A few weeks ago I met V, a Year 11 student who is developing their own project and had read something I had written about the FM Circular Fashion IQ Index. Their questions had me thinking about what a graduate will need for the future. In this post I turn their questions into reflections for others.
Who enters the industry and how
There is no longer one way to work in the industry, and perhaps there never was. The Business of Fashion podcast episode Is Fashion School Still Worth It, released on 23 July 2026, is a case in point.[3] Dan Hastings and Sheena Butler-Young begin from the observation that artificial intelligence is changing how entry-level work gets done while growth slows across the sector.
UCAS data puts the United Kingdom alone at more than two hundred bachelor’s level fashion courses, producing close to five thousand fashion design graduates a year into a market Hastings does not believe is ready for them, and those graduates compete not only with each other but with everyone from previous years who has not yet found work. Unpaid internships remain the route to experience, which means student loans have widened access to the degree without widening access to what follows it, while working class students are often locked out of the system altogether.
Hastings’s argument is that the schools that still open the most coveted doors in industry do it through small cohorts, rigorous teaching and sustained contact with working professionals. The United Kingdom collects data on intake and output and while Australia does also, fashion completions sit inside broader creative arts and design categories while vocational completions (ie:TAFE) are reported separately again, so nobody publishes the number of people we train for the sector each year or what becomes of them.[4] The UTS/TAFE NSW WORK report can tell us that the industry employs more than five hundred thousand people and that it is short of machinists and patternmakers, but it is extremely difficult to know how many graduates enter the sector against that shortage.
At the same time, Roy Morgan’s Future of Retail FY27 address, reported in Ragtrader in June, describes Australian retail as a barbell.[5] Premium retailers are winning through specialisation, experience and desire, value retailers through price certainty, familiarity, geographic spread and reliability, and the middle is under pressure because it asks customers to pay more without giving them enough reason to do so.
Between late April and late May 2026, clothing spending fell 2.9 per cent year on year and footwear fell hardest at 4.1 per cent, while personal entertainment rose 24.3 per cent and sporting equipment 16.1 per cent. The price floor is dropping at the same time, with more than five million Australians shopping at Temu over twelve months despite it being the most distrusted online retailer in the country, which resets what people expect to pay for everything else.[5]
For graduates: What that leaves you is the requirement to be able to give someone a reason, which means being able to tell them what you make, how, and from what. Build the portfolio of skills that lets you do it, and accept that making is one of them, alongside marketing, networking and the patience to explain your work to people who have not thought about it before.
Verification is arriving before you do
Verification is coming. Verification itself is not new, schemes already exist for where fibre is grown, whether it is organic, and how it is processed. From 2027 the European Union’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation begins to apply to textiles, with digital product passports attached to the products themselves, and anyone selling into that market will need to demonstrate performance against a defined set of requirements rather than assert it.[1]
The problem for a graduate, or for a small label, is cost as neither you nor I can spend twenty thousand dollars on certification. What we can do is document what we do in a structured way from the beginning, so that the evidence exists in a usable form at the point someone asks for it, and so that it can be collected into an archive reachable through a digital product passport. That is what the FM Circular Fashion IQ Index is built to do: make circular capability visible and verifiable by converting it into a structured, evidence-tiered score.
For the graduate: From March 2027, any documentation of your process is something you should do at the time rather than afterwards. The decisions that drive your design will need to be validated and it is much easier to do that from the start!!
Sourcing is the constraint nobody warns you about
V asked how they should go about finding deadstock fabrics, particularly denim, because they want to make their own pieces without buying new material. We have seen the rise of the business Circular Sourcing, but are there other reliable supply lines? Sourcing can be so difficult that it becomes a real constraint on a designer’s time.
For the graduate: For denim specifically, I would start with the circular sourcing networks, keep watching Marketplace, and think differently about the material itself. Second-hand jeans are hard to resell because fit is personal to the wearer, so buy them, take them apart, and hold on to the tags, zips, belt loops and rivets as design features. It takes time, but it produces a story that becomes part of the garment.
Repair is not just repair
V and I compared our exposure to textiles from an early age. They used the phrase “just repair” when describing their family enterprise and I stopped them. Their cultural background is a growing asset and should be seen as such. While repair is growing, you cannot mend a garment without understanding how it was designed, what it is made of and how it fails. Most people do not know what they are wearing, nor do they know how a garment has been put together or how it could be brought back. That gap is a market, named in the UTS/TAFE NSW WORK report, describing the Artisanal Practitioner as a role that combines tailoring, mending, material literacy and the running of local repair and remake services.[2]
For a graduate: if you can find the people who still hold that knowledge, and if you are open to being taught, you will acquire something your course cannot give you and most of your cohort will not have. The exchange also runs both ways, as the generation retiring did not train on digital pattern systems and the generation arriving has rarely finished a buttonhole by hand. Neither is complete on its own so seek out the people who know and offer them what you know in return.
