35 Essential Thought Leaders in Textiles & Apparel

The textiles and apparel manufacturing industry employs more than 300 million people across its global value chain, making it one of the largest employers on earth. It also accounts for between 8 and 10 percent of global carbon emissions, consumes more water than almost any other industrial sector, and generates an estimated 92 million tonnes of textile waste every year. These are not abstract statistics, they describe the daily reality of factory workers in Bangladesh, cotton farmers in India, recycling researchers in Hong Kong, and sustainability executives navigating regulatory change in Amsterdam and Brussels.

What makes this industry genuinely complex is that it sits at the intersection of almost every major challenge facing the modern world: climate change, labour rights, global trade, technological disruption, and the shifting expectations of consumers who are increasingly unwilling to separate the product they wear from the conditions under which it was made. According to the Apparel Impact Institute, greenhouse gas emissions from the apparel sector reached 944 million metric tonnes in 2023, a 7.5 percent increase from the year prior. At the same time, a 2025 International Labour Organization report found that less than 2 percent of global garment workers earn a living wage. These numbers sit side by side not as a coincidence but as a symptom of an industry that has historically optimised for speed and cost above almost everything else.

The people shaping the future of this industry are not simply optimising supply chains or innovating new fibres. They are asking harder questions about what it means to build a global industry that serves both people and planet, and doing so with intellectual rigour, genuine courage, and a public commitment to sharing what they learn. By 2030, the global sustainable fashion market is projected to grow from USD 15 billion to nearly USD 47 billion, a CAGR of more than 15 percent, and the organisations that lead this transition will be those that followed the right thinkers early enough to understand what was coming before it arrived.

This list brings together 35 thought leaders who are actively shaping how the industry understands itself in 2026. They span manufacturing innovation, sustainability policy, worker rights advocacy, supply chain research, circular economy, brand leadership, journalism, and academic research, drawn from 14 countries across five continents. The selection emphasised geographic and disciplinary diversity, genuine public contribution rather than title alone, and active engagement with the field rather than legacy reputation.

The people on this list are the thinkers. If your leadership team is ready to act on what they are saying, to build the team culture, have the difficult conversations, and lead the change that the textile and apparel industry demands, Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies globally) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, is available to work with your team. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Following the Right Voices in This Industry Matters

The textiles and apparel manufacturing industry is in the middle of a transformation that no single company can navigate alone. Regulations like the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and the forthcoming Digital Product Passport are moving from voluntary to mandatory. Extended Producer Responsibility programs are shifting the financial burden of textile waste management from governments to brands. Tariff disruptions, documented in the BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion 2026, are reshaping global sourcing patterns at a pace that requires executives to make consequential decisions faster than standard planning cycles allow.

In this environment, the leaders who stay ahead are not the ones who react best but the ones who have been paying attention to the right thinkers long enough to understand what is coming before it arrives. The people on this list have been saying, for years in most cases, that the industry's operating model was unsustainable, that worker wages were a crisis waiting to surface, and that recycling infrastructure would become a regulatory requirement rather than a marketing choice. Missing these voices does not just mean missing ideas. It means arriving late to every structural shift that is rewriting the rules of competition in the industry.

For organisations that take leadership development seriously, applying a leadership lens to the ideas these thinkers champion is not optional. The most technically sophisticated sustainability strategy will underdeliver if the leadership team cannot have the difficult conversations, align around a direction, and build the culture that sustains change through resistance. For more on leadership development in manufacturing and industrial contexts, Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and trusted leadership consultant for teams across Australia, the UK, the USA, Canada, Singapore, and more, is available to facilitate executive offsites and workshops for your team at jonno@consultclarity.org.

For related reading on leadership in manufacturing contexts, explore: 'Best Leadership Speakers for Manufacturing' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/50-best-leadership-speakers-for-manufacturing-2026.

How This List Was Compiled

The 35 people on this list were selected on the basis of genuine credibility and contribution to public discourse on leadership in textiles and apparel manufacturing. Every person included has either written substantively and publicly about the industry, led organisations making measurable impact on how the industry operates, conducted research that has influenced policy or practice, or built platforms that have brought underrepresented voices into the mainstream conversation.

Geographic and disciplinary diversity were explicit selection criteria. No single country represents more than 35 percent of the list. The disciplinary spread covers manufacturing innovation, sustainability policy, worker rights advocacy, supply chain research, circular economy, brand leadership, journalism, and academic research. Gender balance was also prioritised, with women representing more than half the list, reflecting both the demographics of thought leadership in this space and a deliberate effort to ensure that the women who disproportionately shape this field receive the visibility they deserve. Credentials, impact on how the field has evolved, and the quality of each person's contribution to public thinking were the standards applied throughout.

Sustainability Leaders Driving Industry Transformation

These thinkers have made the environmental and social footprint of the industry their primary focus, and their work is directly shaping how organisations approach everything from raw material sourcing to end-of-life textile management. The thread connecting them is not idealism but evidence: each has moved beyond the language of aspiration into the harder work of building standards, measuring outcomes, and holding organisations accountable against data rather than declarations.

1. Maxine Bédat

Few people in the apparel industry have done more to close the gap between sustainability rhetoric and verifiable data than Maxine Bédat. As founder and director of the New Standard Institute in New York, she built one of the field's most rigorous research platforms at a moment when "sustainable fashion" was becoming a marketing phrase more than a measurable standard. Her work on supply chain transparency and legislative accountability has been cited in policy discussions on both sides of the Atlantic, and she regularly publishes original analysis connecting the structural economics of fashion to the climate commitments brands are making but not meeting.

Bédat co-developed the New York Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act, which would require large apparel companies to map their supply chains, set science-based emissions targets, and address water pollution from chemical processes. Her 2021 book "Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment," longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, traces a single pair of jeans through every stage of the supply chain from a cotton farm in Texas to a landfill in Ghana, exposing the human and environmental costs that standard industry reporting consistently conceals.

