The ‘Wellbeing Wardrobe’ as a tool to promote just transitions in the fashion and textile industry

ABSTRACT

In this paper we discuss the pressing need for a just transition in one of our most environmentally and socially problematic contemporary industries: the fashion and textiles industry. We detail the current injustices in the industry, from both environmental and socio-economic standpoints, and then move on to providing some suggestions as to how these entrenched problems with the industry could be addressed. Specifically, we identify five key action areas that could take us towards a just transition for the fashion and textiles industry: establishing limits, developing new indicators, promoting fairness, implementing just modes of governance, and creating new exchange systems. We propose policy interventions in each of these five action areas and discuss how they could practically be put into practice. In doing so, we develop a novel theoretical concept for a more just version of the global fashion industry: the ‘Wellbeing Wardrobe’, which draws on wellbeing economics and de-growth thinking applied to the contemporary fashion industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Just transitions
• fashion industry
• sustainability
• wellbeing economics
• de-growth

1. Introduction

The fashion and textiles industry is widely recognised for its negative environmental and social impacts, which contribute to the industry being one of the most unsustainable in the world (Bick et al., 2018; Bocken & Short, 2021; Brydges & Hanlon, 2020; Buchel et al., 2022; Leal Filho et al., 2019; Myers, 2021; Niinimäki et al., 2020; Ro, 2020; Wicker, 2020). There is a pressing need to find ways to transition the industry to a more just and sustainable mode. However, deep challenges exist in doing so. There is a growing recognition that the growth-driven preoccupation of contemporary capitalism has led to exceeding planetary boundaries and mass environmental degradation. Post-growth concepts have emerged as a response, focusing on ensuring human wellbeing within planetary boundaries (Hankammer et al., 2021, Jackson, 2021). The idea of a wellbeing economy – a term we apply to encompass a range of growth-critical economic theories – has been proposed as a more sustainable and just version of economic growth, which puts planetary and people’s health and wellbeing in focus (Coscieme et al., 2019; Fioramonti et al., 2019, 2022). Here, we draw inspiration from wellbeing economy approaches as one way in which we can transition to a more just and sustainable mode of capitalism and consumption, with the fashion and textiles at the centre of our analysis.

We begin by identifying some of the key ways in which the global fashion industry is currently unjust and unsustainable. In doing so, we draw on a scoping literature review at the intersection of wellbeing economies (including post-growth and degrowth concepts), and sustainability transitions in the fashion and textiles sector to develop a conceptual framing of the wellbeing economies approach applied to the fashion sector. We then use the Three Horizons foresighting framework as applied in a series of participatory workshops with industry stakeholders – from research, policy, production and consumption actors in the supply chain – to envision a sustainable fashion sector and identify the innovations, actions and changes required to move form current problematic practices to a more just and sustainable future for the sector. From the results of the workshops, we link foresighted pathways to existing policy mechanisms and agendas that could define a just transition for the fashion and textiles sector.

Through this review, we identify five key elements that can guide policy and practice toward a just transition: establishing limits, developing new indicators, promoting fairness, implementing just modes of governance, and creating new exchange systems. We package our suggestions together into a conceptual framework we call the ‘Wellbeing Wardrobe’ which is a tool that can be used to help shift the fashion and textiles industry to more sustainable and just directions.

2. Theoretical foundations

2.1 An overview of fashion’s sustainability and injustice crisis

It is not controversial to say that the fashion and textiles industry is facing a sustainability crisis (Henninger et al., 2016; Brydges et al., 2022a, 2022b; Buchel et al., 2022). Dominated by the mode of ‘fast fashion’, the volume of clothing produced is increasing, the rate of clothing utilisation is decreasing (i.e. each item produced is used less) (Maldini et al., 2019). This has led to growing volumes of post-consumer garment waste, with limited effective solutions in managing these waste streams. For example, brand-led textile recycling schemes have been found to be dumping used clothing inappropriately into countries in the Global South (Lindberg, 2023). The fast fashion model was originally dominated by high-street retailers but is now increasingly driven by online platforms built on a high-speed production process whereby designers copy the latest runway styles and rapidly bring them to market (Leslie et al., 2014; Brydges et al., 2021). The environmental price and injustices linked to the fast fashion model are known to be high (Bick et al., 2018; Niinimäki et al., 2020). Worryingly, the fast fashion model that has dominated the industry for the last decades seems to be in the process of being replicated and replaced by an ultra-fast fashion model dominated by new players such as Shein (Dzhengiz et al., 2023).

