Specials

India has taken circular fashion from pilot to production. In less than a year, its denim ecosystem has stitched recyclers, spinners, and manufacturers into a single operational loop. The result, helmed by Denim Deal, is a functioning, traceable supply chain turning waste into wear—and positioning India as the first manufacturing base to industrialise circular denim at scale.

Across Europe, fashion’s sustainability narratives are under growing scrutiny. Amid rising consumer confusion and corporate opacity, one Danish researcher and consultant has been pushing national institutions to act. At the forefront is Tanja Gotthardsen, who has taken on major platforms such as Zalando and Copenhagen Fashion Week, pressing for systemic accountability in how sustainability is defined, communicated, and enforced.

Europe’s denim industry has put data where its mouth is. A new regional collection helmed by Denim Deal shows that traceability, accountability, and aesthetics can function as one production system. By hard-coding transparency into every stage of design and manufacture, European mills have turned circularity from experiment into standard practice across their factory floors.

In Surat’s textile maze, there’s a fast fashion player going sustainable with almost zero minimums, made-to-order fabrics, and size-inclusive garments shipped across India and beyond. Flipping the bulk-first playbook, from one metre to a multi-crore business, Fabcurate’s small-batch smarts with print, cut, stitch, ship is scaling big as it rewrites the e-commerce rulebook.

The conversation around denim is shifting from surface aesthetics to systemic responsibility. In this changing landscape, Carme Santacruz, Creative Director and Senior Denim Designer at Jeanologia, discusses how designers can balance creativity, technology, and emotion while pursuing sustainable transformation, ensuring that new processes respect heritage, enable experimentation, and keep the human essence of denim alive in a digital future.

Circular denim has stepped out of concept decks and onto the hanger. At the recent Kingpins Amsterdam show, an international alliance of mills and recyclers helmed by Denim Deal unveiled full collections proving that post-consumer cotton can compete on price, quality, and design. What was once sustainability rhetoric is now a ready-to-order reality for the industry.

India’s cotton story is fraying. Once the world’s largest producer, it now harvests less from more. Fields are shrinking, farmers are quitting, and seeds have stood still. The crop that once wove India’s textile strength now risks unravelling under policy paralysis, poor yields, and disjointed priorities from farm to factory.

From a 90-day credit norm to 250 and counting, India’s textile market has turned into a waiting game. One jolt followed another — demonetisation, GST, lockdowns, wild cotton swings. Through it all, Gujarat’s textile heartland endures, with traders and manufacturers like Gaurang Bhagat and his LB Tex battling to keep India’s fabric trade from tearing apart.

A riven industry, dumping from China, GST mismatch, need for a uniform countrywide textile policy, the scourge that is fake billing — in spite of it all and more, the enormous potential that this ancient warpwork holds is shackled by systemic inefficiencies, implores Gaurang Bhagat, Treasurer at the Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) and Founder of the ₹1000-crore LB Tex.

Surat-based Man Made Textiles Research Association or MANTRA is one of the eight national level Textiles Research Associations (TRAs) and one among the leading in man-made fibres. While the key focus is the textile industry in the synthetic capital of the country, it works on the overall textile development and on technical textiles in general. In conversation with Director Dr Arup Rakshit.