Specials

The shift of US apparel sourcing away from China has largely benefited Vietnam, which became America's top garment supplier in 2025. India's share of global apparel exports has barely moved in fifteen years, and its US shipments fell sharply this year while, for most of the year, it paid the same duty as Vietnam or more, suggesting that capacity rather than duty rates decides orders.

A year after the last round of US tariffs cost Indian garment workers shifts, wages and jobs, a fresh US duty has been imposed and suspended in the same order, leaving the threat in place. The textile industry's main lobby group says the sector is already under stress, with apparel exports still below last year's level and production concentrated in small firms that have little room to absorb sudden new costs.

A US executive order of 16 October imposed a 100% duty on the largest buyers of Russian energy and waived it in the same text. Indian exporters escape the duty for now, but the waiver has no end date and can be withdrawn at any time, while India's Russian crude purchases remain close to 1.8 million barrels a day.

The world's cotton importers have shifted towards a single dominant exporter at a time of rising weather risk. Brazil shipped 3.37 million tonnes in 2025/26, far ahead of the United States, and its Centre-West cotton belt is in El Niño's dry zone. Conab and StoneX both expect each hectare of Brazilian cotton to yield less this season.

Fashion's sourcing data and its fibre data are moving in different directions. Companies in Textile Exchange's benchmark raised the share of five fibres sourced through standards and certification programmes to 72% in 2025, while polyester took most of the growth in fibre output in 2024. A cotton shortfall driven by El Niño would show which measure defines progress.

Global cotton supply is projected to fall short of demand independently of El Niño. The USDA's August figures put the gap at about 5.3 million bales, and prices rallied on supply concerns before falling back by about a tenth. For spinners that contracted near the peak, a weather shock later this year would compound an existing loss.

Much of India's textile waste is too mixed or contaminated to resell, reuse or recycle. Asha Singhal, Director, Nature of Fashion at The Biomimicry Institute, explains what the fourth Nature of Fashion pilot will target, what India can take from earlier work in Ghana, the Netherlands and Germany, and why local conditions must shape the technologies tested.

India generates an estimated 7.8 million tonnes of textile waste a year, and much of the low-value, mixed or contaminated fraction has no commercially viable end-of-life pathway. Shruti Goel, Chief Executive Officer of Upaya Social Ventures, explains how a new accelerator run with The Biomimicry Institute will support decomposition enterprises while tying their growth to dignified, verifiable employment.

Wellness claims in apparel can drift from what a fabric contains to what it supposedly does for the wearer, and the evidence needed rises in between. Vamsi Sivalanka, Founder and Executive Director, and Akhilesh Karni, Co-Founder and CFO, of NITISI Limited, set out how they separate material, biological and wearer-level evidence, and why sustainability verification cannot substitute for technical proof.

Growing commercial interest in traditional techniques has turned handmade irregularity into a marketable quality, yet the labour and knowledge behind it often go unexamined. Sayali Goyal, a textile visual artist, discusses natural dyes, mechanisation and the line between inspiration and extraction, and why communities should have a say in how their knowledge is represented and sold.