2045: scenarios for the textile and fashion industry: How will the industry look like in 5, 10 and 30 years time? Scenarios offer research-based insights, and potentially can show how realistic a world is, that looks rather quite different from what we're used to. What if Asia become today's Europe? What if we did not buy to own? What if everyone was a maker?
If there is an area of fashion that is truly pushing the boundaries of what is technically and style-wise possible, then it is Haut Couture.
In January 2013 2 pieces among Iris van Harpenr’s 11-piece collection at Voltage show attracted the interested of fashionistas as much as product techies: The first ever wearable dresses created through a 3D printing process.
Overconsumption or ‘simply’ consumption?
Fair resource use, or resource depletion?
Fair share, equal share or acquired share of resources?
Those are questions that pop up when the Planetary Boundaries are being discussed.
“Is Europe living within the limits of our planet?: An assessment of Europe's environmental footprints in relation to planetary boundaries”, published in April 2020 does exactly that: it evaluates and calculates the European performance for planetary boundaries by taking a consumption-based (footprint-based) perspective. This is turn is interesting as it relates environmental pressures to final demands for goods and services.
And the results are ... shall we say: a stark call to action.
Supply chains, as a discipline of expertise, have come out of the hiding and recognise their role in reducing corporate risk. This is notably and specifically the case in fashion and textiles. At the same time, 'design' - not just in the creation room, but in all facets where it impacts the making, delivery and use of a product or service, is increasingly recognised as relevant.
After 10 years in the make, CETI, the European Centre for Innovative Textiles, was finally inaugurated in October 2012. The aim of the research centre is to give the textile industry a platform to research and prototype innovative textiles that can be used in sectors like: Medical, Sport & Leisure, Hygiene, and Protection sectors representing 25% of technical textile manufacturing industry; building and civil engineering that account for 10% of the production; transport making 26% of the market volume (and 15% of the market value) of technical textiles.
The most recent event in the 'Perspectives on Future Sustainable Design' series highlighted the progress made in developing sustainable design approaches. Both, from a theoretical as well as from a systemic point of view. A summary.
The term ‘circular economy’ has recently been – again – converted into a buzz word. To some extent there are a couple of good reasons for that as both common sense as well as the Ellen McArthur foundation's most recent report prove.
Connecting the present and the past, learning and drawing conclusions from either, is and will remain key to creating a more sustainable fashion industry. So far, learning from the past in particular - in the good and in the bad - has been chiefly neglected. A series of thoughts.
The fashion industry, nearly like no other, has gone through dramatic changes in the last 20, 30 years. Indeed it finds itself in the present at a crossroad. Resource scarcity is triggering shifts in business models and supply-chains; waste is the new resource; customers are the sales channel of the future; and legislation is becoming ever more stringent. The fact though is: if looking back at predictions of the 1950 and 1960, or even earlier (physical artefacts not considered), the reality we live in compares best to the predictions that were considered ‘totally crazy’ in their time.
Authentication and traceability backbone solutions have become a key technology for many a brand to prevent not only product forgery, but also to prove truthfulness of on-and-off product claims.
What few realise: product authentication is just one half of a 2-part system (Figure 1) whereby authentication is applied to the product at its point of origin, and a traceability backbone ensures that the product reaches its destination – for example the end consumer – safely and untampered.
Digital tools and IT systems are a great enabler for more data, more stringent channels of how to communicate what the different players in the chain do, and how they do it, over large distances and across operations and organizations.Yet – digital tools are more human than we think they are … because they, in the end, are representatives of the values and the world view of those that have built them.
Japan – for multiple reasons, not the least the still ongoing, if diminishing, cultural influence onto its neighbours – remains an interesting case to look at in terms of sustainable and ethical fashion. And vocabulary and its use and evolution is the start of it all.
How does digitalisation impact and link to corporate responsibility? This is the question we look into in this post.
Combining the two disciplines results in a range of interesting questions. For example: If humans create non-human agents (e.g. in the shape of AI): For what, towards whom are these responsible? And: are they responsible at all - or is it their creator who is?
How do you make ‘sustainability' tangible?
The usual answer is – unsurprisingly – a ‘well, it depends’.
Which it evidently does.
Unfortunately, good case studies are extremely rare to come across.
Hence, when I stumbled across such a gem in one of the primary Swiss news papers, I jumped at the opportunity to summarise it for this blog.
Mistra Future Fashion (MFF) is a 4-year research project (2011-2015), funded by the Swedish government via Mistra, the Foundation of Strategic Environmental Research.
MFF has a very holistic approach that has the goal of supporting the industry to re-think their business models, design and industrial processes and promote consumer behaviour change.
The current fashion and textile landscape is fairly limited in terms of what types of materials are being used. Innovation is key, and products such as Tencel, Sorona and Ingeo proof that industry is investing heavily in R&D. Spider Silk may be one of the few natural fibres of the future yet to see it hayday.
In the fashion industry we’re very taken to ‘trend’: the colours, cuts, styles, fabrics of the next couple of seasons or so. Yet few venture to think about how their very own industry will look like in, say, 2020 or beyond. Resting the case for the importance of building scenarios of the long-term future.
Cradle to Cradle is a design methodology that puts a 'waste-less' world at its heart. What is the concept all about? What does it mean for the apparel industry? And who practises it among designers and companies?
On November 12 and 13, 2013 the yearly Textile Exchange conference took place in Istanbul, Turkey.
I was invited to run a workshop on Scenario Work as one of the 'Strategy' break out session on the first day. The workshop was fully booked with 25 highly interested and active participants. In 90 challenging minutes they experienced a compressed version of a Scenario Planning workshop.
The KISS Principle is a design principle that stems from the 1960.
It originated in engineering and its view point is that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore, simplicity should be a key goal in design, and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.
But what about complex systems such as nature?
How simple can we go before oversimplification results in incomplete, or biased data? Before absence of consideration of relevant factors inherently lead to regrettable substitutions? And before we willingly accept that there will be collateral damages to a decision, without knowing (or wanting to know) of what nature and in what order of magnitude these may be?
One example that illustrates where this challenge may rear what is its ugly head: upcoming Swiss political referenda on agricultural practices.
