photo: Rosina Possingham
Have you ever left a shop knowing how to make the garment you just bought, last?
Last week I wrote about Dr Kate Sansome's Clothing Longevity and Circular Textiles in South Australia, and the gap it documents between intent and participation: South Australians know about resale, repair and rental, but have trouble finding the pathways into these services.[1]
A few days later I came across an article by Dr Ricardo O'Nascimento that explores the design-side answer to Kate's consumer-side diagnosis. Ricardo’s reflection on the retail research session at the Design Research Society (DRS 2026) conference in Edinburgh gathers new work on the impact of retail environments on material knowledge, care and circularity.[2]
Reading the two reports together, five synergies emerge that lead to actions we can all take this month.
The shop is where pathways become visible, or they don't
Kate's report finds that the barriers to circular participation are access, awareness and unclear pathways; her strongest recommendation is infrastructure connecting people to local repair, swap and resale services. Ricardo’s article shows that retail doesn't merely inform people: it choreographs attention, trust and habit, and it either highlights circularity or hides it. A repair desk beside the till, a take-back point, a care label a person can read and understand, a record that persists after purchase: these are the retail-native versions of the visibility Kate's respondents lacked. Her data even shows that these initiatives pay off, since the one garment in ten that gets repaired stays in use 2.5 years longer.
Dormant wardrobes and hidden warehouses
One of the quietly radical moves in Kate's report is treating the wardrobe as a material stock rather than a collection of purchases: 77 per cent of her respondents hold clothing unworn in the past year, around a quarter of the typical wardrobe sits dormant, and the industry experts she interviewed offered the rule of thumb that 20 per cent of a wardrobe does 80 per cent of the wearing.
Ricardo’s article provides similar insights from the industry side. Alexander and Varley's review shows that a fashion retail outlet’s own fit-outs, fixtures and pop-up formats are an under-examined material system themselves. Refurbishment produces cycles of waste streams: consider any renovation work you have ever done and the skip full of materials that follows. This happens over and over again in retail environments, so a store that sells recycled-fibre garments will often do so by tearing out and discarding the last shop fit-out.[3]
By contrast, circular product-service systems such as that described by Ma et al. illustrate what accountability can look like when it is built into retail processes: labelled materials, trackable storage, and a live digital inventory, which at one Google event in Shanghai saw 190 of 300 items returned and almost 95 per cent of those returns reused.[4] The shared insight is that material that can't be seen might as well not exist, whether it's dormant in a household wardrobe or dispersed after a product launch. Stock that stays knowable stays usable.
I’m going to take a little detour here. One of my first jobs in Sydney circa 1992 was the refurbishment of the Capitol Theatre in Haymarket. I loved that job. I spent the day walking the scaffolding, detailing plaster decorations so that they could be remade, should they be destroyed in the refurbishment process. I remember that each of the ceiling joists was both numbered and named. From memory, one was called M9, otherwise known as George.
They were enormous pieces of timber, both structurally and culturally important. [8] Heritage conservation has been connecting material to its heritage for decades. Perhaps this archaeological approach to garments can teach us something, but I digress.
Care has numbers and now it has a design surface
Kate quantifies what care is worth: washing frequency alone separates a five-year garment from an eleven-year one, and gifted second-hand items, the ones carrying attachment, last longest of all at up to 14 years.
The work Ricardo gathers supplies the settings where those behaviours could be shaped before they occur: fitting-room interfaces that explain alteration and resale, product pages honest about fibre and ageing, receipts that work as maintenance records rather than dead documents.
The Hong Kong adaptive-reuse cases recorded in his article make the emotional point from the other direction: materials that keep their histories keep their meaning, which is Kate's gifted-garment finding rendered as interior design.[5]
From customers to participants
There is an important generational finding in Kate's report: younger South Australians, and men across age groups, report strong willingness to learn repair but low confidence, and her interviewees were clear that they wanted to learn through social, community settings rather than formal training.
Ricardo’s article discusses a study of coffee shop regulars that arrives at the same social logic from a completely different direction: long-term regulars stopped being customers and became participants, contributing ideas, joining tastings, shaping the place they kept returning to.[6]
This active circular participation is the relationship circular retail needs to cultivate as repair, resale, alteration and return are all activities that people connect with a business over time, not transactions they complete once.
