By the time I wrote this one I was a lawyer, blogging in the cracks of a demanding career, and I had stopped wanting more clothes. I wanted fewer, better ones. So I wrote about Cuyana, whose slogan was literally "fewer, better things," the grown-up, fundable version of the scruffy idealism I had loved in 2008.
Cuyana is thriving now, funded and expanding. And there is the quiet vindication of the whole arc: the convictions that bankrupted Nau in 2008, restraint and provenance and buy-better-buy-less, became by the 2020s a business model investors line up to fund. The market caught up to the morality.
But "fewer, better, made responsibly" is now also a legal claim, not just a brand story, and that is the part designers miss. The moment you put it on a label or a landing page, you are making a representation a regulator can test. The FTC Green Guides govern how you can describe "sustainable" and "recycled," and the EU's due diligence directive reaches up the supply chain behind the slogan. The brands that win will not be the ones with the greenest marketing. They will be the ones, like Cuyana, that can actually account for what they say.