2. Ashley Gill

Ashley Gill serves as Chief Standards and Strategy Officer at Textile Exchange, the global non-profit whose annual Material Change Index is one of the most widely consulted benchmarks in the industry for tracking progress on preferred fibre and material adoption. Her work sits at the intersection of certification, measurement, and market influence, and she has spent more than a decade helping brands translate sustainability commitments into verifiable sourcing decisions that can be independently assessed rather than simply reported.

The Textile Exchange Preferred Fiber and Materials Market Report, which Gill's team leads, documented that fossil-fuel-based polyester reached 54 percent of all fibre production in 2023, even as brands publicly committed to preferred alternatives. This kind of gap analysis, making visible the distance between stated commitments and actual market behaviour, is the specific contribution that makes her work essential for anyone tracking whether the industry is actually changing or simply changing its language. She is also a member of the University of Texas Austin Textiles and Apparel Industry Leadership Board.

3. Katrin Ley

Katrin Ley has served as Managing Director of Fashion for Good in Amsterdam since 2017, overseeing the organisation that has become one of the most important global platforms for identifying, funding, and scaling sustainable fashion innovation. Fashion for Good has scouted more than 2,000 sustainable fashion innovation start-ups, and under Ley's leadership it has developed a collaboration model that brings brands, suppliers, and innovators into joint pilots that move promising technologies from proof-of-concept to commercial scale.

Her particular contribution to the industry's thinking is on the question of why promising innovations fail to scale, and what structural conditions need to change for circularity to move from experiment to system. Ley co-authored the Fashion for Good Innovation Programme Report, which each year documents which categories of innovation are attracting investment, which are stalling, and what the barriers to scaling look like from inside organisations genuinely trying to adopt new technologies.

4. Marci Zaroff

Marci Zaroff is widely credited with coining the term "ecofashion" in 1995, a small linguistic act that mattered because it created a category at a moment when the industry had no language for the intersection of fashion and environmental responsibility. She is the founder and CEO of ECOfashion Corp, and serves as Board Chair and co-founder of Textile Exchange, the global non-profit that has become the standard-setting body for preferred fibre and materials certification across the industry.

Her book "ECOrenaissance," published by Simon and Schuster, laid out a framework for understanding the fashion industry as a system that could be regenerated rather than simply made less harmful. Zaroff's specific contribution is in demonstrating, through three decades of practice, that organic, regenerative, and traceable supply chains are commercially viable at scale, a claim that was genuinely radical when she began making it and is only recently becoming conventional wisdom among major brands.

Worker Rights and Labour Advocacy

No account of leadership in this industry is complete without acknowledging that it employs hundreds of millions of people, the majority of them women in the Global South, earning wages that leave them unable to cover basic living costs. The advocates on this list have dedicated their careers to making this reality visible and to building the legal, institutional, and commercial infrastructure needed to change it.

5. Kalpona Akter

Kalpona Akter grew up working in garment factories in Bangladesh from the age of twelve, an experience that shaped the labour rights organiser she became. She is the founder and executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity, the organisation that was at the centre of the struggle for workers' rights in the Bangladesh garment industry in the aftermath of the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse, in which more than 1,100 workers died. Her voice carries the particular authority of someone who has lived the conditions she is asking the world to change.

Akter has testified before the US Congress, the European Parliament, and the United Nations on the conditions facing garment workers in export-oriented manufacturing countries. Her Worker Rights Consortium publication "I Am a Bangladeshi Garment Worker" brought her testimony to a wider international audience, connecting the abstract policy language of due diligence and corporate accountability directly to what those standards mean for the women sewing clothes for global brands at wages that leave them in poverty.

6. Carry Somers

Carry Somers co-founded Fashion Revolution in 2013 in direct response to the Rana Plaza disaster, and in the decade since she has built it into one of the world's largest fashion activism movements, operating in more than 70 countries. Fashion Revolution is best known for its annual "Who Made My Clothes?" campaign, which mobilises consumers globally to ask brands to disclose the conditions and the workers behind their products, generating millions of social media interactions and genuine brand responses each year.

The Fashion Revolution Fashion Transparency Index, which Somers helped establish as the organisation's flagship research product, ranks 250 of the world's largest fashion brands on their disclosure of supplier information, policies, and social and environmental impact. The 2024 edition found that the average brand transparency score was just 26 percent, a figure Somers has used to ground public discussion of the industry's accountability gap in documented evidence rather than brand claims.

7. Orsola de Castro

Orsola de Castro co-founded Fashion Revolution with Carry Somers and has developed a distinct voice within the sustainability debate that focuses on the cultural and creative dimensions of the crisis, arguing that fashion's real problem is not simply operational but conceptual. The industry, she contends, has confused value with price and quality with novelty, and no supply chain redesign will resolve what is fundamentally a cultural failure. Her contribution is in maintaining that worker rights and environmental sustainability are not separate issues but manifestations of the same underlying logic of disposability.

Her 2021 book "Loved Clothes Last," published by Penguin, makes the case for a relationship with clothing centred on attachment, craft, and longevity rather than trend cycles and disposal. The book argues that the speed at which garments are produced is simultaneously the cause of environmental overextraction and the driver of wages that never have time to rise because costs are always being squeezed to fund the next production cycle.

8. Ineke Zeldenrust

Ineke Zeldenrust has worked for more than two decades at the Clean Clothes Campaign, the global network of organisations dedicated to improving working conditions in the global garment and sportswear industries. Based in the Netherlands, the Clean Clothes Campaign operates in more than 45 countries and has been instrumental in securing compensation for workers affected by factory disasters, influencing binding due diligence legislation, and building solidarity across the global supply chain between consumers, retailers, and manufacturers.

Zeldenrust's specific contribution is in the policy architecture of corporate accountability. Her work on the development of mandatory human rights due diligence legislation, including direct input into the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, represents a shift from voluntary commitments to legal obligations that is one of the most consequential structural changes in the industry's recent history. Her decades of practical experience translating policy into enforcement give her analysis a credibility that purely academic voices cannot replicate.

