Fashion is rarely the first industry that comes to mind when thinking about climate solutions.
We often associate sustainability with renewable energy, electric vehicles, carbon accounting, or environmental policy. Yet the clothes we wear every day are connected to some of the world’s most significant environmental challenges, from water consumption and carbon emissions to waste generation, microplastic pollution, and global supply chains that stretch across continents.
In my conversation with Caterina, a fashion designer and sustainability researcher whose work spans Italy and China, I learned how sustainable design, circular economy principles, and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence could help transform one of the world’s most resource-intensive industries.
More importantly, our discussion revealed that creating a sustainable future for fashion isn’t simply about choosing different materials. It’s about rethinking entire systems of production, consumption, and design.
When Fashion Lost Its Shine
Caterina’s journey into sustainability began during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a student studying fashion design, she initially viewed the industry through the lens many people associate with it: creativity, luxury, aesthetics, and innovation. But as she progressed through her education and gained a closer look at how the industry operates, she began noticing the dark side of this fancy system.
Behind the polished storefronts and runway collections were enormous amounts of waste.
A large number of prototypes were made and discarded after short periods of use. Materials were thrown away. Products were designed for short lifespans. The deeper she looked, the more she realized that many of the systems underlying fashion were fundamentally unsustainable, following a linear model of consumption: Take-Make-Waste. This realization shifted her focus.
Instead of pursuing traditional fashion design pathways centered on luxury brands and seasonal collections, she became interested in understanding how design itself could become part of the solution.
This perspective eventually led her into specialized master’s programs focused on the fashion system, sustainability, circular economy principles (10 Rs), lifecycle assessment, and innovation.
As Caterina explained, sustainability in fashion extends far beyond simply choosing environmentally friendly materials. It involves understanding supply chains, consumer behavior, product longevity, manufacturing systems, traceability and transparency, and even emotional relationships between people and the products they own.
The Hidden Environmental Cost of Clothing
One of the most striking parts of our conversation was learning how complex and resource-intensive modern clothing production can be. Most consumers encounter fashion only at the final stage of its journey: a finished product hanging on a store rack, or images on an online store.
What remains largely invisible is the extensive global process required to create that product.
A cotton shirt, for example, may involve cotton cultivation in one country, fiber processing (spinning, weaving, dyeing) in other regions, cutting and sewing in yet another factory, and finally transportation across multiple continents before reaching consumers.
The latter phase often means a garment or accessory travels multiple times across the globe before reaching consumers. A pair of jeans can travel up to 65,000 km total distance, which is equivalent to 1.6 x Earth’s circumference.
The environmental impacts accumulate throughout every stage:
- Water consumption during cotton cultivation,
- Fiber processing, dyeing, and finishing
- Chemical use during the wash
- Energy consumption
- Transportation emissions across global supply chains
- Waste generation throughout production
Caterina emphasized that a single cotton T-shirt can require about 2,700 liters of water before reaching the final consumer. Yet despite these substantial impacts, many garments are only worn a handful of times before being discarded.
This highlights what she believes is one of fashion’s greatest sustainability challenges: the industry’s largely linear model of production and consumption.
Resources are extracted, transformed into products, consumed briefly, and ultimately discarded. A truly sustainable system, she argues, would look fundamentally different.
From Linear to Circular Thinking
Throughout our conversation, Caterina repeatedly emphasized the importance of adopting a circular mindset. In a circular system, materials are not viewed as disposable resources. Instead, products are designed with their next life already in mind. Materials are reused, repaired, repurposed, remanufactured, or recycled rather than becoming waste. This shift requires designers to think differently from the very beginning of the design process.
One concept she highlighted was designing for end-of-life. Rather than asking only: “What can I create?” Designers should also ask: “What happens when this product is no longer used?”
Can its components be separated easily?
Can the materials be recycled?
Can it be repaired?
Can it be transformed into something new?
These questions fundamentally change how products are designed. In many ways, sustainability begins long before consumers ever purchase a product.
Why Upcycling Is More Complex Than It Appears
Much of Caterina’s research focuses on upcycling textile waste, particularly post-consumer cotton garments, in her Master’s thesis.
Upcycling differs from traditional recycling because, instead of breaking materials down into raw inputs, existing products are transformed directly into new products with greater value.
At first glance, upcycling appears to be an obvious environmental win. However, Caterina explained that the reality is often more complicated. Many upcycled products combine multiple materials, adhesives, paints, decorations, and treatments that make future recycling more difficult.
In some cases, a product may become less recyclable after being upcycled. This realization influenced her master’s thesis, where she created an upcycled collection using pre-loved, discarded cotton garments while maintaining a mono-material approach.
By working primarily with cotton, she aimed to preserve the possibility of future recycling after the garment reached the end of its next lifecycle. This reflects a broader lesson from circular design:
A solution is only sustainable if it remains sustainable throughout future stages of its life.
In fact, Ecodesign, EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility), and DPP (Digital Product Passports) are at the core of today’s EU textile policies. Along with the mandatory Sustainability Reporting, a radical transition towards sustainable practices is occurring.