Where the clothes are actually made
Almost everything Australians wear is made in the Global South, and the countries that make it hold most of the world’s working manufacturing knowledge along with the livelihoods that depend on it. Building sovereign capability doesn’t change that, it changes the balance of what a country can make for itself, what it chooses to source elsewhere, and on what terms.
That makes the Global South a subject to understand rather than a place a supply chain passes through. Graduates need to spend the time to understand who makes the fabric, under what conditions, at what wage, with what capacity for the volumes being proposed, and what happens to those workers. WORK names sustainable sourcing and supply chain roles among its twenty for this reason.
When V said that drawing on their Vietnamese heritage would produce something different, they were inadvertently speaking to the past and the future. Vietnam is among the largest garment producers in the world, with approximately seven thousand textile and garment enterprises and a textile waste stream estimated at more than two million tonnes a year. Syre has recently announced a one billion US dollar textile-to-textile recycling plant in central Vietnam to turn polyester waste into regenerated fibre, with Nike as a partner.[8]
For the graduate: take the time to understand both ends of the industry - the making of garment and the accounting for them. These skills will be truly valuable in future systems and if you are building your skills here while deciding to be circular from the beginning, all while understanding how you will work with global supply chains, you will have a very strong combination of the knowledges required for future practice.
What you bring to it
My mother is a tailor, and my father was a carpenter/shopfitter, both Italian migrants. My great-grandmother was a hemp weaver, and I have a piece of cloth that she wove for my grandmother’s wedding. It was given to my mother, my mother gave it to me, and it will go to my daughter and to my granddaughters. It is a piece of fabric that tells me where I come from, and it is also a record of skill passed hand to hand across four generations, which is the same transmission problem the sector is now trying to solve at industrial scale.
Relationships between generations, cultures and knowledge matter. Australia is now on a path to build the manufacturing capability it spent decades giving away, and the people who will staff it are in their final year of high school or university today. Understanding verification, sourcing, circularity, repair and a working understanding of global manufacturing are some of the terms of entry.
I still carry a tape measure in my bag, fifty years after being measured up for everything my mother made, and it has never occurred to me to take it out.
Acknowledgement
My thanks to V who asked such sharp questions and who has read and approved this account of our conversation. They are already sourcing their own materials and thinking about where they come from. We wish them all the best.
References
Butler-Young, S. (Host), & Hastings, D. (2026, July 23). Is fashion school still worth it? [Audio podcast episode]. In The Debrief. Business of Fashion. https://www.businessoffashion.com/podcasts/workplace-talent/is-fashion-school-still-worth-it/
Department of Education. (2025). Selected higher education statistics: 2024 student data. Australian Government. https://www.education.gov.au/higher-education-statistics/student-data/selected-higher-education-statistics-2024-student-data
European Union. (2024). Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 establishing a framework for the setting of ecodesign requirements for sustainable products. Official Journal of the European Union.
Kelly, C. (2026, June 2). Why mid-priced fashion brands are really struggling. Ragtrader. https://www.ragtrader.com.au/news/why-mid-priced-fashion-brands-are-really-struggling
Niinimäki, K., Peters, G., Dahlbo, H., Perry, P., Rissanen, T., & Gwilt, A. (2020). The environmental price of fast fashion. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 1, 189–200. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-020-0039-9
University of Technology Sydney & TAFE NSW Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Fashion and Textiles. (2025). WORK: Fashion + sustainability jobs of the future. UTS.
Vietnam Trade Office in Sweden. (2026, May). Opportunities for textile waste recycling sector to grow. https://en.vietnordic.com/2026/05/opportunities-for-textile-waste-recycling-sector-to-grow/
VietnamPlus. (2025, November 24). Syre plans to build ‘gigascale’ textile recycling plant in central Vietnam. https://en.vietnamplus.vn/syre-plans-to-build-gigascale-textile-recycling-plant-in-central-vietnam-post333106.vnp
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
[1]Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 establishes the framework for ecodesign requirements and the digital product passport; delegated acts for priority product groups, including textiles, are being phased in from 2027 (European Union, 2024).
[2]University of Technology Sydney & TAFE NSW Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Fashion and Textiles (2025). The report draws on a modified Delphi study with 29 Australian industry experts alongside a systematic literature review.
[4]Fashion sits within ASCED broad field 10 (Creative Arts), narrow field 1007 (Graphic and Design Studies) in the Department of Education’s higher education student data collection, alongside graphic and interior design; vocational completions are reported separately through NCVER. Neither publishes a fashion-specific annual completions figure (Department of Education, 2025).
[5]Kelly (2026, June 2), reporting Roy Morgan’s Future of Retail FY27 address and the commentary of its head of retail research, Catherine Jolly.
[6]Niinimäki et al. (2020) set out the material and environmental costs of the fast fashion model.
[7]Vietnam Trade Office in Sweden (2026), reporting a 2025 GIZ survey of fabric scrap volumes in Vietnamese textile and garment manufacture.
[8]VietnamPlus (2025). Syre’s plant is described as gigascale, processing tens of thousands of tonnes of textile waste a year into regenerated polyester feedstock.