11 September 2025 14:30 – 17:00 | Session leaders: Jane Tynan and Emma Huffman
The fashion industry makes various commitments to environmental sustainability but what does this mean in practice? Can we continue to consume non-renewable textile materials? A system locked into environmental unsustainability is shown in the lack of transparency about links between fossil fuels and textile materials. Given that the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles aims to ensure that by 2030 all textile products use recycled fibres free of hazardous substances (European Commission, 2022), this session explores the environmental cost of synthetic textiles used in everyday clothing. We invite participants to engage in direct sensory engagement with textile materials as a route to carbon literacy. Collective sense-making brings people into a tactile relationship with textiles but also disrupts the fashion industry’s reliance on image to sell clothes.
The session was part of the Conviviality, Fashion & Networking event at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. : https://vu.nl/en/events/2025/conviviality-fashion-networking
Emma Fukuwatari Huffman 