The Words We're Giving Up

A note on honesty, a new European law, and why you'll see us say less — and prove more.

This September, a word starts disappearing from fashion. Sustainable. Used on its own, with nothing behind it, it becomes something a brand can no longer say across Europe — and, honestly, good.

From 27 September 2026, a new EU rule — the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, if you like the full name — says a brand may only call something good for the planet if it can prove it: specifically, and verified by someone independent. Vague is over. Evidence is in.

We're not waiting to be told. We've already changed our language, and gladly — because radical transparency was never a campaign for us. It's the reason the brand exists.

So here is what shifts, and what never will.

We're retiring the soft words. “Sustainable,” “conscious,” “green” — worn smooth from everyone using them for everything. You'll see us reach for the specific fact instead: the fabric, the maker, the certificate, the cut.

Organic cotton, only when we can prove it. We call a piece GOTS-certified organic only when we hold the certificate for that exact cloth. Where we don't, we tell you plainly that it's conventional cotton — no softening, no sleight of hand. Most brands will never show you that line. We'd rather you saw it.

Why would a fabric not have a certificate? Fair question — and the answer says more about how certification works than about the cloth. A GOTS Transaction Certificate follows one specific batch of fabric through the supply chain, and it must be bought — paperwork, audit and all — at the moment the fabric is. Certificates are priced for industry volumes: when we order small, and we always order small, a mill may simply not issue one for our few hundred metres. Some of our makers are small independent workshops that sew with organic cloth but cannot afford certification themselves — and without their own certificate, they cannot pass one on. Some suppliers sold us fabric as organic and never delivered the certificate they promised; those fabrics we have flagged to our certifier, and we now list them as conventional cotton, whatever the invoice said. And some of our favourite fibres cannot be certified at all: Weganool, spun with wild calotropis, is not in the GOTS fibre catalogue yet — no listing, no certificate, however carefully it is made.

Our archive, honestly labelled. Then there is our history. Before 2019 — before Infantium Victoria became a GOTS-certified company — we sourced fabrics bought and documented as organic, but we did not buy transaction certificates with them; back then we did not yet hold the certification that would let us use them. Much of our archive and our deadstock cloth comes from those years. Under the rule we hold ourselves to now, no certificate means no claim — so those pieces say “cotton,” plainly, even where the paperwork of the purchase tells a warmer story. And when we do buy cotton without papers, we choose it with the same care and the same questions as everything else; we simply don't borrow words for it. We'd rather under-claim than over-promise. That is the whole point.

Vegan, plant-based, fur-free — still true, still ours. But these are matters of compassion, not carbon. We name them as what they are: how we treat animals and people — never a stand-in for an environmental promise we haven't earned.

One badge fewer. The PETA-Approved Vegan logo is leaving our European pages — not because anything changed in how we make clothes, but because the label's own licence isn't written for the EU's new rules. The fact stays, louder than ever: every piece we make is vegan, without any animal-derived materials. We simply say it in our own words now, and the proof sits in the materials list of every product.

A word you won't see: carbon-neutral. Offsetting — paying elsewhere for emissions made here — is exactly the kind of claim the new law retires, and we agree with the retirement. Your parcels travel with DHL's GoGreen Plus programme, which replaces fossil fuel with renewable alternatives inside its own delivery network and credits the reduction to our shipments. A smaller footprint made in the chain, not bought outside it.

And one thing we can now say with a straight face, because there's a mechanism behind it: circular. Outgrown pieces come home to Hannover, get repaired where needed, and start again through our Preloved shop — and you take 20% off your next order for sending them. The whole loop is written down, address and all, on our new circularity page.

None of this makes us less. It makes us legible. You'll always be able to trace what we say back to something true — a fabric, a certificate, a maker with a name.

We'd rather show you the seams than sell you a feeling. If we can't prove it, we won't say it. That was the promise on day one, and a new law only makes us more certain of it.

Dress daringly. Raise compassionately. And trust that when we tell you something, we can stand behind every word.

— Julia