Supply Chain, Research, and Academic Voices

Understanding how the global apparel supply chain actually works, as opposed to how brands describe it, requires engagement with researchers and analysts who have spent careers mapping its structure, measuring its outcomes, and identifying its fault lines. These voices provide the empirical foundation that serious industry decision-making requires.

9. Edwin Keh

Edwin Keh has served as CEO of the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel since 2012, transforming what was a modestly regarded applied research institute into one of the most innovative sustainability research organisations in the global textile industry. A former global procurement executive at Walmart who also lectures at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Keh brings an unusual combination of supply chain operational experience and scientific research leadership.

HKRITA developed the Green Machine in partnership with the H&M Foundation, the first hydrothermal technology capable of separating polyester-cotton blend textiles into reusable fibres at industrial scale. This breakthrough addressed a problem that had stalled textile recycling for decades: the impossibility of separating blended fabrics without destroying fibre quality. The H&M Foundation and HKRITA subsequently expanded their collaboration under a five-year "Planet First" programme with a total estimated budget of USD 100 million, committing both organisations to open-source sharing of all resulting technologies with the industry.

10. Sheng Lu

Sheng Lu is a professor in the Department of Fashion and Apparel Studies at the University of Delaware and the author of one of the most consistently cited and accessible bodies of research on global apparel trade and sourcing. His FASH455 research platform, followed by thousands of practitioners, academics, and policy professionals globally, translates complex trade data into accessible analysis that helps the industry understand what is happening in sourcing patterns before it shows up in executive strategy meetings or quarterly earnings calls.

His annual benchmarking studies, conducted in partnership with the US Fashion Industry Association, document the structural shifts reshaping where US fashion companies source, why they are diversifying away from China, and what trade policy changes actually mean for supply chain cost and complexity. The 2025 USFIA Sourcing Trends and Outlook Report, which Lu co-authored, documented that the top seven apparel suppliers (China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan) together shipped 78 percent of US apparel imports despite tariff disruptions.

11. Sanchita Saxena

Sanchita Saxena is the executive director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the most rigorous analysts of labour conditions in global supply chains, with a particular focus on the apparel industry. Her work sits at the intersection of economic research, human rights advocacy, and policy development, and she has engaged directly with brands, governments, and multilateral institutions on the design of compliance systems that actually protect workers rather than simply producing documentation.

Saxena has spoken extensively at forums including the Sustainable Fashion Forum on the systemic failure of social auditing as a mechanism for improving worker conditions, arguing that the audit-based compliance model has consistently failed garment workers by creating an industry of verification that generates paperwork without producing safety. Her work helped frame the intellectual case for moving beyond audit to due diligence legislation as the appropriate mechanism for corporate accountability in global supply chains.

12. Pietra Rivoli

Pietra Rivoli is a professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business and the author of "The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy," a book that has shaped how a generation of economists, business leaders, and policy makers understand the structural mechanics of global trade in apparel. First published in 2005 and updated in subsequent editions, the book traces a single cotton T-shirt through its entire economic life, from cotton farming in Texas through manufacturing in China to a secondhand market in Tanzania.

The book, widely assigned in economics and international affairs programmes globally, provides one of the most intellectually honest accounts of how trade in textiles works, resisting both the romantic condemnation of globalisation and the uncritical celebration of free markets. Her analysis of the politics embedded in fibre production, the role of protectionist trade policy in shaping which countries manufacture garments, and the surprising outcomes for workers and consumers at different stages of the value chain has influenced researchers, policymakers, and business leaders across multiple sectors.

Circular Economy and Next-Generation Materials

The transition from a linear to a circular textile economy is one of the most technically, commercially, and logistically complex transformations any industry has ever attempted. The global recycled textile market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 3.6 percent between 2025 and 2033, but reaching the scale required to meaningfully address the industry's waste problem requires investment, infrastructure, and leadership that only a handful of people in this space understand from the inside.

13. Helena Helmersson

Helena Helmersson spent more than fifteen years at H&M Group, serving as CEO from 2020 to 2024, before moving to the role of chairman of the board at Circulose, the Swedish company producing chemical cellulose fibre from 100 percent textile waste. Her tenure at H&M coincided with a period of intense scrutiny of the fast fashion model and she navigated that scrutiny by accelerating the group's investment in sustainability research, circular pilots, and preferred material commitments, including H&M Group's partnership in the Planet First programme with HKRITA.

Circulose signed a supply partnership with Mango in 2025 to integrate its recycled textiles into the brand's supply chain, demonstrating that fibre-to-fibre recycling technology is moving from research pilot to commercial adoption. Helmersson's move to Circulose represents one of the more significant instances of a major industry executive placing their career capital directly behind a recycling technology, a signal of conviction rather than simply endorsement.

14. Tricia Carey

Tricia Carey is a senior executive at Renewcell, the Swedish biomaterials company producing Circulose branded dissolving pulp made entirely from recycled cotton and viscose textiles. Having spent years in business development roles connecting sustainable material innovators with global brands, she has become one of the most credible voices in the industry on the commercial realities of scaling next-generation materials, specifically what it takes to move a novel fibre from pilot plant to supply contract and why so many promising innovations stall between those two stages.

Renewcell is reopening its textile-to-textile pulp mill in late 2026, having secured brand partnerships and supply commitments that demonstrate commercial viability. Carey has spoken at major industry forums including the Sustainable Fashion Forum on the specific challenge of financing industrial-scale textile recycling infrastructure, arguing that the gap between available brand commitments and the capital required for next-generation mills is the central bottleneck preventing the circular economy from scaling.

15. Kate Fletcher

Kate Fletcher is a professor at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the University of the Arts London and one of the most original thinkers in the field on what a genuinely post-growth fashion system might look like. Her book "Craft of Use," based on ten years of research with more than 500 people on their relationships with the clothes they love and keep, documents the practices through which people naturally extend garment life and argues that these practices represent a design resource that the industry consistently ignores in its focus on novel production.