The Myth of the Perfect Sustainable Material
One of the most interesting misconceptions Caterina encounters is the idea that there may be a single “best” sustainable material.
Consumers often assume that plant-based leathers, recycled materials, or bio-based alternatives are automatically superior to conventional options.
The reality is far more nuanced. Many innovative materials made from agricultural, waste, or plant-derived inputs still contain synthetic additives that prevent biodegradation.
Likewise, recycled materials do not always perform better environmentally than virgin materials. Caterina pointed to emerging research suggesting that some recycled synthetic fibers may release even greater quantities of microplastics than newly produced alternatives.
These findings illustrate why sustainability requires continuous evaluation rather than assumptions.
The question is rarely: “Is this material sustainable?” Instead, the more useful question is: “Compared to what, under which conditions, and across what timeframe?” There are rarely simple answers.
The Most Sustainable Garment May Already Be in Your Closet
Perhaps the most memorable idea from our conversation was one frequently cited by sustainable fashion advocate, Orsola de Castro: “The most sustainable garment is the one already in your wardrobe.”
Consumers often focus on purchasing more sustainable products while overlooking a simpler solution: extending the life of products they already own. Even if a garment is made from polyester or another imperfect material, continuing to wear it for years may generate a lower overall environmental impact than replacing it with a newly manufactured “sustainable” alternative.
This shifts sustainability away from consumption and toward longevity. Repairing, reusing, donating, reselling, and sharing clothing can often have greater environmental benefits than constantly purchasing newer products marketed as environmentally friendly.
What AI Could Mean for Sustainable Fashion
Another major focus of Caterina’s work is artificial intelligence. Her master’s thesis explored AI-assisted upcycling design, using AI tools as creative collaborators (Creativity Support Tools – CSTs) throughout the design process.
Instead of generating final products automatically, AI helped support brainstorming, concept development, draping experimentation, and visualization. It was a back-and-forth “phygital” process: starting from physical garments disassembling, designer and/or AI recomposition, further physical experimentation, multimodal prompts, and then finally getting a human-crafted collection.
For designers working with unique waste materials, this capability is particularly valuable. Because every discarded garment is different, designers cannot easily predict outcomes using traditional methods. AI enables them to explore possibilities digitally before investing time and resources into physical prototypes. This can reduce material waste while accelerating experimentation.
However, Caterina is careful to distinguish between responsible and irresponsible uses of AI. She believes AI should function as a tool that augments human creativity rather than replacing it. “The human must remain in the loop,” she emphasized.
Designers provide the intention, context, values, and judgment. AI simply assists the process. Beyond fashion design itself, she is equally exploring AI’s broader sustainability applications. Many sustainability professionals are already using AI to analyze complex datasets, optimize logistics, improve resource efficiency, model future scenarios, and support decision-making. In these contexts, AI becomes less about generating images and more about helping people understand and manage complex systems. Thus, accelerating sustainable development rather than making (ultra) fast fashion even faster.
Learning from East to West
Caterina’s academic journey also allowed her to study and work in both Italy and China. This experience exposed her to different approaches to design, manufacturing, and sustainability.
In Europe, she observed a strong emphasis on design thinking, storytelling, craftsmanship, and cultural heritage. In China, she encountered extraordinary manufacturing capabilities, rapid technological innovation, and large-scale production infrastructure.
Many sustainable innovations today struggle to scale because the manufacturing systems that could support them do not yet exist. Countries with advanced production capabilities may ultimately play a crucial role in bringing sustainable materials and technologies to global markets. For Caterina, meaningful progress will require greater collaboration across communities, regions, industries, and disciplines.
The sustainability transition cannot happen in isolation.
Educating Consumers for a Sustainable Future
Outside of her academic work, Caterina volunteers with Textiles UnTangled (Green Donut and Paris 2050 Workshop), an educational initiative that helps people better understand fashion’s environmental impacts.
What makes the program unique is its approach. Facilitators guide discussions that encourage individuals to reflect on their own consumption habits and assumptions.
The goal is not to tell people what to think.
The goal is to help them ask better questions.
Where was this garment made?
What materials were used?
How long will I wear it?
What happens when I no longer need it?
By fostering curiosity and collective intelligence rather than prescribing solutions, programs like these help build environmental literacy among consumers. And as Caterina noted, introducing these conversations early may be particularly important. Young people are often more open to adopting circular mindsets and imagining alternative systems of consumption.
Designing the Future
What stood out most from my conversation with Caterina was her systems-oriented perspective. She does not view sustainability as a material problem alone. Nor does she view technology as a silver bullet. Instead, she sees sustainability as an ongoing process of redesigning relationships between products, people, materials, technology, and the environment.
Her work sits at the intersection of creativity, innovation, education, and systems thinking. Whether through circular design, AI-assisted creativity workflows, consumer education, or cross-cultural collaboration, she is exploring ways to move fashion beyond a model of extraction and disposal toward one of regeneration and longevity. The future of sustainable fashion will not be built through a single breakthrough material or technology.
It will be built by people willing to rethink how products are designed, used, valued, and ultimately reimagined. As Caterina’s work demonstrates, sustainability begins not with what we buy, but with how we think.