Circular fashion design

It's not a question of "if" the fashion industry incorporates a circular economy mindset into its design practices, but of "when." At least, that's the way Ryerson fashion professor Anika Kozlowski sees it.

With an industry heavily reliant on textiles like resource-intensive cotton and polyester – the latter of which is, like many synthetic textiles, an oil derivative – and the tendency of so many clothing items to end up in landfills, change will have to come eventually. This need for change is what fuels professor Kozlowski's research into sustainability in the fashion design industry.

"You have to design for circularity in the first place," she said.

From early in her career, professor Kozlowski had a combined interest in both environmental science and fashion design. Now, building on her PhD research, she has developed a resource for fashion designers to help build circular economy and sustainability concepts into their design and business models before the first stitches on a garment are even made.

That resource is (re)Design Canvas, a visual tool geared toward small fashion entrepreneurs. The canvas offers building blocks under various topics that designers can use to workshop their ideas, with prompts and questions meant to help the designer keep sustainability in mind while developing their business model.

Smaller designers have an advantage over big fashion companies when it comes to trying to be more sustainable, says professor Kozlowski. The smaller size means more flexibility in their design and business practices, allowing them to better adapt to achieve environmental goals. They can consider how to use dye techniques that have clean water or benign outputs, or how to design a compostable T-shirt. They can try to find suppliers who will work with them to achieve greater sustainability, rather than continuing with the industry's tendency towards a linear economy where waste is the inevitable end result.

The (re)Design Canvas was developed in response to the academic literature about design thinking, systems thinking, sustainability in the business of fashion, and strategies and tools for sustainability. Professor Kozlowski went on to do her own fieldwork, interviewing small enterprise, sustainability-based fashion entrepreneurs to better understand their operations.

The research was published in the 2018 article, "The redesign canvas: Fashion design as a tool for sustainability" in the Journal of Cleaner Production. The article was written with Ryerson's Cory Searcy, an industrial engineering and environmental science management professor, and Michal Bardecki, a geography and environmental studies professor.

Part of this research was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.