The Return on Repair: How a 500-Million-Euro Figure Is Reshaping the Economics of the Fashion Industry

Kevin Germanier opened the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen on 6 May with a collection built from unsold stock held across seven LVMH brands. Germanier is a Swiss designer who founded his label in 2018 and has since built an international reputation working exclusively with deadstock fabrics and production surplus, developing Haute Couture silhouettes that have shown alongside the established Paris houses at international presentations. What he showed in Copenhagen was technically precise, formally rigorous, assembled from material sitting in LVMH warehouses. It was the first time the group had made its surplus inventory available to an external designer for public presentation at this scale.

“Presenting this show at the Global Fashion Summit is a way of demonstrating that circularity can be at the heart of the creative process. Working with existing pieces allows us to reveal the richness of materials and craftsmanship, while reimagining the way we create,” Kévin Germanier, Artistic Director and Founder of Maison GERMANIER. 

Surplus inventory is among the most commercially sensitive information a luxury group holds. The volumes, the styles and the fabric allocations carry detailed evidence of what the market accepted and what it did not, which is why the practice has always been to absorb, redistribute or, in the years before EU legislation banned it, destroy what remained. That LVMH chose in 2026 to open seven brands’ worth of that inventory to an outside designer, and to do so on the opening stage of one of the industry’s most visible annual gatherings, is a disclosure of intent as much as material.

The repair economy in fashion describes the business systems that extend the commercial life of garments through repair, take-back, resale, refill, remanufacturing and textile recycling. In 2026, it is moving from sustainability language into balance sheets, supply chains and customer retention strategies.

The following day, LVMH published the figure that contextualises the gesture. Under Life 360, the group’s internal sustainability and circularity programme that measures product longevity, repair and take-back services across all its brands including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Celine, Fendi, Givenchy and Bulgari, LVMH reported 500 million euros in revenue from repair, refill and take-back services for 2025, covering ten million products restored, refilled or returned. The group presented this for the first time as a revenue line rather than as a sustainability indicator. A sustainability indicator is addressed to external audiences as evidence of responsibility. A revenue line is addressed to internal audiences as evidence of a business working.

What the numbers show

The 500 million euro figure arrives within a precise market context. The global base of luxury consumers has shrunk from a peak of approximately 400 million in 2022 to 330 to 340 million in 2026, a net loss of between 60 and 70 million buyers, according to Bain and Altagamma, the Italian luxury industry association and global management consultancy whose joint annual luxury study is the most widely referenced in the sector. Bain traces approximately 80 percent of the luxury market’s growth between 2019 and 2023 to price increases rather than volume gains. Prices rose without a commensurate deepening of product quality or the depth of the customer relationship. The buyers who left understood the difference.

LVMH’s own results reflect this pressure directly. The group recorded a two percent organic revenue decline across the first half of 2025 and one percent organic growth in Q1 2026, while its share price fell 28 percent in the first quarter alone, the largest single-quarter decline in company history, exceeding the drops recorded during the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic quarter of 2020. Kering, the French luxury group whose brands include Gucci, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, recorded flat organic growth at group level in Q1 2026, with Gucci down eight percent organically in the same period. The primary market, measured by new product sales, is under sustained structural pressure across the sector.

In the same period, the market for extended product life has been expanding with consistency. The global market for clothing and footwear repair reached 5.8 billion dollars in 2025 and is projected to grow at 5.5 percent annually to 9.4 billion dollars by 2034. The global secondhand apparel market is anticipated to reach 53.7 billion dollars in 2026, with an 11.1 percent compound annual growth rate projected through 2036, according to Future Market Insights. The BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion 2026 documents that secondhand sales will grow two to three times faster than first-hand sales between 2025 and 2027, reaching a projected 317 billion dollars by 2028. Branded resale grew 300 percent between 2021 and 2025. Repair, resale and rental models combined are estimated to represent a 700-billion-dollar market by 2030. The global textile recycling market was valued at 6.42 billion dollars in 2025 and is projected to reach 9.23 billion dollars by 2034.

The brands that built the infrastructure earliest

Patagonia, the California-based outdoor clothing company founded in 1973, launched its Worn Wear repair and resale platform in 2013, thirteen years before repair became a regulatory topic in the European Union. The company repairs approximately 17,000 products annually and generates as much as 100 dollars per used jacket sold through its own resale channel. Harvard Business Review research found that an average Patagonia product lasts as long as three comparable items from other brands. In partnership with the United Repair Collective, a collaboration between Patagonia, the Amsterdam-based social enterprise Makers Unite, and the Amsterdam Economic Board, the company operates dedicated repair centres in Amsterdam and London providing business-to-business repair services for brands including Decathlon, Lululemon and Rapha.

