Participatory Design and Ethical Labour Dominate Discourse at FTSC 2025 Gathering

Patsy Perry, Reader in Fashion Marketing at Manchester Fashion Institute, delivered the keynote 'Relational Autonomy and the Future of Meaningful Work in the Global Garment Industry' at FTSC 2025. Her research illuminates the structural complexities of fashion's global supply chains and the limitations of corporate social responsibility frameworks.

Your research on corporate social responsibility has illuminated the structural complexities of fashion's global supply chains. In the current climate, do you see meaningful shifts towards more just and transparent systems, or are we still entangled in cycles of reputational management rather than reform?
Modern day sweatshops in global fashion supply chains were exposed in the 1990s and despite a surge of corporate social responsibility and multistakeholder initiatives over the years, ethical scandals still occur at all levels of the market. This signals the limitations of top-down supply chain interventions such as corporate or ethical codes of conduct in an industry characterised by opaque supply chains, negative buying practices that exert cost and speed pressure on manufacturers, and enduring labour intensity of production which is largely carried out by female workers who face multiple intersecting inequalities such as gender, class, race, and migration status. There hasn't been meaningful reform at scale and there remains inequality in the distribution of the gains from global supply chains.

The conference foregrounds fashion's potential as a tool for social change. Yet many supply chain reforms remain confined to the language of compliance rather than emancipation. How can accountability mechanisms be reimagined to centre human dignity rather than market metrics?
Supply chains are fundamentally about people, not just technologies and metrics. We need to build human relationships between buyers and suppliers and workers, that centre dignity in the process and not rely on transactional dealings that focus on compliance. Social dialogue, close collaboration and meaningful consultation with all stakeholders should be prioritised to support accountability that benefits the people that make our clothes.

If fashion is to act as an agent of transformation, what new alliances—between producers, consumers, educators, and policymakers—might redefine the ethics of value creation across the industry?
To redefine how to achieve value creation that is equitable and benefits all parties across the supply chain, we must also include community and grassroots organisations in alliances, with workers considered as central voices in the process. There needs to be a refocus on social upgrading, not only economic and environmental upgrading. Based on findings from our 3 year THRREADS project (Transforming Responsive and Relational Autonomy in the Garment Sector of the UK and Bangladesh) with researchers from University of Essex, University of Derby, Manchester Metropolitan University and Universal College Bangladesh, meaningful transformation of the sector will require integration of economic (skills, innovation, digitalisation), social (decent work, representation, equality), and environmental (resource efficiency, circularity) upgrading. Sustainable economic growth and high-quality innovation in the industry must prioritise worker dignity, fair pay, and safe conditions. Suppliers need to be supported by fair pricing and shared responsibility for ethical value creation.

Francesco Mazzarella, Reader in Design for Social Change at London College of Fashion, presented 'Weaving the Threads of Social Change' at FTSC 2025. His scholarship on 'design from the margins' explores how creative practice can empower excluded communities and challenge colonial legacies embedded in fashion systems.

Your scholarship on 'design from the margins' explores how creative practice can empower excluded communities. In that context, what have you learnt about the social and psychological impact of fashion when it becomes a participatory rather than extractive act?
Co-designing with people from the margins reveals fashion's transformative power when it becomes participatory rather than extractive, contributing to making fashion accessible to all, and generating positive social outcomes. The participatory practice of fashion design and making can enable skills building, creative development, self-expression, self-confidence, pride, and improve mental health and wellbeing. Throughout my research, I have also witnessed how collaborative creative practice can foster collective agency, strengthen community ties, and contribute to the preservation of cultural heritages and traditional crafts.

In thinking of fashion as a tool for social change, how can design activism move beyond protest aesthetics to create sustained, systemic transformation—where design becomes governance rather than gesture?
Design activism means challenging the status quo and address social justice. This can be done through both individual and collective action, by those calling for change based on personal experiences and those working in solidarity of others who are exploited or marginalised. For instance, we are witnessing an increasing number of movements (like Fashion Revolution, XR Fashion, Fashion Act Now) and designers (e.g., Orsola de Castro, Lucia Cuba, Céline Semaan, Sarah Corbett, Bethany Williams, Layla Tyabji) playing an activist role, contributing to systemic change. The focus of their work shifts from the material and aesthetic aspects of fashion towards rethinking the fashion system or advocating for change in society, through fashion.

What would a truly decolonised fashion ecosystem look like to you—one that not only diversifies representation but redistributes authorship, ownership, and narrative power?
Fashion has often been an instrument of colonialism, exporting aesthetics, material cultures, erasing identities and traditional cultural practices. Decolonising fashion means challenging colonial legacies of oppression and exploitation, decentring the fashion system through critical research, cultural plurality, and communication of often untold stories, foregrounding indigenous knowledge, beyond Western logics. Overall, a decolonised fashion ecosystem would move beyond token diversity to achieve epistemic justice—where plural worldviews co-exist, and shape how we make, teach, and value fashion. This means redistributing authorship, ownership, and narrative power to those whose creative labour and cultural practices have long been misappropriated or systematically marginalised.