• She started the conversation about sustainable fashion in China – now she’s helping to effect change from the top down
• Shaway Yeh believes that China is playing a leading role in promoting sustainability in fashion

Like many editors working in luxury publishing, Shaway Yeh began to feel disillusioned with the direction the fashion industry was taking. For 12 years, Yeh was the editorial director of Modern Weekly, one of China’s most influential lifestyle magazines.
Her aha moment happened four years ago, when she took part in a panel discussion at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, a sustainability-focused conference in Denmark.
“I saw so many important people talking about sustainability and, like many others who start learning about it, I was quite shocked because there were so many things I didn’t know about fashion and the negative impact it has. So it was like a wake-up call,” says Taiwan-born Yeh when we meet her in Shanghai, where she has lived for almost two decades.
After the summit, Yeh decided to assign an editor a weekly column on fashion and sustainability, back when almost nobody – especially in China – was paying attention to the impact of fashion on the environment.
Shaway Yeh (left, founder of YehYehYeh) moderates a talk with Burak Cakmak, dean of fashion at Parsons School of Design, and Katrin Ley, managing director, Fashion for Good.
Shaway Yeh (left, founder of YehYehYeh) moderates a talk with Burak Cakmak, dean of fashion at Parsons School of Design, and Katrin Ley, managing director, Fashion for Good.
When Yeh left Modern Weekly two years ago, she realised that if she really wanted to make a difference, she had to learn more about a complex issue like sustainability.
Yeh, whose inquisitive nature and interest in social issues have always guided her career, went to Boston in the United States and enrolled in a course in corporate sustainability and innovation at Harvard Business School, where one of the first things she learned was how difficult it is to reduce one’s environmental footprint.