‘Sustainable Fashion’ Needs A Breakthrough. Here’s A Blueprint For It.

Fashion is an odd industry. Not much of how it works makes sense. Products are designed by people who don’t know how they’re made and made by people who have little influence over what they’re making despite being manufacturing experts.

Most fashion business models rely on outdated forecasting models and arbitrary minimum order quantities; winter products enter shops in summer and vice versa. A significant volume of clothes produced are never sold (due to overproduction, tied to minimum order quantities) and so are incinerated or shredded for low-grade material uses, like stuffing mattresses.

This business model has been economically sustainable for brands by outsourcing manufacturing to factories in developing countries (often based on third-party audits–not site visits). ‘Outsourcing’ means brands procure finished products from garment manufacturers, who conduct materials sourcing, product R&D and development on behalf of the brands. Brand involvement is typically the approval of samples, price negotiation and order placement. But this approach is no longer ‘sustainable’ in social, economic, or environmental terms, and procuring products without knowing where and how they are made is becoming more risky than ever. Just this week, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) was adopted in Europe, and a facet of this will be a digital product passport (DPP) for every textile product sold on the EU market, containing detailed materials, design and production data, as well as recycling instructions.

Today’s fashion industry operates fractured, dividing the brand (the ‘creative’) from production (the ‘technical’). The arbiters of the industry–designers–have long been educated to uphold their ‘vision’ and aesthetic tendencies at the expense of all else, and they are at the top of the food chain when it comes to conceiving products that drive company revenue. But designers (and buyers) in the Global North make these decisions without knowledge of the consequences on those producing them, mostly in the Global South. The industry needs a Breakthrough to unite and meet the regulatory, environmental, and social challenges ahead, and today, a tome launched that could reframe how the industry works to enable that.

Dr Camilla Pang is a scientist and the author of Explaining Humans. In a video interview, she explained how her new book, Breakthrough, helps problem-solving by applying scientific thinking to daily challenges, including creative ones. “The scientific process isn’t just about being technical. It’s actually a very fluid, messy, and creative process of design and personal expression, as well as using [scientific] methods. Much like a designer, you have to design experiments and consider the different nuances [of them]”. “Designers can be creative and technical–it’s not a zero-sum game,” she says.

But educators tend to disagree, as does society, and, more often than not, industry: “this is the indoctrination we’re taught in schools; you’re either technical, or creative–a myth that this book helps us dispel”. That myth, at least in part, is what stands between fashion designers and fashion producers, with designers taught to see technical constraints as ‘compromising their vision’ and technicians powerless in the industry’s hierarchy.

In Breakthrough, Dr Pang reinterprets the established scientific process through her own ‘non-linear’ way of thinking and working, powered by her neurodivergence (she has Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and ADHD). Breakthrough lays out how to think like a (creative) scientist, learn how to fail, and embrace the unknown, but what can fashion professionals learn from it?

Firstly, Observation is the starting point of every major scientific discovery. Observations of a process or problem “are sparks, lighting the fire of an idea to pursue, a hypothesis to test, a theory to develop, and a conclusion to hone,” according to Dr Pang. For the fashion industry, Observation must start with observing how products are made and their ingredients–the process where an idea becomes a physical product. Yet most fashion designers have never been to a textile mill or garment factory–it’s not part of the training for designers to experience industrial production. Therefore, they have never seen the process that their designs or product choices determine.

Dr Pang believes this lack of Observation is disempowering, preventing designers from fully engaging their creativity. It’s inconceivable to her that she would design an experiment and not conduct it. Consider a nurse training and working without ever entering a hospital or medical facility: it’s inconceivable. Yet designers choose chemical processes that are toxic or dangerous to industry workers because they haven’t Observed them or learned about them.

For fashion products, textile production accounts for the most significant portion of the footprint within the production phase, and design decisions determine the textile types and processes used. To address the design and technical disconnect, Dr Pang suggests brands’ introduce “programs, internships or placements” in factories for designers to observe the production processes, enabling designers to begin hypothesizing about how to design with inherent sustainability based on a foundation of knowledge of the products’ ingredients and methods. Far from a compromise, this will hand the power to create ‘better’ to a generation of designers coming through the ranks and who expect their employers to prioritize sustainability. To this end, Dr Pang shares a cautionary tale: “Barclays boycott is one example,” she says, where 220 university students declared a “career boycott” of the bank due to its climate policies, which include the ongoing financing of fossil fuel companies; the students’ response was: ‘we’ll take our talents elsewhere, permanently’.

