What if transforming fashion did not begin with what happens to a garment at the end of its life, but with the moment it first touches our skin?
Fashion is one of the most visible expressions of our identities, cultures and creativity. Yet behind what we wear lies a complex global system connecting raw materials, workers, designers, manufacturers, consumers, technologies, communities and ecosystems.
The textile sector provides livelihoods to hundreds of millions of people worldwide, with women representing a significant majority of its workforce. At the same time, it accounts for an estimated 2 to 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, places considerable pressure on water resources and contributes to ocean microplastic pollution.
How, then, can we move beyond making fashion simply less harmful and towards systems that are genuinely circular, regenerative and healthy for people and the planet?
This question was at the heart of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) session “Living Labs for Circular Regenerative Fashion: Co-creating Science-Based Systemic Solutions Across the Global North & South”, held on 17 September 2026 as part of the Science Summit at the 81st United Nations General Assembly.
Bringing together policy, entrepreneurship, research and Living Lab experiences across Europe and Africa, the session explored what systemic transformation could look like, from global policy frameworks to the clothes directly touching our skin.
Opening the conversation, Claudia Giacovelli, Textile Projects Portfolio Lead and Officer-in-Charge of the Textiles Unit at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), situated circular fashion within a much wider global challenge.
While companies are increasingly investing in sustainability, improving efficiency and experimenting with new materials and processes, textile production continues to grow. Environmental gains achieved through greater efficiency can therefore be offset by the increasing volume of goods being produced and consumed.
Circularity cannot simply mean doing the same things more efficiently.
Giacovelli presented UNEP’s approach around three interconnected priorities: Reduce, Extend and Circulate. This means reducing resource use and pollution at the source, keeping products and materials in use for longer, and recovering and recirculating resources.
This transition also requires coordinated policy. Through initiatives such as the Global Textile Policy Dialogues and work around the Global Framework on Chemicals, UNEP is bringing stakeholders together around Extended Producer Responsibility, hazardous substances and greater supply chain transparency.
Her message established an important foundation for the session: transforming fashion requires us to look beyond individual products and address the system around them.
If Giacovelli invited participants to look at the global system, fashion entrepreneur Matteo Ward brought the conversation somewhere much more intimate: the human body.
His keynote, “Fashioning Better Habits and Habitats from the Inside Out,” challenged the tendency to frame circular fashion primarily as an environmental issue. For Ward, it is equally a question of human health and social justice.
One experience in particular changed the way he thought about clothing.
During a visit to an intensive care unit for premature babies in an Italian hospital, Ward learned about the devastating role of bacterial infections among these extremely vulnerable children. Looking around the unit, he noticed that the babies were wearing onesies made from polyester.
That observation led him to a much larger question.
We carefully consider what enters our bodies through the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe. Yet clothes remain in constant contact with our skin, from the day we are born until the end of our lives, and we rarely subject them to the same questions about health.
For Ward, our body is the first habitat for which fashion should be designed.
His concept of fashion architecture approaches clothing as an architecture surrounding the human body. Starting with what is genuinely healthy for the person wearing a garment inevitably leads us further down the value chain. Which chemicals and dyes are being used? Where do the fibres come from? How were they processed? Can they be traced?
The principle at the heart of his intervention was strikingly simple: designing for what is healthy for our skin can lead us towards what is healthier for our environment.
Ward also reminded participants that environmental innovation cannot be separated from social justice. Recalling a factory in Bangladesh that possessed environmental filtration technology but could not afford to operate it, he questioned what technological solutions can achieve when those expected to implement them are struggling for economic survival.
A regenerative fashion system must care not only for materials and ecosystems, but also for the people throughout its value chain.
The session then moved from principles to experimentation, with four Living Lab experiences showing how circularity can take different forms.
Salla Kuuluvainen, presenting the Baltic2Hand project, showed how Living Lab and service design approaches have helped companies and consumers across Finland, Sweden, Estonia and Latvia experiment with second hand fashion. Pilots ranged from brand specific repair services and second hand shops in shopping malls to digital slow fashion maps. The experience also exposed structural barriers. Taxation can favour virgin materials over reused ones, while products that were never designed to last cannot suddenly become circular at the end of their lives.
Barbara Kieslinger from the Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI) presented make-a-thek, which transforms public libraries into spaces for making, repairing, exchanging and learning. In Antwerp, young people took ownership of designing and running their own circular fashion space. With activities extending from Europe to Ghana, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa and Chile, the initiative also demonstrates how locally rooted knowledge can be shared internationally rather than transferred in only one direction.
