Specials

Governments in more than two dozen markets are adopting or planning Extended Producer Responsibility schemes for textiles, building funding architectures designed to make fashion brands pay for end-of-life waste management. The infrastructure to sort and recycle what those schemes collect barely exists. A new analysis by WRAP maps how the gap between collection mandates and processing capacity is producing stockpiles, exports and at least one regulatory enforcement action.

Sustainability and distinctiveness are often treated as the two core values driving purchase intent in upcycled fashion. New research separates the two experimentally, testing how design typicality and material choice independently shape consumer perception. One value turns out to be fixed by category alone; the other depends entirely on design, and behaves unpredictably once more than one novelty signal is introduced at once.

Sustainability efforts in fashion have largely focused on optimising an existing linear model: cleaner dyes, better sorting, more efficient factories. Asha Singhal, Director, Nature of Fashion at the Biomimicry Institute, argues this approach overlooked a structural absence rather than a technical shortfall. Pilots run by the programme in the Netherlands, Germany and Ghana tested whether biological decomposition could process textile waste current recycling infrastructure cannot.

Fragmented pilot projects have long defined regenerative agriculture efforts in Pakistan's cotton sector, but mounting climate and market pressures are exposing the limits of that approach. Drawing on a recent industry roundtable, Abou Bakar, Country Representative – Pakistan, CottonConnect, explains what a coordinated national framework would look like, and why farmer incentives and traceability now sit at the centre of that conversation.

Clients who built relationships with personal stylists have started asking a question consumer resale apps cannot answer: what happens to clothing once it leaves the wardrobe. Stéphanie Crespin, Founder and Chief Executive of Reflaunt, has answered with Folio, a private resale system that lets stylists manage client wardrobes, earn commission and protect discretion others did not offer.

Premium retail in India is no longer defined by a narrow set of traditional luxury buyers, as a younger, more globally connected consumer base reshapes demand across categories. Pushpa Bector, Group Executive Director, DLF Retail and Whole-time Director, DCCDL, discusses how this expanding aspiration is reshaping leasing strategy, brand curation and the long-term positioning of premium retail destinations.

The textile industry has spent years producing pilot-scale sustainability successes that rarely translate into supply chain-wide adoption. The constraint is purchasing behaviour, not available technology. Eva Baumann, Chief Executive Officer of CHT Group, draws on CHT's foundation-owned structure and portfolio depth to make a case that is less about ambition than about where industrial reality and procurement logic continue to diverge.

Three years after ITMA 2023 placed textile recycling firmly on the industrial agenda, the technology has matured rapidly. Automated sorting systems, mechanical fibre recovery lines and adapted spinning platforms are now commercially operational across Europe and Turkey. Andritz, Trützschler, Rieter and Saurer lead an expanding supplier base, though fragmented policy and inconsistent feedstock supply still constrain scale.

Regulatory pressure on the global secondhand clothing trade is building in Brussels, Washington, and Geneva, shaped by the widespread belief that exports to Africa amount to little more than waste disposal. Field evidence from East African markets tells a different story, one in which market incentives, trust-based quality systems, and consumer affordability constraints combine to keep textile waste to a fraction of imported bales.

Europe’s textile fair circuit is crowded, and buyers are weighing travel, time and sourcing returns more carefully as sourcing budgets face sharper scrutiny. For Serhan Pul, Managing Director of B Group US and organiser of Intertex Portugal, the answer lies in efficiency, relevance, buyer qualification and Portugal’s manufacturing strengths rather than scale alone today.