Fletcher's concept of "local wisdom," developed in subsequent research, argues that the most durable forms of sustainability in fashion are embedded in cultural practices rather than technological solutions, and that policy focused exclusively on manufacturing efficiency and material innovation will miss the relational dimensions of fashion's environmental impact. This framing, uncomfortable for an industry that prefers solvable engineering problems to cultural change, has influenced a generation of sustainable fashion researchers.

16. Anna Brismar

Anna Brismar is the founder of Green Strategy in Stockholm and developed the Circular Fashion System standard, one of the field's most practical frameworks for assessing whether a given business model, product design, or material choice genuinely contributes to circularity or merely uses the language of circularity to describe incremental improvement. Her eight-strategy framework, covering longevity design, classic design, fair design, care design, repair design, reuse design, recycled materials, and upcycled materials, has been adopted by brands, researchers, and policy bodies across Europe.

Brismar's specific intellectual contribution is in providing a vocabulary and assessment methodology rigorous enough to distinguish genuine circular innovation from greenwashing, at a time when "circular" had become one of the most abused terms in fashion sustainability discourse. Her work on the Green Strategy blog has made this thinking accessible to practitioners rather than locking it behind consultancy fees, giving her framework genuine reach across a fragmented industry.

Brand Leadership and Operational Transformation

These leaders are navigating the industry's transformation from inside large organisations, making decisions that directly affect millions of workers, the cost of goods for billions of consumers, and the carbon footprint of one of the world's most polluting industries. Their contribution is not just in what they build but in what they say publicly about what that building requires.

17. Ryan Gellert

Ryan Gellert has served as CEO of Patagonia since 2020, inheriting a company whose founder had just transferred ownership to a trust and a non-profit organisation dedicated to fighting climate change, a decision that effectively made all of Patagonia's future profits permanently unavailable for private extraction. His role has been to build the operational and commercial infrastructure that makes this unusual ownership structure viable in practice, while maintaining the company's standing as one of the most credible sustainability voices in the apparel industry.

Under Gellert's leadership, Patagonia has maintained its commitment to donating 1 percent of total sales to environmental organisations through its One Percent for the Planet programme, continues to publish its full supply chain map, and has taken active public positions on political issues ranging from public lands protection to immigration enforcement. His consistency in doing what Patagonia's mission requires even when it is commercially uncomfortable has made him an important reference point for other industry CEOs navigating the tension between brand values and stakeholder pressure.

18. Imran Amed

Imran Amed is the founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion, the digital media and intelligence platform that has become the essential global resource for fashion industry executives, investors, and policy makers. Founded in 2007 from a personal blog, the Business of Fashion now reaches millions of readers globally and co-publishes the annual State of Fashion report with McKinsey and Company, which is the most widely cited benchmark for understanding the global industry's direction.

Amed's contribution to leadership thinking in the industry is in insisting on the quality of analysis. The Business of Fashion created the BoF 500, an annual list of the 500 people shaping the global fashion industry that has become an instrument of industry recognition, and provides the structural analysis of competitive dynamics, sourcing trends, and sustainability progress that helps executives make better decisions. The platform's commitment to following major forces including tariffs, consumer confidence, and sustainability regulation as interlocking rather than separate stories reflects Amed's editorial vision for what genuine industry intelligence looks like.

19. Achim Berg

Achim Berg spent more than a decade as a senior partner at McKinsey and Company leading its global Fashion and Luxury practice, co-authoring the State of Fashion report and becoming one of the most widely cited analysts of the structural economics of the global apparel industry. He is now an independent adviser and investor, a role that gives him the freedom to speak about industry dynamics without the institutional constraints of a consulting firm or a client roster.

Berg's specific intellectual contribution is in quantifying what is at stake in the industry's structural transformation. The State of Fashion 2026 report, which he helped shape during his McKinsey tenure, documented that 76 percent of fashion executives now identify tariff responses as the single most important factor shaping the industry, while only 25 percent anticipate improvement in market conditions. His analytical rigour has given operational leaders a framework for understanding where the industry is actually going rather than where its press releases suggest.

Industry Policy and Trade Architecture

The regulatory and trade policy environment shaping the apparel industry is changing faster than at any point in the last two decades, with implications for manufacturing locations, labour standards, material requirements, and the commercial viability of circular business models. The leaders on this list understand its architecture and are actively working to shape it.

20. Steve Lamar

Steve Lamar is President and CEO of the American Apparel and Footwear Association, the industry's primary trade association in the United States, and has served in that role through one of the most turbulent trade policy periods in recent memory. His annual Executive Summit, themed "Trust and Transformation" in 2025, brought together industry leaders to address the impact of tariff disruptions, with his central argument being that brands needed to focus on smart sourcing and responsible manufacturing rather than simply reacting to short-term duty changes.

The AAFA benchmarking study under Lamar's leadership has documented the industry's ongoing shift away from China as a primary sourcing hub, with China's share of US apparel imports declining from 30 percent in 2019 to 22 percent by 2023. His analysis has helped frame this as a structural shift rather than a cyclical disruption, giving manufacturing executives and investors a more durable framework for sourcing decisions than the day-to-day policy announcements that have dominated the news cycle.

21. Mário Jorge Machado

Mário Jorge Machado has served as President of the Textile and Clothing Association of Portugal since 2019 and was elected President of Euratex, the European Apparel and Textile Confederation, in a recent election. His leadership of Euratex positions him at the centre of European textile policy at a moment when the EU's sustainability regulations are fundamentally reshaping what it means to manufacture textiles and apparel in or for the European market.

Machado holds a degree in Production Engineering from the University of Minho and represents Portugal on the Euratex board, where he has been a consistent advocate for the position that environmental ambition and manufacturing competitiveness are not in conflict, provided that the regulatory framework applies equally to imports and domestic production. His work on the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles and the Digital Product Passport regulation reflects both technical manufacturing expertise and an understanding of European trade politics.