Eileen Fisher, the New York-based womenswear label founded in 1984, has operated its Renew remanufacturing programme for two decades, taking back used garments, repairing and reselling them, and publishing annual transparency data on repairs completed. Nudie Jeans, the Swedish denim label founded in 2001, offers free in-store repairs at all its retail locations globally. Tersus Solutions, the Colorado-based logistics company whose clients include Patagonia, The North Face, Arc’teryx, Dr. Martens and Lululemon, reported banner years across those brands in 2025. “With each holiday cycle, we’re seeing the resale category grow,” said Terry Boyle, CEO of Trove, “and each year the promotions have more of the polish and scale of broader retail campaigns.”

Of the 42 major fashion brands tracked by Stand.earth in 2025, 40 now offer some form of resale or repair programme, up from nine brands in 2020. The University of Exeter’s Mapping the Repair Landscape in Fashion report, published in March 2026 as the conclusion of the UK Research and Innovation-funded Future Fibres Network Plus programme, found that repair remains commercially underdeveloped across the industry because brands have not yet resolved the practical and strategic barriers to operating it at scale.

The regulatory architecture

The European Union’s Right to Repair Directive, which came into force in 2024, establishes the legal right of consumers to have products repaired by independent repairers and requires manufacturers to provide access to spare parts and technical information for a defined period after purchase. Across the EU countries within the directive’s initial scope, smartphone repair rates have already risen by 20 percent. France has introduced its Repair Bonus, a direct government reimbursement covering a portion of consumer repair costs. Sweden has reduced VAT on repair services across clothing and textiles. The EU Digital Product Passport, which becomes mandatory for textiles in 2027, will require brands to document the material composition, provenance and repairability of every garment at the point of sale.

The Global Fashion Agenda, the Copenhagen-based non-profit organisation that convenes the Global Fashion Summit and serves as one of the primary international policy coordination bodies for the fashion industry, launched the 2030 Circularity Blueprint at the summit in partnership with ReHubs, the European network whose mandate is to develop the industrial infrastructure for textile-to-textile recycling at scale. The Blueprint sets out a roadmap for transitioning the EU textile ecosystem so that fibres recovered from used garments re-enter the production cycle as new fibre. Less than one percent of fibres are currently recycled fibre-to-fibre globally, according to BCG data documented by The Silent Luxury, against a projected annual textile resource loss of 150 billion dollars.

Europe: From policy to practice

Within Europe, the transition from policy commitment to operational practice is moving at different speeds. The United Kingdom’s resale market is projected to grow at a 9.3 percent compound annual growth rate through 2036, driven by the country’s established charity shop culture, the growth of digital platforms including Depop and Vinted, and the government’s Green Industrial Revolution framework. Germany and the Netherlands have developed the densest networks of brand-operated repair services and government-backed repair cafés. Europe’s textile recycling market generated 1.28 billion dollars in 2025 and is projected to reach 1.34 billion dollars in 2026.

Marine Serre, the French designer who won the LVMH Prize in 2017 and founded her label the following year, has built one of the most rigorous practices in European fashion around upcycled materials and archived textiles. She stepped back from seasonal runway presentations for two consecutive collections to concentrate on what she describes as the slow craft of making clothes. Her FW26 collection, titled “The Grace of Time,” and its Louvre capsule, three pieces assembled from archived Louvre shop T-shirts and souvenir medals cut apart and rebuilt, make the underlying argument at the level of craft: the object that carries evidence of prior life and careful reconstruction accumulates meaning that a new object arrives without.

United States: Scale without mandate

The United States is the world’s largest and most mature resale market, representing roughly 40 percent of global secondhand apparel revenue. Online resale in the US is forecast to grow 16 percent annually, reaching 34 billion dollars by 2027. In 2025, 66 percent of US adults reported shopping secondhand regularly, with 28 percent of Gen Z consumers doing so on a weekly basis. The US textile recycling market is projected to reach 1.02 billion dollars in 2026. The Government Accountability Office has called for coordinated federal action on textile waste, and industry coalitions including American Circular Textiles are pressing for the removal of double taxation on secondhand goods. The BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion 2026 found that fewer than one-third of US fashion industry executives called resale a priority for 2026.

Latin America: Community-rooted infrastructure

Latin America’s textile recycling market reached 770 million dollars in 2025 and is projected to grow to 790 million dollars in 2026, according to Fortune Business Insights, representing just under 12 percent of total global textile recycling revenue. Brazil accounts for the largest share of the regional market, with its textile recycling sector valued at 97.5 million dollars in 2025 and projected to reach 166.8 million dollars by 2034. Across the region, community-based textile recycling programmes represent one of the most documented growth areas, with local cooperatives gathering, sorting and repurposing used textiles in ways that combine environmental function with social impact for underserved communities.