From Tunisia, Samia Chelbi of DigiArt Living Lab and Building African Fashion introduced digital circularity. Using 3D environments, digital twins and immersive technologies, designers can experiment and prototype without immediately producing physical samples. By connecting African fashion designers with digital creators, the approach combines cultural creativity, reduced resource consumption and opportunities for young digital talent. Her broader message was clear: digital circularity is a mindset, and lasting transformation requires investment in local skills and capacity.
Finally, the TAMK Living Lab experience in Tampere, Finland, brought researchers, material producers, recyclers, companies and end users into the same innovation process. Its experiments included piloting the European Digital Product Passport to explore how sustainability and traceability information can accompany textile products. The experience also highlighted a persistent gap. While funding often exists to start pilots, far less support is available to turn successful experiments into viable long term activities.
Together, the four examples demonstrated the diversity of circular innovation, from reuse and community action to digital experimentation and traceability, while pointing towards a common need for collaboration across the entire system.
The final discussion, moderated by ENoLL Director Martina Desole, invited the speakers to look beyond individual projects and reflect on what is needed for systemic transformation.
For Matteo Ward, social justice remains fundamental. Living wages and a fairer distribution of wealth across supply chains are essential if environmental transformation is to succeed. He also challenged the sector to communicate more effectively. Sustainability produces enormous amounts of information, but information alone does not necessarily mobilise people. His idea of approaching clothing almost as a healthy diet brought the conversation back to the body, understanding what we put against our skin and prioritising transparent supply chains and non-toxic garments.
For Salla Kuuluvainen, circularity must begin with durable materials designed for future use cycles, rather than expecting consumers to solve the problem at the end. She also highlighted the need to rethink fiscal systems that favour linear consumption, with Living Labs providing spaces for policymakers, companies and citizens to co-design alternatives.
For Barbara Kieslinger, stronger bridges between the Global North and Global South are essential, alongside greater recognition of grassroots upcycling initiatives, social businesses and local creative innovators. Circular knowledge should travel in multiple directions.
For Samia Chelbi, global connections must be accompanied by local capacity building. Connecting pilots through shared platforms could accelerate learning, but meaningful North South and South South collaboration requiresdeveloping regional leaders capable of driving open innovation themselves.
From the TAMK experience came a clear call to close the gap between experimentation and implementation. Innovation systems need to support successful solutions beyond the pilot stage and towards long term viability.
Together, these messages showed that scaling is not simply about making a pilot bigger. It means creating the policy, financing, skills, economic incentives and collaborations that allow change to last.
Closing the session, ENoLL Chair Wim De Kinderen brought these different perspectives together.
From UNEP’s global policy roadmap to Ward’s focus on the relationship between textiles and the human body, and from second hand business models and community repair spaces to digital experimentation and product traceability, the session demonstrated how many parts of the fashion system need to move simultaneously.
De Kinderen framed Living Labs as “ecosystem orchestrators”, environments capable of bringing together actors who would not necessarily collaborate otherwise, translating ideas into real life experimentation and connecting local action with wider systemic transformation.
The examples shared throughout the session demonstrated this capacity, but also showed that experimentation alone is not enough. Successful approaches need pathways towards scale, as well as policies and economic frameworks that support circular rather than linear models.
De Kinderen also pointed towards opportunities for further collaboration, including potential engagement with the OECD around fiscal measures supporting circularity, while inviting the community to continue the conversation around upscaling and impact.
Perhaps one of the most powerful lessons from the session is that the transformation of fashion can begin from very different places and still lead us towards the same conclusion.
We can begin at the global level, examining policies, production volumes, resource flows and international value chains.
Or we can begin with something as intimate as a premature baby’s skin.
A piece of clothing touches a body. Behind it are fibres and dyes, chemicals and water, workers and factories, designers and technologies, logistics and business models, regulations and economic incentives. Behind those, ultimately, arethe natural systems from which every material and resource originates.
Circular and regenerative fashion therefore asks us to rethink the relationships between our skin and what we wear, workers and the value they create, experimentation and the systems capable of scaling it, the Global North and Global South, and human stakeholders and nature itself.
This may be where Living Labs have something particularly valuable to offer: not one answer to a profoundly complex challenge, but a way of bringing these relationships into the same space, allowing people to experiment, learn and build the transition together.
Because the health of our bodies, our communities and our ecosystems may ultimately be much more connected than we think.
Missed the session? You can watch the recording here.
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