This report aims at sharing knowledge relevant for sustainabili- ty-oriented studies and actions in the Dutch apparel sector, with a focus on clothing volumes. The apparel industry is said to be one of the most polluting at a global level; however, we nd that dis- cussions of its environmental challenges or the actions needed to tackle them are often based on super cial or unreliable information. This information is frequently disseminated by word of mouth and non-scienti c texts and nally accepted as valid. Moreover, some actors working on practice-based solutions for the environmen- tal challenges of the apparel industry build solutions and projects based on these ‘facts’. As a result, these actors risk focussing on topics that are not as critical or relevant as was originally thought. Clear, reliable data is needed to pinpoint the true challenges and bottlenecks within the fashion system.
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Fashion design has rapidly become a digital process where textiles are simulated as soft, conformable materials on a digital body. The embodied experience and physical interaction with the textile have been replaced by screen-based media, resulting in a gap in understanding between physical and digital textile material. Consequently, understanding digitized textile properties and characteristics has become challenging for practitioners. This research investigates fashion designers’ implicit understanding when selecting textiles, specifically how interactions with physical textiles influence design considerations. Twenty digital fashion designers interacted with ten physical textile materials via tangible and scientific drape measurements, reflecting upon their design considerations. In digital environments, a tangible understanding of material properties is vital, and scientific drape measurements add significant understanding to digital design. The research advances our understanding of integrating digital tools in textile and soft material practices, where a postphenomenological approach is employed to help formulate the design considerations in selecting materials.
The in-depth assessment of the situation of the European textile and clothing sector is composed by six independent reports with a close focus on key aspects useful to understand the dynamics and the development of the textile and clothing industry, drivers of change – most notably the impact of the financial crisis – and identification of policy responses and best practices. This has been done in six specific tasks leading to the six reports: Task 1 Survey on the situation of the EU textile and clothing sector Task 2 Report on research and development Task 3 Report on SME situation Task 4 Report on restructuring Task 5 Report on training and Education Task 6 Report on innovation practices The aim of Task 2 was to analyse in detail how specialised research an innovation centres liaise with textile/clothing enterprises and analyse the process of transforming textile/clothing research innovations into new products/processes available in the market.
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Denim Democracy from the Alliance for Responsible Denim (ARD) is an interactive exhibition that celebrates the journey and learning of ARD members, educates visitors about sustainable denim and highlights how companies collaborate together to achieve results. Through sight, sound and tactile sensations, the visitor experiences and fully engages sustainable denim production. The exhibition launches in October 2018 in Amsterdam and travels to key venues and locations in the Netherlands until April 2019. As consumers, we love denim but the denim industry, like other sub-sectors in the textile, apparel and footwear industries, faces many complex sustainability challenges and has been criticized for its polluting and hazardous production practices. The Alliance for Responsible Denim project brought leading denim brands, suppliers and stakeholders together to collectively address these issues and take initial steps towards improving the ecological sustainability impact of denim production. Sustainability challenges are considered very complex and economically undesirable for individual companies to address alone. In denim, small and medium sized denim firms face specific challenges, such as lower economies of scale and lower buying power to affect change in practices. There is great benefit in combining denim companies' resources and knowledge so that collective experimentation and learning can lift the sustainability standards of the industry and lead to the development of common standards and benchmarks on a scale that matters. If meaningful, transformative industrial change is to be made, then it calls for collaboration between denim industry stakeholders that goes beyond supplier-buyer relations and includes horizontal value chain collaboration of competing large and small denim brands. However collaboration between organizations, and especially between competitors, is highly complex and prone to failure. The research behind the Alliance for Responsible Denim project asked a central research question: how do competitors effectively collaborate together to create common, industry standards on resource use and benchmarks for improved ecological sustainability? To answer this question, we used a mixed-method, action research approach. The Alliance for Responsible Denim project mobilized and facilitated denim brands to collectively identify ways to reduce the use of water and chemicals in denim production and then aided them to implement these practices individually in their respective firms.
The textiles and apparel industry faces increasing regulatory pressure to reduce its negative environmental and social impact. A widely discussed strategy is to extend the active lifecycle of garments through durable, better quality clothing. Durability, however, is an ambiguous concept and a more complex understanding of durability is emerging that goes beyond material strength to notions of emotional, social and functional durability that live in consumers’ mindsets. Our understanding of durability and how it impacts product design, reuse, repair and recycling is limited and businesses find it difficult to incorporate durability into more sustainable and circular business models, particularly where there is also an element of degrowth or slow growth. Additionally, digital technologies, particularly for traceability and product information, are needed and require new organizational capabilities and change. Our project proposes to explore the concept of durability in the apparel and textiles industry, focusing on how various industry actors (e.g. fashion brands, designers, suppliers, consumers) define durability and how they incorporate it into commercially viable circular business models. Our proposal is timely in that local, national and EU research agendas are stimulating sustainable and circular transformation. Nationally, we address questions in the Nationale Wetenschaps Agenda (NWA-ORC), e.g. the call on the theme Ab-initio circular materials design that emphasizes an interdisciplinarity approach for circular redesign and includes aspects of socio-economic relevance, raw material innovations and digital tooling. On the EU level, policies, directives and regulations, so called New Industrial Strategies, are aimed at helping industry towards green and digital transformation. Our proposal is pertinent to the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles and the Transition Pathway for the Textiles Ecosystem. Calls in the near future offer opportunities for the consortium to access funding for continued research and industry collaboration.
