Perspectives on the changing landscape of fashion, materials, circularity, innovation and education:

DPP + ESPR + EPR — from compliance to design intelligence

The Digital Product Passport is not a QR code. It is a design challenge.

The EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation is changing the relationship between product design, data, traceability and regulation. Textile apparel is one of the priority product categories under the ESPR Working Plan 2025–2030, with the European Commission currently planning the textile delegated act for Q4 2027. The emerging Digital Product Passport framework is intended to make product information more accessible across the value chain, potentially supporting repair, reuse, recycling, traceability and compliance. At the same time, Extended Producer Responsibility is shifting more responsibility and cost towards producers for what happens to products after use.

The important question for fashion is not simply: “How do we create a DPP?” It is: “How should we design the product differently because this information will exist?” Material composition, construction, durability, repairability, recyclability, suppliers and manufacturing processes increasingly need to be considered together with the data that describes them. Data architecture therefore cannot remain an afterthought delegated to compliance teams or IT providers. It needs to enter the design and product-development process much earlier.

For brands, this creates both a regulatory challenge and an opportunity to rethink product development. For material innovators and technology companies, it raises questions about interoperability, evidence and how new materials can actually integrate into future product-data systems. For investors, it changes what should be examined during due diligence: not simply whether a technology is innovative, but whether it can operate within an increasingly data-driven and regulated product ecosystem.

ALIGN can help organisations connect these worlds — bringing together design, materials, manufacturing, circularity and regulatory awareness to translate emerging requirements into practical product and innovation strategies.

The wider point is important: the next generation of circular products will need to be designed not only to exist physically, but to carry meaningful information about their existence.

Resale + Repair — when circularity becomes an economic question

What happens when keeping clothes in use becomes more profitable than making new ones?

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation's May 2026 report, The New Bottom Line: Policy Levers to Scale Resale & Repair for Fashion, makes an important intervention: the barrier to scaling circular business models is not simply consumer behaviour or lack of innovation. The economics themselves currently favour the linear system. The report identifies three policy levers — VAT/sales tax, labour taxation and Extended Producer Responsibility — that could help rebalance the economics of resale and repair. Its modelling suggests that targeted policy changes could substantially improve gross margins for these businesses.

That has implications far beyond companies already operating resale platforms or repair services. If policy begins to make circulation economically more competitive, brands will need to reconsider what a “product” actually is. Is the business model still based on selling a garment once, or should the value of a product be measured across multiple owners, repairs, alterations, resale transactions and years of use? How should products be designed if the brand expects to recover, repair, authenticate or resell them? Who owns the relationship with the product after its first sale?

The Foundation's call has already attracted support from dozens of fashion and textile organisations, including major brands, retailers and resale platforms, signalling that this is becoming a business-model issue rather than simply a sustainability discussion.

For established brands, this raises questions around product architecture, services, reverse logistics, pricing and new revenue streams. For emerging businesses, it creates an opportunity to build circularity into the business model from the outset rather than retrofit it later. For investors, it introduces another dimension to assessing fashion businesses: does the underlying commercial model benefit from keeping products in circulation, or does it still depend on continuous new production?

ALIGN works at this intersection of design and business — helping brands and emerging companies explore how product design, circular strategies and commercial models can work together rather than treating circularity as an additional layer of sustainability reporting.

The bigger question is perhaps this:

If policy begins to correct the economics of fashion, which businesses will already be designed for the circular economy — and which will have to redesign themselves?

Education — designing for a fashion industry that is changing underneath us

Are we still educating designers for the fashion industry that existed yesterday?

The role of design education is changing as rapidly as the industry itself. Leading institutions are moving beyond treating sustainability as a specialist subject and increasingly embedding systems thinking, circularity, material intelligence, responsible production and ecological thinking into design education.

At Central Saint Martins, sustainability and climate action are being integrated through curriculum, research and knowledge exchange, including initiatives around regenerative luxury and circular design innovation. The Royal College of Art's sustainability strategy explicitly aims to embed environmental sustainability across teaching and learning, alongside research and knowledge exchange.

Across Europe, the direction is similarly broadening. Aalto University describes sustainability as integrated across design studies, moving from material and product impacts at undergraduate level towards system-level change, circular business models, product-service systems and regulation at postgraduate level. In France, the École des Arts Décoratifs' Fashion & Materials programme brings together design, management and engineering around the social and ecological transition, while its Ecodesign & Creation chair has explored new approaches to designing, making and using products.

Polimoda's new Master's in Sustainable Fashion Systems, Strategy & Finance is another interesting signal: sustainability is positioned not as an add-on, but alongside policy, digital infrastructure, traceability, DPPs, finance, ESG and systems thinking.

This raises a critical question for education: what does a designer, fashion manager or creative leader actually need to know to operate in this new environment?

Knowing that a material is “sustainable” is no longer enough. Future professionals need to understand why a material performs as it does, where it comes from, how it is manufactured, how it can be repaired or recovered, what data supports its claims, what regulation applies, how it affects product development, and whether the resulting proposition can work commercially.

This is precisely where industry-connected education becomes valuable.

ALIGN can support universities, fashion schools and education organisations through expert lectures, masterclasses, curriculum development, industry projects and mentoring — bringing current knowledge of materials, circularity, manufacturing, innovation, regulation and commercial realities directly into the learning environment.

The opportunity is not simply to teach students how to make more sustainable fashion.

It is to equip the next generation to question, redesign and ultimately transform the systems in which fashion is made.