2025 marks a turning point for the fashion industry, where innovation and sustainability are more crucial than ever. From addressing the intricate challenges of circular footwear design to redefining the resilience of global supply chains, the industry faces both immense tasks and transformative opportunities. Below, we delve into six pivotal shifts shaping fashion’s future in 2025, highlighting the solutions, partnerships, and technologies steering us toward a more sustainable and inclusive path forward.

In the evolving landscape of sustainable fashion, different types of innovators play distinct roles in advancing industry transformation. Understanding these roles helps in identifying how each contributes to sustainable practices.

The journey of fashion technology from idea to market involves a complex process known as the “innovation lifecycle”. This lifecycle is crucial for transforming cutting-edge concepts into viable, market-ready products that can revolutionise the fashion industry.

Hard tech and soft tech play complementary roles in driving sustainable transformation within the fashion industry. Hard tech, with its capital-intensive and longer development cycles, enables fundamental shifts like recycling and advanced manufacturing, while soft tech offers scalable digital solutions that deliver quicker efficiency and transparency gains. Balancing investments in both is essential to achieve systemic change and circularity.

Fashion for Good drives systemic change in the fashion industry by fostering innovation, scaling transformative technologies, and enabling circular solutions. Through strategic programmes, funding support, and multi-stakeholder collaborations, it bridges the gap between innovators and mainstream markets, addressing key challenges like capital access, market adoption, and scaling solutions for a sustainable future.

The fashion industry, valued at $1.79 trillion, urgently needs innovation to address outdated technologies that drive inefficiencies and environmental harm. Fashion for Good is fostering this transformation by supporting innovators and scaling solutions that enable brands to meet growing sustainability demands and achieve circularity goals.

With the end of 2024 approaching, we took some time to reflect on a year marked by both progress and complexity in the pursuit of sustainable innovation. It has been a pivotal year for Fashion for Good, defined by deeper collaborations with brands, suppliers, and investors to accelerate the scaling of innovations. Here are some reflections from our unique point as a global convener and catalyst for change in the fashion industry.

Fashion for Good launched the Fast Feet Grinded Collaborative pilot in 2023 with FastfeetGrinded, Target, adidas, Inditex, and Zalando to test and validate the footwear recycling process and support the uptake of recycled materials in footwear.

Back in 2019, Fashion for Good dove into the world of packaging and did an extensive exercise of mapping plastic waste flows through the fashion supply chain. Through this work, we identified three key intervention levers: reduce plastic through process innovation, close loop on existing plastics and decouple from fossil fuels. Read below the insight from our five multi-stakeholder reports and projects aimed at addressing two of these three levers.

Small to the point of invisible, extremely persistent and all around us, fibre fragments represent one of the hidden costs we pay with our garments across all market segments, from activewear to luxury, posing a risk to our ecosystems and our health. This article informs readers about the ongoing discussions regarding definitions used in the industry, as well as pathways of fibre fragments and the current solutions to mitigate their impact.

Today Fashion for Good announces the launch of the Feedstock Assessment for Biosynthetic Innovation, an initiative in collaboration with Bestseller, On and other brands aimed at accelerating the industry’s shift towards alternatives to fossil-fuel polymers. The assessment will be conducted in partnership with industry experts, the nova-Institute.