The structural picture across Latin America is complex. Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Peru each restrict or prohibit commercial imports of secondhand clothing, policy decisions that reflect a choice to protect domestic textile production. Chile and other Southern Cone nations are integrating textiles into Extended Producer Responsibility frameworks. A 2026 study published in Springer Nature’s Circular Economy and Sustainability journal, examining Brazilian consumer trends from 2012 to 2022, found that fast fashion-oriented behaviour is forecast to dominate the Brazilian market by 2033 without effective structural interventions, and calls for policy measures that make the circular option economically accessible rather than aspirational.

China: Industrial policy as the mechanism

China’s approach to the repair and circularity economy is driven at the level of industrial planning. The State Council’s 14th Five-Year Plan, covering 2021 to 2025, set a target of achieving a textile waste recycling rate of 25 percent and producing two million tonnes of recycled fibre annually, according to research published in Frontiers in Environmental Science. The 15th Five-Year Plan, covering 2025 to 2030, continues this trajectory with emphasis on green transformation and carbon neutrality goals. China’s textile recycling market is valued at 2.24 billion dollars in 2026, the largest single national market in Asia Pacific. China’s luxury resale market was projected to grow from approximately eight billion dollars in 2020 to 32 billion dollars by 2025, according to iResearch data cited by The Interline, driven by a generational shift among Gen Z and Millennial consumers who account for more than 80 percent of secondhand luxury customers in the country.

Japan: A grammar that predates the legislation

A 2024 study published in ScienceDirect, examining circular economy potential in Japan’s textile and fashion industries and produced for the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation, describes the concept of Mottainai as the cultural foundation beneath Japan’s approach to textile longevity. Mottainai, a term conveying deep regret at any form of waste, has produced a functioning infrastructure for textile circulation in Japan that operates without regulatory mandate: networks of secondhand retail, community exchange events, mending practices embedded in household routines, and the intergenerational transfer of clothing as a standard cultural expectation. The same study describes the kimono as a design object that embodies this logic structurally: cut in straight lines so that when untied it returns to a single piece of fabric, designed from its origin to be disassembled, reused and repurposed across generations. Japan’s secondhand luxury market is projected to grow at a 7.6 percent compound annual growth rate through 2036. The country’s textile recycling market generated 323.8 million dollars in revenue in 2025 and is projected to reach 462.7 million dollars by 2033.

India: Circularity as industrial baseline

In India, the repair and reuse economy has never required a policy framework because it has always been the baseline condition of production. A March 2026 report published in Global Textile Times on the country’s textile recycling sector found that approximately 55 percent of post-consumer textile waste is diverted from landfill through informal collection, sorting and redistribution systems supporting between four and four and a half million livelihoods, the majority held by women from marginalised communities. Nearly 100 percent of spinning sector waste is directly reused within production processes. The Indian textile recycling market is projected to reach 3.5 billion dollars by 2030. India’s G20 Presidency and Mission LiFE, the Lifestyle for the Environment programme adopted by the United Nations Environment Programme as a global framework, reinforce long-term goals that align with the repair economy’s direction.

West and East Africa: Protection as strategy

In West and East Africa, the political response has taken the form of trade policy. Kenya and Tanzania have introduced import taxes on secondhand clothing shipped from Western markets, protective measures for domestic textile manufacturing. A 2024 study published in ScienceDirect on the dynamics of global secondhand clothing trade found that while sub-Saharan African countries benefit from the affordability and employment that secondhand clothing trade creates, the dependency relationship also constrains domestic production investment. In Ghana, kente production, the hand-woven textile tradition with roots in the Asante and Ewe peoples dating to the 17th century, is experiencing documented revival as an international market positioning strategy. Bubu Ogisi, the founder of the Lagos-based label I Am Isigo and one of the most internationally recognised practitioners of a design approach in which repairability is a structural requirement from the earliest design stage, has built a following across Europe and North America among buyers who treat the durability and material honesty of a garment as primary purchasing criteria.

What 500 million euros changes

LVMH’s Life 360 figure is the first time a luxury group of its scale has placed a revenue number on the object that stays. The group’s total revenues run well into the tens of billions, and 500 million euros is a fraction of that. What the figure changes is the terms of the conversation. Repair has been discussed in the fashion industry for the better part of a decade as a loyalty instrument, a regulatory compliance strategy, a sustainability signal, a customer service add-on. The 500 million euro figure positions it as a measurable business line with documented growth, in a market where the primary channel is under sustained pressure.

The BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion 2026 found that fewer than one-third of industry executives called resale a priority for 2026, and that only 7 percent planned to support circular business models in any meaningful way. These figures sit alongside a secondhand market projected to reach 317 billion dollars by 2028. The gap between where executive attention is directed and where consumer spending is moving is the space in which the repair economy will continue to grow.

On 6 May in Copenhagen, Germanier assembled ten million products worth of that growth into Haute Couture silhouettes and placed them on a stage where the industry’s decision-makers were required to look at them. The nails held.