The clothes you're wearing have travelled a remarkable distance before reaching your wardrobe.

A typical garment may spend months moving through a global network of farms, mills, factories, suppliers, logistics providers and retailers. Raw materials are sourced in one country, processed in another, assembled somewhere else and shipped across continents before arriving in stores. What begins as simple clothing design often passes through dozens of hands before it reaches the customer.

Fashion is a $1.7 trillion industry built on supply chains designed for speed, flexibility and low costs. Those same qualities have helped drive growth and keep prices down, but they can also create vulnerabilities when conditions change. As trade tensions, tariffs, climate impacts and geopolitical uncertainty increase, supply chains that appear highly efficient can become increasingly exposed to disruption.

Environmental impacts often dominate sustainability discussions, but many of the industry's biggest challenges are social: poor working conditions, labour rights abuses, weak worker protections and the lack of meaningful oversight across complex supplier networks. When pressure enters the system, those risks are often borne by the workers with the least power to influence the outcome.

In this week’s episode, Giulia Bottaro discusses what this means for fashion’s future with Áine Clarke, head labour rights in supply chains & investor strategy at the Business and Human Rights Centre.

Their conversation explores why modern fashion supply chains have become increasingly vulnerable, how business models built around speed and flexibility can amplify risk during periods of disruption, and why workers often bear the greatest costs when commercial pressures move through the supply chain.

The discussion also challenges the common assumption that transparency alone is enough. Knowing where risks exist is only the first step: without changes to purchasing practices, stronger worker protections and meaningful accountability, transparency risks becoming little more than a reporting exercise.

As sustainability increasingly becomes a conversation about resilience, this episode asks a fundamental question: who ultimately bears the cost when fashion's supply chains come under pressure?

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For years, sustainability in fashion has often been discussed almost as a parallel conversation to the business itself. Some brands publish reports, set targets and talk about responsibility, while others turn their sustainability credentials into a marketing tool.

Yet, at the corporate level, many of the real decisions are still being driven by the old metrics of margins, supply chains and growth – but that's beginning to change.

Behind the scenes, there is a vast global industrial system increasingly exposed to climate volatility, energy prices, material shortages and carbon regulation. And its stakeholders have realised that sustainability is crucial to competitiveness: climate change can affect energy prices, raw materials and supply stability.

In this episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia speaks to Kristina Elinder Liljas, senior director for sustainable finance and engagement at the Apparel Impact Institute (AII), about how climate volatility is set to upend many companies' forward strategies within the next five years. From supply chain disruption and rising sourcing costs to carbon pricing and energy volatility, they explore why sustainability is shifting from a reporting exercise or a worthy side conversation to a core business issue.

In its Cost of Inaction report, the AII looks at the literal price tag of climate risk in fashion. The findings are striking, and the message is clear: inaction may just be the most expensive strategy on the board.

For an industry built on speed, scale, and razor-thin margins, sustainability is a matter of corporate survival.

This is week one of our four-part fashion arc. Over the next month, we are tearing down the curtain on global supply chains to see how this industry impacts people, the planet, and the bottom line.

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AI is no longer just a technology issue, it’s starting to reshape how whole systems operate. Yet we’re not paying enough attention to that yet: most of the focus on AI is on what it can do, with individuals and organisations alike rushing to implement this new technology.

But AI capability is advancing extremely quickly, while the systems around it — governance and regulation, infrastructure, organisational learning, labour markets, productivity models and even public understanding — are struggling to adapt at the same pace.

And all of this is unfolding inside a world already dealing with climate disruption, geopolitical instability, infrastructure stress, declining institutional trust and widening inequality.

In this week’s episode, the final in our AI arc, we explore what happens when AI becomes embedded inside the systems that underpin everyday economic and social life. Co-hosts Felicia Jackson and Giulia Bottaro discuss the implications for infrastructure, institutions, labour, energy, trust and governance — and ask whether societies and economies are prepared for the scale of change we now face.

The conversation ranges over stories about AI going rogue, the capability vs governance gap, the physical impacts of something that is still perceived by many as intangible, how AI promises the democratisation of technology while fuelling inequality, and what companies are doing to address these challenges.

For businesses, the questions are becoming increasingly operational: what governance, oversight and accountability systems need to exist once AI becomes embedded inside day-to-day decision-making? It’s worth asking: is your business prepared for what happens once AI starts influencing real operational decisions?

The arc on AI is now complete! You can find the rest of the episodes (alongside our entire catalogue) here.

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