Kent and Alexander's longitudinal work adds a practical note: the technology shift in stores has been towards the device already in the customer's hand, which suggests circular interfaces should be modest and habitual (a scan that surfaces repair instructions) rather than spectacular.[7] Kate's proposed platform connecting South Australians to local circular services is precisely that kind of modest, habit-shaped infrastructure.
Both refuse the easy story
Importantly, neither piece treats circularity as a communication problem. Kate's report doesn't recommend telling South Australians to care more; they already care, and her recommendations are infrastructural. Ricardo is equally blunt that retail design can't fix overproduction, and that a calming store full of biophilic materials guarantees nothing about labour, durability or actual recirculation.
Both arrive at the same discipline: build the systems that make circular practice knowable and reachableand stop mistaking messaging for infrastructure.
That is the legibility argument again, now running from the factory through the shop floor to the wardrobe, and it points towards garments that can eventually carry their own records of composition, care and repair with them through their lives.
What you can do
Both documents reward action, so here is what we can do this month:
Open the dormant quarter. Pull out everything you haven't worn in a year. You'll likely find about a quarter of your wardrobe there; decide what returns to use, what gets gifted, and what goes to a swap or resale.
Repair one garment. Only one in ten ever is, and repaired garments stay in use 2.5 years longer. If your skills are rusty, look for a community repair event rather than a tutorial
Wash less and colder. Washing frequency is one of the strongest levers in the data: moving a garment from weekly washing towards airing and spot-cleaning can more than double its active life.
Give clothes with stories. Gifted garments, especially second-hand ones, last longest of all: attachment is a durability technology.
Ask the shop. Next time you buy, ask what happens after: repairs, alterations, take-back. Retailers count questions, and Ricardo’s article shows the interfaces exist when businesses choose to build them.
I'll be looking at retail interfaces with fresh eyes during my field research at European circular textile hubs later this year, and thus these two documents have become travelling companions. My thanks to Ricardo for a generous piece of conference reporting, and to Kate, again, for giving this state the evidence to act on.
About the author
Angelina Russo, PhD, MBAHEM is the Founder, Fleurieu Made, a circular knitwear label using vintage yarns, and the FM Circular Fashion IQ Index, a procurement verification platform for circular fashion practice. She is a 2025 Green Industries SA Women in Circular Economy Leadership Fellow, currently undertaking field research at circular textile hubs. Her fellowship research is examining the manufacturing and infrastructure models that support circular textile production at scale. Adelaide University 2025 Venture Catalyst Alumna. Contact angelina@fleurieumade.com | www.fleurieumade.com
Notes
[1] Sansome, K. (2026). Clothing longevity and circular textiles in South Australia. Green Industries SA. https://www.greenindustries.sa.gov.au/documents/clothing-longevity-circular-textiles-sa-ksansome.pdf
[2] O'Nascimento, R. (2026, July). Retail after the purchase: Designing for material knowledge, care, and slower consumption. Medium. https://ricardoonascimento.medium.com/retail-after-the-purchase-designing-for-material-knowledge-care-and-slower-consumption-daf49eb72f72
[3] Alexander, B., & Varley, R. (2026). Mapping the opportunity for circularity in fashion retail design and fit-out. In L. Simeone et al. (Eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh. Design Research Society. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1198
[4] Ma, K., Valsecchi, F., Tan, Y., Ji, M., Shen, J., Ma, X., Wu, D., Mo, J., & Zhao, S. (2026). A 4R-supported circular product–service system for luxury branded events. In L. Simeone et al. (Eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh. Design Research Society. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2754
[5] Chan, A., & Serrano, V. M. (2026). Between consumption and care: Restorative design and cultural memory in Hong Kong coffee shops. In L. Simeone et al. (Eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh. Design Research Society. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1665
[6] Münster, M. B., Matheny, R., & Raahauge, K. M. (2026). Becoming a coffee shop regular: Factors shaping regularity in contemporary coffee shops. In L. Simeone et al. (Eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh. Design Research Society. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.587
[7] Kent, A., & Alexander, B. (2026). Consumer-facing technologies in stores: A longitudinal study of their impact on customer experience. In L. Simeone et al. (Eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh. Design Research Society. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.943
[8] Capitol Theatre, Sydney. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Theatre,_Sydney