensive to implement; the scan-less checkout systems that Uniqlo and Zara deploy require their entire supply chains to be RFID-tagged, an intensive process that takes upwards of six months.

While acceptance is growing, particularly among young consumers, many shoppers prefer interacting with human employees. A study from Drexel University published earlier this year in the Journal of Business Research found that traditional, cashier-operated checkout services make customers more loyal to the store.

And the concept may never be a good fit for many brands. High-end stores see relatively few transitions on any given day, making streamlined checkout a less-pressing issue. Many brands — and not just in the luxury space — also make high-touch, or human, service part of the value proposition.

“When you think of someone buying a $150 bag, it almost feels like self-checkout would cheapen the service,” said Matt Moorut, marketing analyst at Gartner. “Fashion has been one of the slowest areas to make changes in checkout.”

For now, Uniqlo’s all-in approach to self-checkout is an outlier. Zara’s dual-service approach is more likely to be widely adopted: self-checkout for customers in a rush, and traditional checkout for sceptics and shoppers craving a personal touch.

“We are far from a seamless and pure value-add level of self-checkout,” said Simeon Siegel, analyst at BMO Capital Markets. “Trial is key … It needs to add more value than discomfort.”

A Trial-and-Error Approach

For self-checkout to work, retailers have to experiment with what configuration best fits their needs. Uniqlo began piloting its RFID self-checkout solution more than a decade ago, and the most recent iteration of the concept launched in 2019.

“We continuously made tweaks based on our learnings, to evolve to where it is today,” said Tambara. “Our first design included a lid that had to be closed to accurately scan the RFID tags, but having to shut and open a lid was an inconvenience to customers, so we found a solution to eliminate it.”

Even today, Uniqlo’s self-checkout offering isn’t perfect; at the kiosks in its SoHo store, all the shopping bags are placed toward the end of the checkout section rather than in individual stations, causing some shoppers to walk over to the bags and then return to their station again to complete their transactions.

Every retailer has its own needs when it comes to self-checkout, said Moorut of Gartner, pointing to UK retailer Marks & Spencer, which in addition to self-checkout, offers self-service for in-store online returns and pickup.

Preventing ‘Shrink’

According to a 2023 survey conducted by LendingTree, an online loans marketplace, one in five respondents said they’ve accidentally taken items during self-checkout. One in seven admitted to stealing.

While RFID technology eliminates the tedium of scanning — and the opportunity for error or intentional skips — it hardly mitigates theft, analysts say. Zara’s RFID self-checkout stations equipped with security tag removal devices in fact might pose a heightened risk for shoplifting, said Siegel.

“It’s somewhat ironic the tag designed to specifically prevent theft can be removed by the potential thief,” he said. A number of retailers, including Uniqlo, don’t use security tags at all. Instead, a number of store associates are placed at the checkout stations for customer assistance, while other store personnel are dedicated to loss prevention, the company said.

But RFID could soon serve an anti-theft function, according to Spencer Hewett, founder and chief executive of Radar, a technology company that works with American Eagle and other major apparel retailers that already deploy RFID technology for real-time inventory visibility.

Radar’s RFID scanning sensors can detect when customers interact with and carry items throughout the store. When combined with cameras, this feature would be able to detect the exact number of products customers bring to the station so that if that doesn’t match the number of pieces rung up in the point-of-sales system, there will be a notification on the screen and store personnel would be alerted.

Radar is planning to launch its checkout function within the year.

For now, “self-checkout in fashion is still at a fairly immature stage,” said Moorut. “There are a lot of opportunities but also a lot of figuring out on the part of retailers before we get to a point where it’s driving massive benefits.”

Peloton Interactive Inc. shares fell to a record low after chief executive officer Barry McCarthy announced plans to step down and the struggling fitness company embarked on a major restructuring that will reduce its global workforce by 15 percent.

The board will conduct a search to name a replacement, Peloton said in a statement Thursday. Board Chair Karen Boone and director Chris Bruzzo will serve as interim co-CEOs.

The shares fell as much as 16 percent to $2.71 in New York on Thursday, marking the worst intraday drop since February. Even before the decline, the stock was down 47 percent this year.

McCarthy — a veteran of Spotify Technology SA and Netflix Inc. — took over from co-founder John Foley in early 2022 and set about overhauling the company. That’s included thousands of previous layoffs, management shake-ups and outsourcing business functions. He’s also tried to make Peloton more of a services company — with its mobile app at the heart of the business — rather than just a seller of expensive bikes and treadmills.

The executive also forged new partnerships, including one this week with Hyatt Hotels Corp. to bring Peloton bikes to the hotel chain in an attempt to boost sales.

But McCarthy acknowledged in recent months that the company continued to struggle with growing “at scale” and warned in February that revenue may not start increasing again until the fourth quarter.

