The fashion industry’s impact on the environment is undeniable. It contributes to water pollution and climate change, sends enormous amounts of waste to landfills and threatens the health and safety of the people who make clothes and the people who wear them.
Fashion for Good was created to change that.
In 2017, Fashion for Good launched as a global initiative to reimagine how fashion is designed, made, worn and reused.
With an innovation hub in Amsterdam, a startup accelerator in Silicon Valley and a worldwide network of collaborators and changemakers, it demonstrates a better way for the fashion industry to work; a way in which companies, communities and the planet can flourish.
Fashion for Good, and its founding partner C&A Foundation, tasked Pentagram with creating a brand strategy, visual identity and messaging platform that could be compelling enough to unite brands, producers, retailers, suppliers, non-profit organisations, innovators and funders around a shared ambition – and that would be sharp enough to inspire them to act.
Pentagram developed a succinct brand idea that acts as a three-word manifesto for Fashion for Good: ‘Only good fashion.’ Because good fashion at scale is not only possible, it is within reach. And by harnessing the power of innovation, practical action and cross-sector collaboration, Fashion for Good shows that good fashion is more attractive, accessible and affordable than its opposite.
The Fashion for Good brand behaves with daring, style and practicality, expressed by a tone of voice that is brave, wise and accessible. The identity is informed by the brand idea, demanding that ‘good’ should run through all aspects of the fashion industry.
Building on author William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle™ approach to a truly circular apparel industry, Pentagram’s messaging platform articulates a robust definition of ‘good’ fashion across five key areas:
1. Good materials:Safe, healthy and designed for reuse and recycling
Growing, circular, shared and benefiting everyone
3. Good energy:
Renewable and clean
4. Good water:
Clean and available to all
5. Good lives:
Living and working conditions that are just, safe and dignified
These ‘Five Goods’ represent a common vision for a diverse set of stakeholders operating inside and outside the fashion industry. By translating them across Fashion for Good's promotional messaging and visual language, Pentagram created an identity with consistency, coherence and clarity of purpose.
The modern typographic logo designed by Pentagram is a visual manifestation of the brand idea, with the overlapping ‘good’ running through ‘fashion’. The logotype has been adjusted to produce rounded letterforms, born from complete circles, reflecting the circular and sustaining nature of the organisation’s Cradle to Cradle ethos.
The identity provides Fashion for Good with a flexible visual language that can be creatively used to communicate campaigns and align with third-party partnerships. The brandmark’s colourways are flexible, adapting to the space in which it sits and responding empathetically to its partners. The partner’s primary colour runs through the ‘Good’, emphasising their adherence to the initiative’s core value.
By utilising modern colour palettes, consistent layouts and inclusive imagery styles across print and digital applications, the brand guidelines deliver a clear type-led aesthetic that allows plenty of room for expression.
