The Unexpected Breadth of Knowledge Sewn into Fashion

Why fashion deserves a seat at the COP31 negotiating table.

COP31 will convene in Antalya this November with Australia as President of Negotiations. It is unlikely that fashion will feature in the headline negotiating agenda, even though fashion and textiles sit at the intersection of decarbonisation, circularity, sovereign capability and cultural diplomacy. A garment is a record of what materials we can make, who we can make them with, where they are made, and who we want to be when we wear them. The case for treating fashion and textiles as a strategic sector at the climate table deserves more weight than it currently receives..

A recent piece from Imperial College London (Green, 2026), profiled the startups supported by Undaunted the climate innovation hub at the Grantham Institute - Climate Change and the Environment, directed by Alyssa Gilbert. Imperial staff and students have created seventeen sustainable fashion startups and spinouts in the last five years, many of them supported by Undaunted. The technologies on display include AI-designed textile fibres made from non-petroleum feedstocks, biodegradable sequins made from cellulose, plant-based insulation grown on regenerated UK wetlands, dyes made from algae, and enzymes engineered to recycle previously unrecyclable nylon (Green, 2026). Professor Mary Ryan observed that the UK is entering an era where vats of bacteria can synthesise planet-friendly textiles, and where atmospheric CO2 can be turned back into valuable products (as cited in Green, 2026).

However, this is not really a story about clothes. It is a story about materials science, computational design, regenerative agriculture, biotechnology, AI engineering, and circular manufacturing infrastructure, all of which happen to converge on a t-shirt. Fashion is the surface, and the depth is everything else.

Five layers of change, all visible through what we wear

Fashion is the industry that cuts through and across most others, and it provides an unusually good window into how the world is changing. Look closely at any garment and you will find five overlapping layers in motion:

• Material innovation: new fibres, finishes and construction techniques drawn from chemistry, biology and computational design;
• Manufacturing transformation: where, how, and at what scale garments are made, and what that means for sovereign capability and embedded carbon;
• Shifting social norms: how bodies are expected to move, perform, present and age in everyday life;
• Shifting societal norms: economic cycles read through what people buy, discard, resell, and hold onto;
• The projection of cultural power: fashion as a vehicle for soft power, cultural diplomacy and the global circulation of silhouettes.

Each layer has its own story and each is currently in motion.

Material innovation is the layer Imperial College London is making most visible. Where a previous generation of fashion innovation was about silhouette and surface, this generation is being driven by chemistry, biology and engineering. For example, the article names Solena Materials who are using AI to design entirely new textile fibres from non-petroleum feedstocks, and Epoch Biodesign who are using engineered enzymes to recycle nylon that has never previously been recyclable (Green, 2026). These are not fashion stories at heart, they are deeptech stories that happen to manifest in our wardrobes.

Manufacturing transformation is where decarbonisation meets sovereign capability. Australia's fashion and textile industry contributes $27.2 billion annually and employs around 489,000 people, and yet 97% of clothing and textiles are manufactured offshore (Australian Fashion Council, 2026). Australia exports its world-class wool and cotton as raw fibre and imports it back as finished product, and the missing middle of fibre processing, spinning, and advanced garment manufacturing represents lost economic opportunity, foregone jobs, and a growing climate liability where long supply chains drive embedded carbon up at every step. Regional textile hubs, near-shoring, and smart manufacturing are both industrial and climate strategy, but they are also archive strategy, since shorter supply chains generate simpler provenance records.

Shifting social norms are equally legible. The rise of activewear and technical clothing across the last two decades was not only a style trend, it was a slow rewriting of how bodies are expected to move, perform, and be photographed. Athleisure normalised the body as a site of constant low-grade optimisation, clothing became its instrument while sweat became a commodity. (Russo, 2016)

Shifting societal norms are more cyclical. Fast fashion is, among other things, a product of long economic expansions and cheap global logistics through the late nineties and into the early 2020s, while the rise of resale and secondary markets has converged with more austere economic conditions, post 2020, where the notion of a seondlife has come into its own.

The projection of cultural power is the most underestimated layer. Joseph Nye's concept of soft power, the capacity to shape preferences through attraction rather than coercion (Nye, 2004), has since been used to read everything from K-pop to the Korean Wave to the global circulation of silhouettes themselves. Korean popular culture has become, through deliberate state investment, one of the most studied contemporary examples of soft power in action, and fashion is one of its principal carriers.

From archive to leverage

Imperial is asking what materials we can make, and UTS is asking who gets to write the archive of what we have made. If fashion carries this much knowledge, who gets to read it, hold it and verify it? In a paper presented at the UTS Research Symposium in March, I argued that Digital Product Passports both record garment information and restructure the architecture of how fashion knowledge is created, held and accessed (Russo, 2026). Garments become self-documenting cultural artefacts; authority shifts from institutional gatekeepers to community-driven verifiable records; and regulation, in the form of the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, becomes a tool for transparency rather than bureaucratic overhead. Here, the garment becomes a node in a much larger system that is material, cultural, regulatory and geopolitical at once.

The breadth of knowledge sewn into fashion is not new and the infrastructure to make it legible (regulatory, technical, and evidentiary) is finally arriving. The point worth holding onto, particularly heading into COP31, is that fashion does not only reflect how the world is changing, it can also drive that change. Four levers are already operational:

• Textile hubs build sovereign capability and reduce embedded carbon by anchoring production close to fibre and demand;
• Near-shoring shortens supply chains and rebuilds manufacturing skills in places that have lost them;
• Smart manufacturing makes circular design economic at scale through digital tools, automation, and AI-assisted production;
• Verifiable archives turn compliance into transparency infrastructure that consumers, procurers and regulators can act on.

Fashion is, in this sense, both a measuring instrument and a lever for change, and that is why it deserves a seat at the climate negotiating table.

Angelina Russo is a designer, researcher, and founder of 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 in Europe. Her fellowship research is examining the manufacturing and infrastructure models that support circular textile production at scale.