The New York-based company was a highflier during the early days of the pandemic, when lockdowns sent consumers scrambling for its stationary bikes and fitness classes. But as people returned to gyms, paying subscribers declined, leaving the company with a glut of inventory. A series of product recalls over safety issues only added to the company’s image problem and led to lower sales and profits. The shares have tumbled over the past three years, erasing more than 90 percent from its valuation.

On Thursday, the company announced a new restructuring programme to reduce annual expenses by more than $200 million. As part of that plan, the company will continue to pare its retail showroom footprint and eliminate about 400 jobs.

“The objective of the cost reductions is to align our cost structure with the current size of our business and position Peloton to generate sustained and meaningful positive free cash flow, which is a top priority for us” the company said in a statement. Peloton said it’s working closely with its banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. on a refinancing strategy.

“We are mindful of the timing of our debt maturities, which consist of convertible notes and a term loan, and we know this is also on the minds of our shareholders,” the company said in a letter to shareholders.

Achieving positive sustained free cash flow will make Peloton “a more attractive investment for debt holders,” the company said.

Peloton narrowed its guidance for revenue for this fiscal year, and the new range came in lower than analysts anticipated. The company now predicts sales of $2.68 billion to $2.70 billion for the full year. It also is anticipating 2.96 million to 2.98 million connected fitness subscribers, lower than a previous forecast for as much as 3.01 million. The forecast reflects Peloton’s “updated outlook for hardware sales based on current demand trends and expectations for seasonally lower demand,” the company said.

In the fiscal third quarter, revenue was $717.7 million, coming up short of analysts’ estimates for $719.2 million. Connected fitness subscribers were 3.06 million, less than estimated and virtually unchanged from a year earlier.

Peloton said it’s revamping its approach to international markets to be more “targeted and efficient.” The company said it has no plans to “exit any of our existing international markets, we will leverage global strategies and capabilities where we can.”

By Mark Gurman

Starting next year, Patagonia’s wetsuits won’t just be recycled — they’ll be reincarnated.

At the company’s “Wetsuit Forge” repair and design center, located a few blocks from the beach in Ventura, California, a first-of-its-kind wetsuit is draped over a table. The suit looks and feels like any other, but it’s made in part from used Patagonia wetsuits broken down at a molecular level. It too will be melted down at the end of its life and reborn into a new, lower-carbon wetsuit.

The prototype is the product of a years-long initiative by Patagonia Inc. to eliminate much of the waste that accumulates when a surfer buys a new wetsuit. While the outdoor apparel retailer guarantees a lifetime of repairs for wear and tear, eventually the day comes when the racks of old wetsuits awaiting mending in Ventura can no longer be stitched back together. Some are recycled into yoga mats or tote bags, but inevitably, they all end up buried in landfills.

Just how many old Patagonia wetsuits end up as part of $500 reincarnated versions depends on the volume of discarded wetsuits the company collects. But the strategy is ushering in a potentially repeating cycle that would yield the ultimate, immortal wetsuit.

“Essentially, a wetsuit becomes endlessly reusable,” says Mackenzie Warner, a Patagonia material developer.

The $2 billion wetsuit market is the antithesis of fast fashion, the cheap disposable clothes largely responsible for the apparel industry’s growing carbon footprint. Surfers tend not to be slaves to style, at least when it comes to wetsuits, often only buying an expensive new one when their old one wears out. Roughly 7 million wetsuits are sold annually and the global market is forecast to grow to $3.5 billion by 2033.

Patagonia in particular has built eco-consciousness into a billion-dollar brand by making clothes for hiking, climbing and surfing out of pricey but sustainable materials, then urging its customers to wear the gear until it frays before returning it for repair or resale. The company sells about 100,000 wetsuits a year.

“Durability and reparability affect environmental impact,” says Veronica Bates Kassatly, a London-based fashion industry analyst focused on sustainability. She cites the example of wearing a shirt 500 times. If a cheaply made shirt is replaced after being worn 10 times, 50 shirts will need to be produced and discarded. But if one better-made and easily mended shirt can be worn 500 times, the environmental cost is significantly lower, even if making the garment uses more water and energy upfront.

Despite surfing’s one-with-nature vibe, most wetsuits are the sartorial equivalent of an oil spill. They’re made from neoprene, a petroleum-based synthetic rubber. (Many wetsuits sold in California even carry a state warning that they can expose you to chemicals known to cause cancer.) Patagonia is collecting end-of-life wetsuits for a partner that vaporises them to reclaim what’s known as carbon black, a key ingredient in neoprene and in the natural rubber Patagonia uses. It’s the petroleum-derived element that gives wetsuits their strength and jet-black colour.