Providing a summary of the (un)sustainability of the fashion sector as a whole, Dzhengiz et al. (2023) pull together notable statistics: the fashion and textiles sector has been identified as the second most polluting industry in the world after oil extraction and production (Diabat et al., 2014); the industry is associated with excessive water use and pollution (Abbas et al., 2020); and it is blamed for around 10% of annual global emissions which is more than flights and maritime shipping combined (World Bank, 2019). With respect to social justice, the picture is no better: the fashion industry has been found to entertain human rights abuses, modern slavery, unsafe working conditions, and negative health outcomes for workers (Haug & Busch, 2015; Peake & Kenner, 2020). Thus, the case for a just transition in the fashion and textile sector is clear on both environmental and social grounds (ILO, 2015; ILO, 2023).

Whilst there are many intractable ‘problems’ with the fashion and textiles industry, we wish to highlight five here. First, the sector is dominated by striking overproduction and overconsumption fuelled by growth-oriented business models and a culture of trend-driven fashion (Clark, 2008, 2019; Clarke-Sather & Cobb, 2019; Fletcher, 2010; Stringer et al., 2020). Whilst it is hard to pinpoint what is considered ‘enough’ to meet our clothing and textiles needs (Frick et al., 2021; Vladimirova, 2021), which will also vary based on livelihoods, climate, family situations and more, most consumers in the Global North, and many of the highest income consumers in emerging economies, are operating beyond the fair consumption space (Coscieme et al., 2019).

Second, there are negative effects on health and wellbeing for those who work in the industry, as well as consumers who may be exposed to dangerous products under the emerging ultra-fast fashion model (Cowley et al., 2021). There are reports of forced labour being used by factories supplying the rapidly growing fashion apps like Shein and Temu (BBC News, 2023), and the negative impacts on the health and wellbeing of poorly paid garment workers are well documented. These range beyond health and safety issues in dangerous workplaces to encompass exhaustion and ill health resulting from exploitative practices in the global fashion supply chain (Prentice, 2019; Prentice et al., 2018).

Third, the global fashion industry is unjust and unequal (Brydges & Hanlon, 2020; Buchel et al., 2022), partly linked to the above-mentioned exploitation and poor conditions for garment workers, but also due to the glaring gender wage gap in the industry (Vijeyarasa & Liu, 2022; Thureau et al., 2023). The global fashion industry is also environmentally unjust (Bick et al., 2018), with environmental harm inflicted upon the Global South, with some areas specialising in specific production activities – such as textile manufacturing or dyeing – and being treated as the industry’s ‘sacrifice zones’, with little care or commitment to mitigating environmental impacts of production (Niessen, 2020).

Fourth, the way the industry is governed, with concentration of power in the hands of global fashion brands, is neither participatory nor inclusive. The industry has at its heart high power imbalances (Godart, 2014; Noto La Diega, 2019) and recent developments seem to have worsened the imbalances in the sector, leaving experts to question whether the industry can indeed ever be fair (Athreya, 2022).

Finally, the current mode of the industry has limited drivers for the transformative change needed for the sector to achieve sustainability. The current business model predominantly focuses on high-volume and low-cost production: profit margins are priorities to the detriment of local environments and workforces in production centres. Sustainability programs largely operate at the margins of production. Other more intentional forms of sustainable production and consumption – what Henninger et al. (2016) call sustainable fashion, including organic fabrics, fair trade, locally made, second-hand, circular fashion, swapping, and fashion rental – exist but remain niche. Sustainable fashion makes up a small fraction of the total sector (Buchel et al., 2022; Henninger et al., 2016).

Slow fashion is another term that is used in the sustainable fashion literature to describe a system of production and consumption based upon classic design and high-quality production to produce garments that are worn, cared for, repaired and passed on (Brydges et al., 2014; Brydges, 2018; Clark, 2008; Fletcher, 2010; Leslie et al., 2014; Pookulangara & Shephard, 2013). Fashion scholars have advocated more radical transformations of the growth-oriented fashion industry and developing entirely new, purpose-driven business models that are oriented around environmental and worker wellbeing (Buchel et al., 2022; Clark, 2008; Fletcher, 2010; Thorpe, 2014). However, the mechanisms through which this radical change could be achieved are unclear.

2.2 Just transitions and the fashion industry

A ‘just transition’ is both a process and an outcome – a process that ensures that, while we are transitioning to more ecologically sound economies and societies, we also plan for positive outcomes for people and communities that will be negatively affected by our efforts to decarbonise (ILO, 2015; ILO, 2022). The outcome of a just transition is for people in jobs and occupations that are reduced or are phased out because of our transition efforts to be provided with pathways to other viable and decent employment, and social protection is available to these people on this just transition journey (ILO, 2015).