22. Dorothée Baumann-Pauly

Dorothée Baumann-Pauly is the founding director of the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights, associated with the University of Geneva, and one of the world's most respected researchers on the practical implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, particularly as they apply to the global apparel industry. Her research connects the abstract language of international human rights frameworks to the operational decisions that brands and manufacturers make about supplier selection, purchasing practices, and compliance system design.

Her co-edited book "Business and Human Rights: From Principles to Practice," published by Routledge, is used in academic and professional contexts as a foundational text on what corporate due diligence actually looks like in practice. Her specific contribution to the apparel sector is in documenting why auditing-based compliance systems consistently fail workers, and proposing systemic alternatives that address purchasing practices, not only supplier behaviour, as the root cause of labour rights failures.

23. Rubana Huq

Rubana Huq served as the first woman elected president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, a position she held from 2019 to 2021, before becoming Vice-Chancellor of the Asian University for Women in 2022. Her career spans manufacturing leadership, policy advocacy, academic administration, and poetry, making her one of the most multidimensional voices in any serious consideration of leadership in the global garment industry.

As BGMEA president, Huq made a widely praised public appeal to global buyers during the COVID-19 pandemic to honour existing purchase commitments, preventing mass order cancellations that would have left millions of garment workers without income. The BGMEA under her leadership also partnered with the Asian University for Women to fund higher education for factory workers without reducing their wages, a model that demonstrated how manufacturing associations could invest in worker development while maintaining commercial relationships with international buyers.

Innovation, Technology, and Organisational Transformation

The technological transformation of apparel manufacturing, from AI-powered demand forecasting to 3D design to automated sewing and digital product passports, is creating new categories of leadership challenge. These voices are the most credible guides to what that transformation actually means for organisations trying to navigate it from the inside.

24. Tensie Whelan

Tensie Whelan is the founding director of the Center for Sustainable Business at NYU Stern School of Business, where she developed the Return on Sustainability Investment methodology, known as ROSI, which provides organisations with a framework for measuring the financial returns on specific sustainability investments. The methodology has been applied across multiple industries including apparel and retail, generating some of the most rigorous evidence available on whether sustainability investments actually deliver positive financial outcomes or simply reduce regulatory risk.

Her specific contribution to the industry is in making the business case for sustainability without resorting to the vague claims about brand value and consumer preference that typically substitute for evidence. The ROSI framework, documented in the 2023 publication "Sustainable Business Strategy" co-authored with Elyse Douglas, has been adopted by brands, investors, and consultancies as a tool for quantifying what was previously treated as qualitative benefit.

25. Raz Godelnik

Raz Godelnik is an associate professor at Parsons School of Design in New York, where he works at the intersection of business strategy, sustainability, and responsible innovation. His research on the limitations of the prevailing corporate sustainability model, which he argues is structurally incapable of delivering the scale of change the industry needs, has made him a productive critic of the incremental approach that most brand sustainability programmes represent in practice.

His 2021 book "Rethinking Corporate Sustainability in the Era of Climate Crisis" argues that the fundamental problem is not that companies are not trying hard enough but that the metrics, incentives, and timeframes of corporate sustainability programmes are incompatible with the pace and scale of change required by the climate science. For apparel industry leaders who want to understand why their sustainability efforts feel inadequate even when they are working hard, Godelnik provides the structural diagnosis rather than a list of incremental improvements.

26. Matteo Ward

Matteo Ward is the co-founder and CEO of WRÅD, an organisation based in Milan working at the intersection of fashion industry transformation, circular design methodology, and educational innovation. Ward is one of the most energetic advocates in the European fashion industry for the application of design thinking to systemic change, arguing that the industry's sustainability problem is fundamentally a design problem rather than an engineering problem or a regulatory compliance exercise.

His TEDx talk "How Your T-Shirt Can Make A Difference" has been widely viewed and has brought his thinking about fashion's structural incentives to audiences well beyond the industry itself. WRÅD has collaborated with brands, universities, and policy bodies across Europe on developing circular design frameworks that embed sustainability into the design process rather than adding it as a downstream consideration in sourcing or production.

27. Patrick Duffy

Patrick Duffy is the founder of the Global Fashion Exchange, one of the world's largest clothing swap initiatives, operating across more than 60 cities globally, and has become one of the most practical advocates for circular fashion as a lived behaviour rather than a theoretical framework. Based between Australia and the United States, he has used the swap events he organises as research platforms to understand how consumers actually relate to textile circularity when it is made accessible, convenient, and socially engaging.

Duffy's specific contribution is in bridging the gap between circular economy theory and consumer behaviour at scale. His practical experience organising events at which thousands of people exchange clothing has produced insights into what actually motivates behaviour change that are not available from supply chain research or brand sustainability reporting, and he shares those insights consistently through speaking and content creation on platforms including LinkedIn.

Academic Research and Educational Leadership

These academics are producing the research that the industry's best decisions are eventually based on, even if the lag between research and practice remains one of the industry's most persistent problems. Their work provides the empirical foundation and the conceptual vocabulary that serious change in the industry requires.

28. Kirsi Niinimäki

Kirsi Niinimäki is a professor of fashion research at Aalto University in Helsinki and one of the most internationally cited researchers on sustainable fashion, consumer behaviour, and the environmental impact of the apparel industry. Her research spans the full lifecycle of garments, from the conditions under which natural fibres are grown to the dynamics of post-consumer textile waste, and consistently provides quantified, peer-reviewed evidence for claims that are frequently made in the industry without supporting data.

Her 2020 paper "The Environmental Price of Fast Fashion," published in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment with Greg Peters, Hanna Dahlbo, and other co-authors, is one of the most cited empirical analyses of the industry's full environmental impact. The paper estimated that the fashion industry accounts for between 2 and 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a range that reflects genuine uncertainty in the measurement methodology and that Niinimäki was among the first to document honestly rather than paper over with a single, more quotable number.