Whether carbon black can be infinitely recovered remains to be scientifically validated, but reusing it keeps old wetsuits out of landfills. The reclaimed material also avoids carbon dioxide emissions from the production of virgin carbon black, a ubiquitous ingredient in tires, plastics, inks and electronics. The material’s $19.3 billion market, which is expected to grow 66 percent by 2032, emits as much as 79 million metric tons of CO2 annually from the combustion of tar oil and other petroleum feedstocks, according to a January paper published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

“Circularity is always the good approach,” says Fabian Rosner, lead author of the paper and an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles. “If you can reclaim that carbon black, you reduce the amount of resources that you need in the first place.”

About a decade ago, Patagonia began to replace neoprene with Yulex, the brand name for a natural rubber produced by drought-resistant Hevea trees and Guayule plants grown on non-arable land. The company’s latest wetsuit line, released in September, is 85 percent Yulex, and rival surf brands have also started to add Yulex and other sustainable materials to their wetsuits. Some have also launched recycling initiatives.

But even Yulex wetsuits are made with carbon black. That led an entrepreneur named Tony Wibbeler to show up at Patagonia’s door in 2017 with a pitch for a sustainable solution to both the carbon black conundrum and the recycling challenge.

The startup Wibbeler founded, Boulder, Colorado-based Bolder Industries, developed an industrial process to reclaim carbon black from old tires, which it sells as BolderBlack. He told Patagonia executives he could create a proprietary formula to do the same for their wetsuits. Wibbeler says Bolder’s method is 85 percent more sustainable than traditional carbon black production.

Rosner says the CO2 savings from reclaimed carbon black depend on the energy efficiency of the reclamation process. But the environmental impact could be substantial: Carbon black accounts for about 20 percent of Patagonia wetsuits’ rubber foam and is also used to dye the wetsuits’ recycled nylon lining, according to Hub Hubbard, the company’s product line manager for surf and wetsuits.

At the Wetsuit Forge, Warner points to a container full of inky granules of BolderBlack. “It was kind of a no-brainer for us to switch to BolderBlack as it has a pretty wide impact on the overall wetsuit,” she says.

Bolder isn’t the only company producing reclaimed carbon black for wetsuits. Taiwan-based Sheico, which manufactures wetsuits for Patagonia and other major surf brands, has started using its own reclaimed carbon black from old tires. Patagonia is the first, though, to source the reclaimed material from used wetsuits. The company will collect end-of-life wetsuits, remove the zippers and ship them to Bolder to extract the carbon black. The reclaimed material will then be sent to Patagonia’s manufacturer.

“It’s a circular solution, not just a sustainably sourced or a bio-based material,” says Wibbeler, who is also Bolder’s chief executive officer. “The cool part about this is that it’s wetsuits to wetsuits.”

The first BolderBlack Patagonia wetsuits are set to go on sale in 2025. Bolder will mix old wetsuits with tires so enough BolderBlack is produced for each reincarnated suit.

In the meantime, the company continues to improve its wetsuits’ durability and repairability. The Wetsuit Forge opened in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic inspired a new wave of sustainably minded surfers to take up the sport after gyms shuttered. As supply chain snarls led to a shortage in new wetsuits, a tsunami of used ones arrived in Ventura for repair — some 6,000 over the past three years. The pandemic also closed down recycling programmes, spurring an effort to prolong the lives of wetsuits and close the loop on reuse.

“When we get all these suits that come through the door, we’re really able to pinpoint where the failure was on the suit and track those data points for each generation of suit,” says Patagonia wetsuit engineer Buddy Pendergast. “We started drawing those hard correlations between repeat failures that we wanted to address.”

To illustrate his point, Pendergast walks over to a table and picks up a wetsuit to show how a seam has been replaced with one that’s more durable and quicker to repair. When the data indicated that ankle cuffs were commonly failing, the team redesigned that part of the wetsuit, too. A rack of surfboards stands along one wall of the Forge so engineers can test design tweaks at C Street, a legendary surf break nearby. All of the engineers’ learnings and upgrades have been incorporated into the reincarnated wetsuit.

“We lab tested it, we field tested it and made sure that it would pass all of our quality standards,” Warner says.

The fast-fashion dynamic has made it so that people often find it “cheaper and easier to buy a new item than to repair an existing item,” says Kassatly, the fashion analyst. Patagonia has already flipped that calculation. Pendergast says the company has a 90 percent repair rate; for just the cost of shipping most times, a surfer gets an improved wetsuit without buying a new one. But the success of the BolderBlack initiative will depend on getting surfers to send their beyond-repair wetsuits back to Patagonia a final time — at least in their current life — rather than letting them mould in the garage.

“Our hope is that once this gets out, people are going to start digging out all their old wetsuits to send to us,” says Hubbard.

By Todd Woody