Have you ever watched an industry describe its own future in real time?
Three national reports on Australian fashion and textiles
Over the past six months, Australian fashion and textiles has produced an unusually coherent paper trail. The Australian Fashion Council's National Manufacturing Strategy 2026–2036 sets the national ambition: rebuilt sovereign capability, shared manufacturing hubs, and reconstructed fibre-to-fibre circular capability.[1]
The WORK report from the UTS and TAFE NSW Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Fashion + Textiles maps who will do that work, identifying twenty future roles for which Australia currently has no curriculum.[2]
Three weeks ago Seamless, the national clothing stewardship scheme, released Evidence for change, concluding that voluntary stewardship must become mandatory and finding that Australia has no consistent national data framework to track clothing flows from production to end of life, so we cannot measure our own progress.[3]
Strategy, workforce, accountability: what to build, who will run it, who pays. But beneath all three sits a harder question. How does anyone verify that any of it is actually happening? Without a shared way of making circular claims visible and verifiable, capability stays invisible, and invisible capability can't attract investment, win contracts, or anchor policy.
Then a fourth document arrived, and it answers a significant question that impacts on all three other reports: what are we actually doing with our clothes?
Clothing longevity and circular textiles in South Australia: Kate Sansome's research
Dr Kate Sansome's Clothing Longevity and Circular Textiles in South Australia, published through the Green Industries SA Women in Circular Economy Leadership Scholarship (the same GISA program that supports my own fellowship), is the most detailed picture we have of how South Australians wear, wash, repair, store and part with their clothing.[4]
Adapting a methodology developed by WRAP in the UK, Kate surveyed 591 South Australian residents and gathered data on 2,819 individual garments, 2,364 in active use and 455 dormant, alongside in-depth interviews with consumers and industry stakeholders. That garment-level granularity is invaluable in shifting discussion beyond attitudes and into daily, documented behaviour.
How long do our clothes actually last?
Kate's findings on longevity are particularly interesting. Her reserach found that the average South Australian garment has an estimated active life of 7.7 years, but the average conceals enormous variation: coats and non-padded jackets last 17 years, socks and underwear under four.
It turns out that purpose matters as much as garment type. Merchandise and occasion wear stay in use for twelve to thirteen years, while activewear averages under six, and a functional work T-shirt lasts barely a year.
Care behaviour is one of the strongest levers we have: garments washed weekly last around five years, while the same wardrobe logic stretched to seasonal washing yields more than eleven.
These are interesting findings and are supported by the single most striking number in the report, one that relates to repair. Only one garment in ten is ever repaired, yet repaired garments stay in active use an average of 2.5 years longer. There is an emotional finding buried in the data too: gifted items, especially gifted second-hand items, last longest of all, at up to 14 years, suggesting that attachment extends garment life in ways that price does not.
Dormant clothing and the participation gap
Added to the clothing we wear and launder, there is the wardrobe we don't wear.
Seventy-seven per cent of respondents hold clothing they haven't worn in the past year; around a quarter of the typical wardrobe sits dormant, and the industry experts Kate interviewed offered the familiar rule of thumb that 20 per cent of a wardrobe accounts for 80 per cent of actual wear.
If we consider our own wardrobes, we might not find that figure so staggering yet, when Kate examined how people part with clothing, the formal circular pathways were barely touched: nearly two-thirds of respondents have never used resale or rental, almost four in five have never attended a clothing swap, and three-quarters say they're unlikely to repair or redecorate a garment.
Donation dominates, and importantly, awareness of circular models is high across the board. People know these options exist but they don't participate, and the barriers Kate identifies are limited access, low awareness of what's nearby, and unclear pathways in.
This is an important finding, the intent is there; the visibility of how to, isn't.
Five recommendations for growing circular textiles participation
Kate's five recommendations follow directly from this extensive diagnosis, and they're all things that we can consider in our own wardrobes:
- Behaviour-change campaigns that link everyday care habits to personal and financial benefit, not just environmental framing.
- Influencer and stylist partnerships that make second-hand, repair and upcycling aspirational rather than worthy.
- A South Australia-specific digital platform connecting people to local swap events, repair workshops, drop-off points and tailoring services.
- Toolkits and small grants so communities can run their own circular events.
- And repair skills built through social, community-based settings, particularly for younger people and men, who report strong willingness to learn but low confidence, and who told her plainly that connection beats formal training.
Making circular capability visible and verifiable
When you read Kate's report alongside the national documents discussed above, and the pattern completes itself.
Seamless finds that industry can't measure clothing flows; Kate finds that consumers can't see circular pathways. Both are failures of legibility, and legibility is the problem. In some ways this is a relief as I've spent the past two years working on the FM Circular Fashion IQ Index which exists to make circular capability visible and verifiable on the industry side. Kate's platform recommendation is the consumer-facing counterpart: infrastructure that turns interest into participation. Her repair finding alone (2.5 extra years of active use) shows what becomes possible when a garment's pathways are visible to the person wearing it.
Digital product passports and the view from Europe
The same questions are live in Europe, where the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation makes digital product passports a market requirement from 2027, and where Dutch circular textile practice, from Knitwear Lab to New Industrial Order, is already showing what distributed, verifiable capability looks like on the ground.[5] Notably, Seamless's own evidence base points to the mandatory schemes of France and the Netherlands as the benchmark. I'll be spending time in several European circular textile hubs later this year, and look forward to reporting on findings from there.
Why this moment matters
What excites me most about both Kate's report and its release at this time is the coherence we are witnessing. Strategy, workforce, stewardship and now household-level evidence are converging on the same insight: the circular transition will be won or lost on whether we can see it happening. Kate's report deserves to be read widely, cited in every South Australian circular textiles conversation, and acted on. My thanks to her for putting this research and to Green Industries SA for funding it through the Women in Circular Economy Leadership Fellowship.
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] Australian Fashion Council. (2026). National manufacturing strategy for Australian fashion & textiles 2026–2036. Australian Fashion Council.
[2] UTS & TAFE NSW Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Fashion + Textiles. (2025). WORK: Fashion + sustainability jobs of the future. University of Technology Sydney & TAFE NSW.
[3] Seamless. (2026, June 15). Evidence for change: Australia's circular clothing future. Clothing Stewardship Australia Ltd. https://www.seamlessaustralia.com/news/evidence-for-change
[4] Sansome, K. (2026). Clothing longevity and circular textiles in South Australia. Green Industries SA. http://greenindustries.sa.gov.au/news/research-circular-economy-opportunities-sa
[5] European Commission. (2024). Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 establishing a framework for the setting of ecodesign requirements for sustainable products (ESPR). Official Journal of the European Union.