Reformation’s silk rethink shows how better data can change a sustainability strategy.
The Los Angeles-based brand is using a new life cycle analysis (LCA) of silk to justify a pragmatic shift in its climate strategy: moving away from conventional silk toward organic alternatives.
Reformation assembled a coalition of brands—including Dôen, Eileen Fisher, Everlane and Zimmermann—to co-fund the study, aiming to generate better primary data on a fiber that represents a small share of global use but plays an outsized role in premium and luxury supply chains.
The findings suggest silk’s impacts are concentrated earlier in the supply chain than previously assumed—particularly in mulberry cultivation and silkworm rearing. Fertilizer use, the report notes, is the primary driver of emissions—underscoring how much of silk’s footprint is determined upstream.
Quick context: Organic silk reduces carbon emissions by roughly 30 percent and uses about 80 percent less water than the MSI benchmark. While silk accounts for just 0.1 percent of global fiber use, it represents roughly 3-4 percent of Reformation’s sourcing—and remains both its most water-intensive and second-most carbon-intensive material.
But the more consequential takeaway may be less about silk itself than the data behind it.
“We realized that the underlying data for silk was also very outdated and, frankly, not representative of what we were sourcing,” said Kathleen Talbot, Reformation’s chief sustainability officer and vice president of operations.
The LCA, which tracks one kilogram (just over 2 pounds) of undyed raw silk yarn in China from mulberry cultivation through reeling. It was designed to replace generic industry averages with primary, supplier-specific data. In doing so, it exposed a gap between strategy and reality.
Silk has been one of Reformation’s most difficult materials to address. Materials account for roughly two-thirds of a product’s footprint and remain the company’s largest emissions lever. Early on, the brand set a goal to eliminate conventional cashmere and silk entirely—an aggressive target intended to force progress, even if it proved unrealistic.
Cashmere transitioned relatively quickly, with recycled alternatives cutting emissions by about 55 percent. Silk, by contrast, did not.
Consumer demand increased while viable alternatives lagged. Ultimately, Reformation expanded silk’s share of its fiber mix—from 1.5 percent in 2021 to roughly 3.8 percent in 2025.
“It’s a hard one,” Talbot said. “If you’re looking at it just through the carbon lens, we knew we needed to reduce it. But from a product perspective, it’s an incredible fiber [that] performs so differently than other materials.”
Attempts to replace it exposed the limits of current innovation.
“We couldn’t really find a true like-for-like that wasn’t polyester,” she said.
Rather than force a substitution that compromised quality—or lean more heavily on synthetics—the company began to reconsider its approach. The updated LCA offered a different path: improving silk rather than eliminating it.
“Silk alternatives were definitely slower to develop,” Talbot said. “The customer demand for silk actually grew. So instead of eliminating it, we now use a few more points of silk than when we started.”
If cashmere was a quick win, silk became a reality check.
Reformation found itself caught between growing demand for the fiber and a next-generation materials market that has yet to deliver comparable performance at scale. Instead of phasing silk out, the brand adjusted course—using better data to guide a more incremental strategy.
The shift comes as Reformation closes out its 2020–2025 “Climate Positive” roadmap. Over that period, the company says it sourced 97.5 percent of its fibers from recycled, regenerative or renewable inputs and reduced product carbon intensity by 29 percent. It met its Scope 3 reduction targets while missing its Scope 1 and 2 goals, in part due to business growth and structural constraints.
“Sustainability is full of trade-offs,” Tablot said. “The planet doesn’t need companies to wait for certainty. It needs us to move early, learn fast and raise the bar for what the industry can achieve.”