The fashion and textiles sector contributes significantly to global carbon emissions (among other environmental issues), and decarbonisation will have deep impacts on the way the sector works. These emissions, however, concentrate in the production links of the supply chain in the Global South and in activities associated with textile manufacturing (Dominish & Sharpe, 2021). Decarbonisation will create ‘hotspots’ where activities to reduce the carbon intensity of production will have a significant impact on employment – including the type and tasks of employment, as well as the quantity (ILO, 2022). This is why just transition is critical. Moving towards low or zero-carbon modes of production and consumption must consider that transition as a complex and uneven process (Wang & Lo, 2021). Some communities will bear more of the burden, and a just transition needs to recognise and address this uneven distribution of future costs and benefits, while also accounting for the ecological and social damage and impacts that have already accrued.

A rapidly growing and varied literature contains different meanings and understandings of what a just transition is. Reviewing the state of the art, Wang and Lo (2021, p. 1) present the just transition concept as comprising five main components: (1) just transition as a labour-oriented concept, (2) just transition as an integrated framework for justice, (3) just transition as a theory of socio-technical transition, (4) just transition as a governance strategy, and (5) just transition as public perception. Key to the just transition theory in the context of this paper is ensuring that the socioeconomic inequalities and injustices of the current regime are not simply transposed onto a new zero-carbon scenario; a just transition should incorporate zero poverty in addition to zero carbon (Wicker, 2020).

Just transitions literature has already been quite focussed on energy justice and climate policy (Klinsky & Dowlatabadi, 2009; Jenkins et al., 2016; Sovacool & Dworkin, 2015). Just transitions within specific industries have also been explored, such as the automotive industry, the agriculture sector, and the bioeconomy (Blattner, 2020; de Ruyter et al., 2022; Lima, 2022). The fashion and textiles industry certainly needs direction towards just transitions but has been the focus of limited exploration through this lens to date (Brydges et al., 2020; Buchel et al., 2022; Karaosman & Marshall, 2023; ILO, 2023).

The work on just transitions in the fashion and textiles sector is emerging, but what we already know raises concerns about the ability of the sector to achieve this. As Karaosman and Marshall (2023) found out, efforts by fast fashion industry incumbents towards greening the industry take place in a top-down manner, placing even more demands on manufacturing suppliers who employ low-paid workers within the industry's global supply chains. They argue that any efforts spearheaded by industry giants are deeply problematic without better inclusion of the industry’s workers at the heart of the transition. This is further evidenced by recent work by the ILO that has mapped how suppliers and manufacturers make irreconcilable trade-offs between environmental and social standards in attempting to achieve the sustainability agendas of buyers and brands (ILO, 2023).

3. Methods and approach

For the empirical work we draw on in this paper we adopted a qualitative methodology. We drew on a scoping literature review to identify and characterise both the current unsustinabilities and injustices in the fashion industry, and the elements of a well-being economies approach that could be taken forward and applied to the sector. We chose this approach because it has been found that scoping reviews are useful in rapidly assessing and synthesising available information and evidence in response to specific questions, as a way of informing current practice and policy with new concepts and identifying future research priorities (Tricco et al., 2018, Stempfle et al., 2021). The scoping review was used to derive the following research questions: first, how can the post-growth and wellbeing economy literature be applied to the fashion and textile industry? Second, how could the current fashion business models be redefined to be just and sustainable? And third, what are the key policy pathways for achieving this? The scoping literature review involved keyword searches for academic articles and books with the following terms ‘degrowth’, ‘planetary boundaries’, ‘doughnut economy’, ‘post-growth’, ‘steady state’, ‘wellbeing economy’. A further search within this literature added ‘fashion’, ‘textiles’ and ‘apparel’. This search produced over 100 results and was further supplemented by grey literature as well as key research articles on the sustainability of the fashion and textile sector (see Sharpe & Retamal, 2021 for further details).

Through the scoping literature review we identified common objectives and attributes of the wellbeing economies literature, and then applied these to the existing practices in the fashion and textiles sector. The aim was to highlight limitations of current practices but also identify areas where existing strategies and practices can be expanded and/ or strengthen towards wellbeing economy objectives, including a just transition for the sector (Table 1).

Table 1. List of participant organisations.

