Fashion Does Not Lack Circular Solutions, It Lacks Connections Between Them

The industry often discusses circularity as if the system ended when a product left the store, yet that is where another part of the system begins. Once a garment is purchased, its lifespan depends partly on how it is used, maintained, repaired, stored and eventually transferred to another owner. This makes the consumer an active participant in circularity, whether the industry acknowledges that role or not.

Working directly with luxury consumers has shown that information only becomes valuable when it is relevant to a real ownership decision. Knowing that a material is recycled is one thing; understanding how the product should be cared for, how long it is designed to last, or what happens if it needs repair makes that information actionable. Retail has an important role here. The store, sales advisor and after-sales experience can translate technical information into something a customer can actually use. Details about craftsmanship, materials, provenance and care are not simply additional information; they can change how a client understands a product's quality and long-term relevance. Retail can then extend beyond the point of sale into education and connection between the product and its future lifecycle.

There is evidence that these customer-facing circular models can have measurable effects. WRAP's 2025 research found that, in its UK analysis, every five repaired clothing items displaced four new purchases, corresponding to an 82.2% displacement rate. For resale, five preloved purchases displaced three new purchases, or 64.6%. The precise impact of circular models varies by context, but the findings reinforce a crucial point: the second life of a product can influence what happens to the next new product.

The same principle applies digitally. Product information, authentication systems and digital product passports can make ownership histories, care instructions, repair options and material information easier to access. But technology only creates value when the information is understandable and connected to a practical action. The objective is to remove the friction between knowing what to do and being able to do it, not to give consumers more data for its own sake.

Technology Can Connect the Lifecycle

Technology is often presented as the solution to circularity; it is better understood as connective infrastructure. Digital product passports, item-level identifiers and traceability systems can connect information that is otherwise fragmented across manufacturers, brands, retailers, repair providers, resellers and recyclers. This is becoming more than a theoretical possibility. The European Commission identifies textile apparel as a priority product group for Digital Product Passport requirements under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, with textile-specific requirements currently planned for adoption in Q4 2027.

For the industry, the significance is not simply regulatory. A product identity can potentially connect material information with care instructions, repair history, authentication and resale. It can allow downstream actors to access information that would otherwise disappear when ownership changes. Demand forecasting and inventory tools can play a different but equally important role by helping brands avoid producing products for which there is insufficient demand in the first place.

But technology cannot compensate for poor product design or weak economics. A digital passport does not make an unrepairable garment repairable, and a traceability platform does not create demand for a product that customers do not want to keep. AI can improve forecasting, yet it cannot by itself resolve the commercial incentives that reward constant volume. The most useful technologies are therefore those that reduce friction between stages of the product lifecycle.

A repair service, for example, could feed information back into the product's history rather than treating each intervention as an isolated transaction. A resale platform could preserve provenance and condition data instead of rebuilding that information from scratch. In this model, technology does not replace circular practices; it makes them easier to coordinate. This is where circularity begins to look less like a collection of sustainability initiatives and more like an operating system.

Ultimately, the simplest test of circularity may also be the most demanding, namely whether the product remains useful and desirable for longer. From my experience, clients often respond more strongly to the idea of longevity than to sustainability terminology itself. A conversation about how a piece will age, how it can be maintained, or why its construction allows it to remain relevant for years can be more persuasive than a general environmental claim.

This is particularly significant for luxury. Craftsmanship, emotional attachment, scarcity, provenance and collectability can all support longer product lives. But those qualities need infrastructure behind them: accessible repair, trusted authentication, realistic resale, and product information that remains available as ownership changes.

There is also a broader industry tension to address. Fashion depends commercially on newness, while circularity depends on extending the useful life of what already exists. These objectives are not necessarily incompatible, but they require a different definition of growth. The next stage of circular fashion must be measured by what happens after the first sale, not only by how many recycled products are introduced or how many take-back boxes are installed.

The circular system remains incomplete unless the product can be repaired and resold, its history verified, its materials recovered, and the next owner able to understand what they are buying.

The fashion industry lacks connections between its circular solutions rather than the solutions themselves. Materials innovation, repair, resale, authentication, traceability, digital product passports, demand forecasting and consumer education are often discussed separately. Yet their real potential emerges when they work together around the same product.

That is why scaling circularity requires a shift in perspective. The goal is to design a product and a system capable of supporting multiple stages of value after the point of manufacture, not to make the product itself more sustainable at that point alone.

For luxury, this creates an opportunity as much as a constraint. A product that is designed to last, supported by credible information, repairable, authenticatable and capable of retaining value through multiple owners can make circularity part of the luxury proposition itself.

What defines the next stage of circular fashion is how well the industry connects the product to everything that happens before, during and after ownership, rather than any single breakthrough material or take-back programme.

Changing the product is necessary; building the system around it is what makes circularity scalable.