Fashion Task Force Briefs King Charles on Regenerative Projects and Digital Passports

The Sustainable Markets Initiative wrapped its annual Roundtables and Exhibition on March 12 at Hampton Court Palace, and the fashion world's most powerful sustainability coalition used the occasion to brief King Charles III at Buckingham Palace on the actual, measurable results of projects that most of the industry is still treating as aspirational.

Federico Marchetti, Chair of the SMI Fashion Task Force and the founder of Yoox, presented the results directly to the King, who founded SMI in 2020 when he was still Prince of Wales. "Their collective efforts have enabled us to achieve remarkable, innovative and measurable results, which we had the honour of presenting today at Buckingham Palace to HM The King, who has always encouraged me to turn ideas into action," Marchetti said. "These results demonstrate to the entire industry the path forward. Fashion has always been an industry of creativity and reinvention: with collaboration and innovation, we can turn sustainability into the next great chapter of luxury."

The two headline numbers that came out of the summit are modest by industry scale but significant as proof of concept. The Armani Group's regenerative cotton experiment in Italy has produced roughly 1,000 T-shirts. The Himalayan Regenerative Fashion Living Lab in Ladakh, India, which supports local communities in transitioning to regenerative farming practices, yielded a 200kg pilot run of regenerative pashmina that reached Brunello Cucinelli products. Neither figure represents mass production, and Marchetti acknowledged the constraints plainly: "The biggest challenges are scale, alignment, and storytelling. Scale is difficult because regenerative agriculture and traceability require transforming entire supply chains. Alignment is complex because fashion is fragmented. And storytelling matters because consumers must understand why regeneration and transparency are valuable. If customers reward responsible products, transformation accelerates."

On the digital infrastructure side, Stella McCartney and Mulberry showcased Digital Product Passports on select products during the event, with the underlying technology provided by Aura. The demonstrations were designed to show the depth of data a DPP can surface for a consumer at the point of purchase, from material sourcing to manufacturing credentials. Making DPPs universal across the industry is one of the Fashion Task Force's central objectives, alongside scaling regenerative agriculture and building consumer demand for transparency.

Day 2 of the Roundtables opened with a fashion plenary built around a Giorgio Armani case study, moderated by Marchetti and featuring Giuseppe Marsocci, CEO of Giorgio Armani; Marc Palahí, CEO of the Circular Bioeconomy Alliance; and Claudio Rovere, Founder and CEO of HMODA. The session traced the sustainable transition across the full value chain, from regenerative raw materials sourcing through to the consumer-facing transparency that DPPs enable.

The broader summit brought hundreds of global CEOs, innovators, policymakers and investors to Hampton Court Palace across the two days of March 11 and 12. SMI CEO Jennifer Jordan-Saifi framed the event's purpose in terms of execution over intention: "The SMI's annual Roundtables and Exhibition brings together global leaders not just to discuss ambition, but to drive real-world action, forging partnerships, mobilizing investment and scaling the solutions needed to deliver sustainable growth."

The Fashion Task Force's membership has grown steadily. Puig joined in April 2023, and Diesel, part of OTB Group, along with HModa came on board in February 2025. Stella McCartney was welcomed as SMI's new ambassador at London Fashion Week last month, adding one of fashion's most recognizable sustainability voices to a group that already includes Giorgio Armani, Brunello Cucinelli, and Prada.

The gap between a 200kg pashmina pilot and industry-wide transformation is real, and Marchetti isn't pretending otherwise. The question the SMI is betting on is whether getting enough CEOs in the same room, with the same data, pointed at the same supply chain problems, can close it faster than the industry would manage on its own.