Fashion industry: an innovative path towards sustainability

The fashion industry is a worldwide multibillion-dollar enterprise devoted to the business of making and selling clothes and accessories. Luxury and fast fashion markets are just two of the many possible markets that could be made by segmenting the fashion industry. Although being considered opposite, both of them base their way of doing business and making profits on linear economy’s principles such as the ‘take-make-waste’ business model or the traditional linear supply chain. Hence, sustainability in all its three dimensions (environmental, economic, and social) is still not considered the guiding core value at the basis, or at the centre, of the executive and operational decision-making process of the majority of fashion firms all over the world. This choice is easily observable in the detrimental environmental and social impacts generated by the actors involved in the various step along the entire textile and clothing value chain, from the raw material production and extraction until the final disposal by the end-consumers. Exactly the clothing waste management and the lack of recycling or closed loop (where scraps or discarded items are reintroduced as inputs in a new lifecycle, thus avoiding the need of new virgin resources) processes during end-life stage of fashion items are among the issues that the fashion should fix to become more sustainable in the near future. These are efforts asked to both upstream and downstream fashion’s involved actors, which substantially consist of a business (and consumption) process innovation that can occur through the adoption of sustainable or circular business models such as resale, rental, remaking or repair. In the proposed work all the above mentioned topics are recalled through a deeper analysis.