29. Subramanian Senthilkannan Muthu

Subramanian Senthilkannan Muthu, widely known as S. S. Muthu, is Head of Sustainability at SGS Hong Kong and one of the most prolific researchers and authors in the field of textile and apparel sustainability, having authored or edited more than thirty books on topics ranging from sustainability assessment to circular economy to chemical management in the textile supply chain. His work is used extensively in academic and professional training contexts across Asia and Europe.

His book "Assessing the Environmental Impact of Textiles and the Clothing Supply Chain," published through Woodhead Publishing, remains one of the foundational texts for practitioners trying to understand how to measure the full lifecycle environmental impact of a garment from fibre extraction through disposal. His output consistently bridges the gap between academic research and industry application more effectively than almost any other researcher in the field.

30. Michael Sadowski

Michael Sadowski is a senior director at BSR, Business for Social Responsibility, one of the world's leading sustainability advisory organisations, where his work focuses on sustainable supply chains and the apparel sector. BSR has worked with many of the world's largest fashion brands on developing sustainability strategies, conducting supply chain mapping, and building capacity for responsible sourcing across Asia and other major manufacturing regions.

His specific contribution is in the practical architecture of supplier engagement: how brands can move beyond audit compliance to genuine capability building with manufacturers, and what it actually takes to improve labour standards and environmental performance at the factory level rather than simply documenting that they need improvement. BSR's annual state of responsible sourcing analysis, to which Sadowski has contributed, is one of the most practical assessments of what is working in industry sustainability programmes and what is not.

Journalism, Advocacy, and Public Communication

The public understanding of fashion's systemic problems that makes regulatory change politically viable does not emerge from academic papers or industry reports alone. It emerges from writers and communicators who can translate complex supply chain dynamics into stories that reach and change the thinking of general audiences. These are among the most effective communicators in the field.

31. Dana Thomas

Dana Thomas is a journalist and author whose work sits at the intersection of fashion industry investigation and narrative non-fiction, reaching audiences that academic research rarely does. Her 2019 book "Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes" is one of the most comprehensive journalistic investigations of the apparel industry's operating model, interviewing hundreds of people across the supply chain to document how speed, cost pressure, and consumer demand have created the conditions the industry is now trying to reverse.

Thomas has written extensively for the New York Times, the New Yorker, and other major publications on fashion sustainability and supply chain transparency. Her specific contribution is in making the industry's dynamics legible to a general audience without sacrificing accuracy, a combination that is rarer than it sounds and that has helped build the public understanding of fashion's systemic problems that makes legislative change politically viable at the state and national level.

32. Clare Press

Clare Press is a Melbourne-based journalist, author, and podcast host who has spent more than a decade making sustainable fashion accessible to the Australian and global mainstream. Her podcast Wardrobe Crisis, which has reached listeners in more than 150 countries, and her books including "Wardrobe Crisis: How We Went from Sunday Best to Fast Fashion" and "Rise and Resist" have brought sustainability thinking to audiences who were not previously engaged with the formal discourse of the field.

Press was named the world's first Vogue Sustainability Editor in 2019 at Vogue Australia, a role that reflected both her expertise and the publication's recognition that sustainability had moved from niche to mainstream in the conversations its readers were having about fashion. Her specific contribution is in popularisation, the often undervalued work of translating complex systemic problems into stories that change how ordinary people think about their relationship with clothing and with the industry that produces it.

Emerging Voices and Regional Manufacturing Perspectives

These leaders represent geographies and institutional perspectives that are underrepresented in most global conversations about textile and apparel leadership, and whose inclusion reflects the reality of where this industry operates and where its future is being shaped. The Global South produces the vast majority of the world's garments, and the voices of those closest to that production deserve prominence in any serious account of who is leading the industry's transformation.

33. Faruque Hassan

Faruque Hassan is the President of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, leading the trade body that represents manufacturers responsible for approximately USD 47 billion in annual ready-made garment exports, making Bangladesh the world's second largest apparel exporter. Hassan has served as BGMEA president through a period of intense geopolitical and regulatory change, navigating the dual pressure of rising labour standards expectations from Western buyers and cost competition from other Asian manufacturing countries.

Under Hassan's leadership, the BGMEA hosted the 2024 Training of Trainers programme on circularity principles in partnership with Circle Economy and the Bangladesh University of Textiles, a concrete step toward building circular economy capacity inside the world's most important garment manufacturing country. His hosting of US Trade Representative delegations in 2025 to discuss workers' rights and market access signals an active engagement with the policy architecture that will shape Bangladesh's competitive position over the next decade.

34. Randi Marshall

Randi Marshall serves as Regional Head of Sustainability and Public Affairs for the Americas at H&M Group, one of the world's largest fast fashion companies, and has become one of the more thoughtful voices on the intersection of regulatory compliance, sustainability strategy, and political advocacy in the apparel industry. Her work spans the full range of issues that the largest global brands face: Extended Producer Responsibility programs, supply chain decarbonisation, worker rights standards, and the translation of global sustainability commitments into specific regional market requirements.

At the American Apparel and Footwear Association's 2025 executive summit, Marshall spoke on EPR readiness and the California textile recycling program, encouraging industry leaders to see Extended Producer Responsibility not as a compliance burden but as a structural opportunity to build the circular infrastructure that the industry will eventually require regardless of regulatory mandate. Her combination of corporate sustainability leadership and public policy advocacy represents the kind of insider-outsider voice that is most effective at moving large organisations.

35. Jonno White

The people on this list are the thinkers who are shaping how the textiles and apparel manufacturing industry understands itself, its responsibilities, and its future. Jonno White is the person you bring in when your leadership team is ready to act on what they are saying, to build the team culture, have the difficult conversations, align around a direction, and lead the change the industry demands rather than simply reading about it. As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally), and experienced leadership consultant who has worked with organisations across Australia, the UK, the USA, Canada, Singapore, and more, Jonno brings a practical framework for turning insight into organisational action.

