Coco Chanel once said, “Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”
So how can an industry become sustainable when the ‘we loved it, but now we shun it’ cycle is embedded so deeply? Do we have to change everything we love about fashion to make it a sustainable, fair industry? Not necessarily.

Last night, amid the glamour and excitement of London Fashion Week, we held a drinks party with Levi Strauss & Co., to launch our joint report Fashion Futures which explores the world of 2025 and the role of the fashion industry within it. More than a hundred fashion industry folk turned up to hear about our four vivid scenarios and view the animations, which bring them to life.

Follow this link to find out what kind of worlds might see cities inundated by second-hand department stores; high-street brands competing on sustainability credentials; people partying in biodegradable, spray-on outfits; and regions where grow-your-own clothing is popular.

We created the scenarios to help companies around the globe navigate the ever-changing challenge of developing sustainable businesses. They compel us to mull over big questions we wouldn’t usually consider when thinking short-term. Like how the industry will react to shortages of cotton and other raw materials – or how people will care for their clothes in a future of water shortages and high energy prices – which raises deeper questions like whether current business models will survive in a retail market that’s very different from today.

We have deliberately avoided making Fashion Futures a read-it-then-shelve-it report. We want companies of all shapes and sizes, from all corners of the globe, to use the four scenarios. We want them to be inspired, perhaps even a little scared by some of them, but hopefully motivated to think differently about the future and excited by the idea that a sustainable fashion industry is achievable.

To this end, we’ve published some workshop materials on our website with advice on how to use the scenarios to shape strategy, push for sustainable design and innovation and generate the skills needed for a sustainable industry.

And we’ve brought the scenarios to life with four powerful two-minute animations, which show just how different they are, and how much a sustainable future depends on us taking bold action today.

Fashion Futures has already been put to practical use. Our project partner, Levi Strauss & Co. is using the scenarios internally, to inform strategy and innovation. As Michael Kobori (pictured), LS&Co’s Vice President of Social and Environmental Sustainability said at the launch party yesterday, "These scenarios are so stimulating, we will be sharing them with senior management to inform our broad strategies, with designers to spur them to create more sustainable products, and with all employees to unleash the power of our entire company to think about sustainability."

And we’ve used them to help fashion students understand how to design for the future, working with the great team at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the London College of Fashion. Four groups of students from the 2009-10 MA Fashion and the Environment – a diverse and enthusiastic bunch from all over the world - spent their autumn term living and breathing one of the Fashion Futures scenarios, creating new ideas and businesses that would thrive in such a world. They not only produced some great, thought-provoking concepts, which are illustrated in our report, but they also helped us shape the scenarios at one of the critical stages of development.

So this is the beginning of an exciting journey. We’re looking forward to helping our partners and others use the scenarios and we’re excited to hear how other organisations will use them in innovative ways.

Innovation is famously described as one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent  perspiration – great ideas are rarely enough, the challenge is to execute them.

Sustainable innovation can be a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process. Our latest report Paint the Town Green has been more than three years in the making but what a story we have to tell.

The report is about a multi-year innovation collaboration which set the goal of creating sustainable paint systems, and about the new products, services and processes which came out of it. It explains how to conduct innovation driven by environmental and social responsibility and why it makes good business sense.

Its not that I’m especially excited by paint – though I must confess to a soft spot after working on it for so long. Essentially the report shows how to use sustainability as a new lens to reinvent and rethink every aspect of our life. If we can do this with paint, imagine what you can do with cars, mobile phones, homes and holidays.

The three-year project set out to study the entire lifecycle of paint – from raw materials through to manufacturing, use and disposal - to find ways to make it more sustainable. It brought together ICI Paints AkzoNobel, a manufacturer and supplier, construction group Carillion, a major user of paint, and Forum for the Future.

Here are a few of the innovations:

• Dulux Ecosense, a new range of eco-paint with half the carbon and water footprint of the standard paint sold two years ago and 40 per cent less waste.
• Improved cans which use less plastic and are easier to clean and recycle.
  A recycling scheme in which vehicles delivering paint to Dulux Decorator Centres bring back used cans.
• Envirowash - a mobile brush and roller cleaning station for building sites: instead of pouring contaminated water down the drains it is captured for reuse with the paint residue filtered out.
• Manufacturing improvements that save millions of litres of water used in cleaning production equipment by using it to make new paint.

We also developed new tools for the project like our Streamlined Lifecycle Assessment (SLCA) method and Environmental Impact Analyser  –  a tool to measure the key impacts of a proposed new formulation and compare them against an existing product. This was the key which allowed ICI Paints AkzoNobel to develop both Ecosense and Ecosure trade paint, which won Green Product of the year in the Green Business Awards 2009.

Paint the Town Green marks a unique point in Forum’s innovation work. Some years ago we resolved to only work on practical innovation projects and not write any reports. We caved in on this project, but that’s only because we’re convinced there’s a great story we want to share with others. We hope it provides the one per cent inspiration you’ve been looking for.