Recently, I accompanied two Gen Z ‘voices’ on a trip to garment factories in Bangladesh and Vietnam as part of the Puma Voices of a RE:GENERATION program. The ‘voices’ included food content creator Luke Jaque-Rodney, who examined garment worker lives from their factory to home kitchens in Stitch and Spice; and visual artist Jade Roche who documented the environmental consequences of industrialization and fashion’s role in this through Made in Vietnam and Made in Bangladesh. Their Observations changed their understanding of the industry and garment workers’ lives, debunking stereotypes they had learned at home in Europe. Observation is powerful, but it also challenges the status quo.

On the journey to problem-solving and discovery, Breakthrough explains that after Observation comes a Hypothesis, or “how to come up with ideas.” Dr Pang interviewed science peers for her book, and they explained how they see hypotheses as forming creative narratives, like crime books that solve the mystery by observing clues and then working out which questions to ask–the hypotheses. Breakthrough offers the ‘unputdownable thriller’ as a perfect product of Observation and hypotheses, but what might be fashion’s equivalent? The ‘untakeoffable’ jean? How does ‘coming up with ideas’ lead to the perfect (and in this case, sustainable) end-product?

The hypothesis, Dr Pang explains, is something to “build ideas upon and sharpen them against”. Far from being a linear process where you observe, hypothesise, test and share findings, it’s far more chaotic and iterative. To use the crime clue analogy, the clues lead to questions, and the answers lead to more questions and possibly a rearrangement of the clues to view them from a different angle and ask more questions. Perhaps the perfect jean is one where every ingredient and process is a clue that must be rearranged to ask the question: what is the impact, utility and commercial desirability of this combination? If it’s not optimal, it’s time to rearrange and hypothesise again.

Hypothesis might really come into its own for fashion soon, with unprecedented data demands in the new European Union Ecodesign regulation, which will require individual product-level data on product materials, design, disassembly instructions and recyclability (as part of the digital product passports). The hypothesis stage allows all these requirements to be probed as a system based on the full production process documented during Observation. A designer without Observation and subsequent Hypothesis will be without the tools and inquisition to pursue Ecodesign compliance; and that failure could be expensive.

Breakthrough presents Focus as the next critical step in the scientific method to decide which lines of inquiry to pursue (to solve product sustainability problems, in this case). Dr Pang gives the metaphor of the nut to be cracked and two possible approaches: the obvious and quick one (the hammer), or the indirect and slow one (the dissolving solution that melts the shell, allowing time to contemplate how the shell ‘works’ and what that might mean for the nut in their co-dependent’ system). Fashion and any industry or individual favoring short-term thinking is choosing the hammer, obviously.

In fashion, an example is choosing a ‘lower emission’ raw material like organic in place of conventional cotton and ignoring the subsequent synthetic dyestuffs and textile treatment required to make the final fabric. “Simply applying the most obvious solution may give you the feeling of progress, but it isn’t necessarily getting you anywhere,” says Dr Pang. In science, Focus can amount to untangling a mess of information, which can give valuable insights if “wrestled into a more manageable form”, she says.

Breakthrough explains that this wrangling needs a system, a set of rules, and a way of grouping the data into clusters so it can be more easily visualized. Instead of designing a product based on indiscriminate decisions, imagine that every decision belongs to a data cluster, and each cluster can be evaluated to become either an area of Focus, or ignored (based on a rationale, rather than chaos that leads to simply overlooking the information). It’s this kind of scientific approach structure that could help fashion designers operate within a design framework, or ‘toolkit’ of clustered design and product information, that would enable evaluation of how a design could and might be changed, helping to improve product credentials ahead of enforcement (from 2026) of Ecodesign for Sustainable Product Regulations in Europe.

Breakthrough is a treasure trove of guidance for observing, questioning, analyzing, and reinterpreting the fashion industry–extracting ideas and structure from its chaos for better economic, social, and environmental outcomes. Just a first few chapters have been plundered here, but the others, spanning analysis, trouble-shooting failures, collaboration, and how to seek proof and be objective. The book culminates in Imagination: how to build worlds and expand reality.

Dr Pang believes “There’s a scientist hidden inside all of us. Science’s greatest gift to us is not formulae, but enabling the urge to discover” which is what “makes us truly human”. For humans, the myth that we are either creative or technical, and can remain divided along these lines while trying to solve today’s biggest challenge—environmental and social sustainability—is false and dangerous. Breakthrough offers a blueprint to reframe how to think and solve problems using structure and method; while unleashing creativity and imagination, but they need each other. Not zero-sum, but a sum that’s greater than the parts.