His Working Genius facilitation, DISC workshops, and executive offsite design help manufacturing and apparel leadership teams understand why they communicate the way they do, where their energy naturally flows, and what kinds of conflict are getting in the way of decisions that everyone knows need to be made. Jonno delivers keynotes, workshops, and facilitation sessions globally, and many organisations find that international travel is far more affordable than they expect. To discuss how Jonno might work with your leadership team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several people were seriously considered for this list but did not make the final 35. Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, was considered for his foundational contribution to the idea of environmentally responsible apparel manufacturing, but at 86 years old he has largely stepped back from public engagement and the decision to transfer Patagonia's ownership to a climate trust, while historically significant, is better captured through the current CEO Ryan Gellert. Sourcing Journal editor-in-chief Peter Sadera was considered for his role in shaping industry trade coverage but his platform is primarily editorial rather than thought leadership in the sense this list applies.

Rick Relinger, Chief Sustainability Officer at PVH Corp, was a strong candidate given PVH's Sustainable Supply Chain Finance Program, one of the industry's most sophisticated supply chain sustainability mechanisms. He was not included primarily because his public output on LinkedIn and other platforms has been less consistent than others at similar levels of institutional leadership. Julia Hughes of the US Fashion Industry Association was also considered and her annual benchmarking work in partnership with Sheng Lu is exceptional, but Sheng Lu's broader research output gave him the stronger claim to the academic research category. Achim Berg was included over several other McKinsey fashion analysts because his transition to an independent role gives him the freedom to speak about industry dynamics that is constrained for those still inside large consulting firms.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Engaging With Thought Leadership in This Space

The most common mistake leaders in the textiles and apparel industry make when engaging with thought leadership is treating it as an endorsement exercise rather than an intellectual one. Following the voices on this list because they say reassuring things about the direction the industry is heading misses the point. The value of genuine thought leadership in this space is precisely that the most credible voices are consistently saying uncomfortable things about the gap between what the industry claims and what the data shows. If the thought leadership you are consuming is consistently confirming what you already believe, you are probably not reading the right people.

A second mistake is conflating activism with analysis. The worker rights advocates on this list, Kalpona Akter, Carry Somers, Ineke Zeldenrust, are not making arguments that should be engaged with only if you find them politically sympathetic. They are making arguments grounded in documented evidence about what is happening to people in the supply chain, and those arguments have direct implications for risk management, regulatory compliance, and brand equity. The brands that treated these voices as peripheral activist noise in 2010 spent the following decade managing crises that those voices had predicted.

A third mistake is consuming thought leadership as a substitute for operational change. Reading Maxine Bédat's analysis of why fashion companies' sustainability pledges are structurally unenforceable is valuable. Acting on it, by changing purchasing practices, investing in supply chain mapping, or supporting legislative accountability mechanisms, is where the value is actually realised. The leaders who most effectively use the thinking on this list are those who have built systems inside their organisations for turning insight into decision, and for holding themselves accountable to the commitments they make in response.

A fourth mistake is underestimating the leadership dimension of this transformation. Sustainability is ultimately a people challenge as much as a technical one. The most rigorous circular economy strategy will underdeliver if the leadership team cannot have difficult conversations about trade-offs, align across functions with competing priorities, or sustain change through the resistance that every significant operational transformation produces. For help building those leadership capabilities inside your apparel or manufacturing organisation, Jonno White delivers keynotes and facilitation sessions that give leadership teams the tools they need to translate good ideas into sustained action. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Implementation Guide: Building Your Thought Leadership Practice in This Space

Start by identifying three to five people from this list whose disciplinary focus maps most directly to the strategic challenges your organisation faces right now. If you are navigating regulatory complexity in the EU, begin with Mário Jorge Machado on European textile policy and Kate Fletcher on circular design principles. If your most urgent challenge is worker rights and supply chain due diligence, prioritise Dorothée Baumann-Pauly, Ineke Zeldenrust, and Sanchita Saxena. If you are trying to understand where the circular economy transition is actually heading commercially, Edwin Keh, Tricia Carey, and Helena Helmersson will give you the most grounded picture.

Follow each of your chosen five on LinkedIn and set aside twenty minutes each week to engage actively with their content rather than simply consuming it. The distinction matters. Reading a post confirms what you already know. Writing a comment, sharing to your own network, or using what you read to frame a conversation with your team turns passive consumption into active learning. People like Maxine Bédat, Sheng Lu, Anna Brismar, and Clare Press are consistently publishing analysis that is worth engaging with publicly, and doing so builds your own understanding of what is actually happening in the industry more effectively than internal briefings alone.

Within three months, read at least one book from the authors on this list. The options are extensive: Bédat's "Unraveled," Rivoli's "The Travels of a T-Shirt," Thomas's "Fashionopolis," de Castro's "Loved Clothes Last," Fletcher's "Craft of Use." The book is where the full argument lives. The LinkedIn post or conference talk is a pointer to the argument, not the argument itself. For organisations that want to develop a genuinely informed leadership team in this space, a structured reading programme built around this list is one of the highest-leverage investments available.

Once you have worked with two or three months of consistent engagement, consider how to apply what you have learned to your team rather than keeping it as personal professional development. The leaders who generate the highest leverage from thought leadership are those who bring the best ideas to their leadership teams and create structured opportunities to experiment with them. To build that team capacity, whether through Working Genius facilitation, DISC communication workshops, or executive offsite design, Jonno White works with organisations across the apparel, manufacturing, and corporate sectors globally. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss what your team needs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes someone a genuine thought leader in textiles and apparel rather than just a senior executive?

Genuine thought leadership in this space is demonstrated by the quality and independence of ideas rather than by title or company size. A thought leader generates original frameworks, asks uncomfortable questions, publishes in peer-reviewed journals or widely read independent platforms, and is willing to say things that are inconvenient for the industry or for their employer. Executives who primarily communicate through press releases and earnings calls, however impressive their track records, are not thought leaders in the meaningful sense. The people on this list earn the designation through the specificity of their public contribution to how the industry understands itself.

How was this list compiled and what criteria were used?

The selection criteria prioritised genuine intellectual contribution to public discourse, geographic and disciplinary diversity, and active engagement with the field in 2025 and 2026 rather than legacy reputation alone. No single country represents more than 35 percent of the list. The disciplinary spread covers manufacturing innovation, sustainability policy, worker rights advocacy, supply chain research, circular economy, brand leadership, journalism, and academic research. Gender balance was an explicit criterion, with women making up more than half the list. Credentials, demonstrated impact on how the field has evolved, and the quality of each person's contribution to public thinking were the standards applied throughout.

What are the most important trends in leadership in textiles and apparel manufacturing right now?

Four structural trends are shaping leadership in the industry most significantly. First, the move from voluntary sustainability commitments to mandatory regulatory compliance, driven by the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the Digital Product Passport, and Extended Producer Responsibility programs, is forcing organisations to operationalise what was previously aspirational. Second, the tariff disruptions of 2025 documented in the BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion 2026 are reshaping sourcing strategies faster than most brands planned for. Third, the commercial scaling of textile recycling technologies, represented by companies like Circulose and Renewcell, is beginning to make circular supply chains technically and commercially viable. Fourth, the accountability gap between stated commitments and measurable progress, documented annually by Textile Exchange and New Standard Institute, is becoming increasingly visible to both regulators and investors.

Can I hire someone to facilitate leadership workshops or sessions for my apparel or manufacturing team?

Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally, works with leadership teams across manufacturing, apparel, corporate, and non-profit sectors to build team alignment, communication, and the cultural conditions required for sustained transformation. His workshops cover Working Genius team assessment, DISC communication styles, executive offsite facilitation, and keynote presentations tailored to manufacturing and industrial leadership audiences. Organisations consistently find that international travel costs less than expected, and Jonno has delivered sessions across Australia, the UK, the USA, Canada, Singapore, and more. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore what your team needs.

What books should I read to understand leadership in the textiles and apparel industry?

Several books from people on this list provide the strongest foundation. Maxine Bédat's "Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment" is the most accessible and rigorous entry point to understanding the supply chain's human and environmental dimensions. Pietra Rivoli's "The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy" remains the clearest account of how global trade in textiles actually works. Dana Thomas's "Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes" is the most journalistically comprehensive investigation of the industry's operating model. Kate Fletcher's "Craft of Use" addresses the relational dimensions of sustainability that production-focused accounts miss. Orsola de Castro's "Loved Clothes Last" makes the cultural case for transformation most eloquently. Any two of these read consecutively will give a leadership team a more grounded understanding of the industry's systemic challenges than most industry conferences deliver.

What is the difference between thought leaders who focus on sustainability and those who focus on supply chain?

The distinction is disciplinary rather than ideological, and at the most sophisticated level it disappears entirely. Sustainability-focused thought leaders like Maxine Bédat and Ashley Gill focus on the environmental and social impact of production choices, asking what the industry should be doing differently. Supply chain-focused voices like Sheng Lu and Achim Berg focus on the structural economics of how the industry actually operates, asking why it behaves as it does. The most valuable thought leaders in the space, people like Edwin Keh, Dorothée Baumann-Pauly, and Carry Somers, operate across both questions simultaneously, recognising that you cannot answer "what should we do differently" without first understanding "why the current system works the way it does."

Final Thoughts

The textiles and apparel manufacturing industry is at an inflection point that the people on this list have been preparing for, in some cases, for more than two decades. The conditions that made the current model possible, cheap labour, lax environmental regulation, consumer indifference to supply chain conditions, and the absence of binding accountability mechanisms, are changing simultaneously. The organisations that navigate this transition well will be those that engaged with the right thinking early enough to build the systems, culture, and capabilities that the new environment requires.

What unites the 35 people on this list is a refusal to accept the industry's operating model as natural or inevitable. Maxine Bédat traces a pair of jeans to expose the human and environmental costs that conventional reporting conceals. Edwin Keh builds recycling infrastructure that demonstrates commercially viable circularity. Kalpona Akter testifies before parliaments about what living wages would actually mean for workers in Bangladesh. Clare Press makes sustainability legible and engaging for mainstream audiences who will never read an industry sustainability report. Each contribution is different in method and in reach, but they all share the conviction that the industry that exists today is not the industry that has to exist tomorrow.

The most important thing a leader in this space can do with this list is not to use it as a reading list but to use it as a question generator. What are the people closest to this problem saying that your organisation is not yet taking seriously? Where is the gap between the commitments you have made and the data that your supply chain is actually producing? What structural change are the worker rights advocates describing that your purchasing practices are inadvertently making impossible? These are the questions that reading across this list will surface, and they are the questions that distinguish organisations that will lead the transition from those that will manage it reactively.

If you lead a team inside an apparel or manufacturing organisation and want to translate the ideas these thinkers champion into practical cultural change, working practices, and team alignment, Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally, available at https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, delivers keynotes and workshops for leadership teams globally. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For further reading: 'Manufacturing Leadership Facilitators USA' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/manufacturing-leadership-facilitators-usa.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read

If you found this guide valuable, you may also enjoy reading about the best leadership speakers for manufacturing. Here is how that article begins:

The manufacturing sector has never needed stronger leadership more urgently than it does right now. Automation is reshaping the workforce. Supply chain disruptions have exposed the fragility of systems built for efficiency at the expense of resilience. The pressure to decarbonise is creating both enormous capital requirements and significant cultural resistance from workforces that have built careers around processes now scheduled for transformation.

Against this backdrop, the speakers, facilitators, and consultants who work with manufacturing leadership teams face a challenge that is genuinely different from corporate consulting in other sectors. They need to understand the operational realities of factory floors, the specific leadership challenges of middle managers and frontline supervisors in industrial settings, and the particular dynamics of organisations where the gap between executive strategy and shop-floor reality is wide and consequential.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/50-best-leadership-speakers-for-manufacturing-2026