Participant Organisation	Type of organisation	Location
1	Alliance of organisations and individuals (focus on wellbeing)	International
2	Environmental organisation	Norway
3	Fashion activist group	International
4	Garment production company	Romania
5	Independent think-thank	Sweden
6	Network of companies	EU
7	Network of environmental citizens’ organisations	EU
8	Network of environmental NGOs	International
9	Network of fashion scholars	International
10	Network of independent consumer organisations	EU
11	Network of researchers and activists	international
12	Network of textile labs	EU
13	Network organisation (focus on labour)	International
14	Organisation to accelerate transition	International
15	Policy organisation	International
16	Policy organisation	International
17	Policy organisation (focus on environment)	EU
18	Policy organisation (focus on labour)	International
19	Policy organisation (intergovernmental)	International
20	Politician/Former MEP	EU/Scotland
21	Second-hand shopping centre	Sweden
22	Sustainable fashion association	Spain
23	Sustainable fashion consumption app	Belgium
24	Trade association focus on fashion and textile	Netherlands
25	University (Researcher /Expert)	Australia
26	University (Researcher /Expert)	Australia
27	University (Researcher /Expert)	Denmark
28	University (Researcher /Expert)	Netherlands
29	University (Researcher /Expert)	Netherlands
30	University (Researcher /Expert)	Sweden
31	University (Researcher /Expert)	Sweden
32	University (Researcher /Expert)	US

Our next step was conducting a series of participatory workshops with a range of 50 stakeholders from 32 international organisations, to gain their input regarding this puzzle of moving the fashion industry in just and sustainable directions. These workshops included a mix of research, advocacy, and policy stakeholders as well production and consumption actors in the fashion and textiles sector. The workshops were held online in January and February 2022. In these workshops we used the foresighting tool – the Three Horizons framework – to map existing practices, behaviours, and the sustainability trajectory of the fashion and textiles industry. The Three Horizons framework is a useful visual tool to support discussions about future directions of sectors where there is a high degree of uncertainty and complexity (Sharpe et al. 2016). The framework includes three curves or horizons on a chart, with time on the horizontal axis and prevalence of activities on the vertical (see Figure 1). The first curve/ horizon on the left represents current practices, the last curve/ horizon on the right represents a future transformed sector, with the middle curve including innovations and changes that can drive transformation from horizon 1–3. Using the Three Horizons framework, stakeholders envisioned a wellbeing transformation of the fashion and textile sector (Horizon 3), but also identified the ideas, innovations, and paradigm changes needed to achieve this (Horizon 2). The results of both Horizons 2 and 3 were then used to inform our application of these solutions to policy analysis and recommendations in the European context.

Figure 1. The three horizons.

4. Analysis – how to address fashion’s sustainability and justice crisis: developing the Wellbeing Wardrobe concept from the wellbeing economies literature

Several concepts have been suggested as alternative economic approaches to our current growth-focused economic model, including alternative economy, community economies, degrowth, post-growth, and steady state economies. These approaches can better address the global issues of environmental degradation and social inequality caused by the current unsustainable status quo. Taken together, we see these concepts challenging the possibility of perpetual growth, enforcing planetary boundaries, and prioritising wellbeing, equality, climate justice and sustainable livelihoods (Cosme et al., 2017; Crownshaw et al., 2019; Gibson-Graham, 2006; Hickel, 2021; Kallis, 2011; O’Neill et al., 2018; Perkins, 2019; Schneider et al., 2010; Steffen et al., 2015; The European Environmental Bureau, 2019).

Although many of the alternative economy approaches have different orientations and features, we identified some uniting principles or elements from the scoping literature review. A common thread is the focus on reducing the use of materials and energy and more localised economies. Likewise, common features include more equally distributed income and a transition from primarily consumptive to more participatory and community-oriented societies. Tangible suggestions proposed include, for instance, universal basic income, new forms of ownership, shorter work weeks, and valuing unpaid labour (Cosme et al., 2017; Kallis, 2011; Mastini et al., 2021; Schneider et al., 2010; Sekulova et al., 2013).

Coscieme et al. (2019) explain that the goals of a wellbeing economy include greater fairness and equality, good social relationships as well as human mental and physical health, and a thriving environment: goals that on current available evidence are not being met by the incumbent economic regime. Wellbeing is, by definition, a hard concept to pin down, but it has been put forth that a wellbeing economy would centre around principles of community, conviviality and reciprocity (Andreoni & Galmarini, 2014). The economy would move away from our current modes of (over) production and (rampant) consumption towards collaboration, sharing, recycling and upcycling, with porous boundaries between consumers and producers (Coscieme et al., 2019). The wellbeing economy centres not around GDP growth but the satisfaction of human needs within planetary boundaries (Andreoni & Galmarini, 2014; Büchs & Koch, 2019). Basic needs such as water security and safety would be included, but also mental and emotional needs for relationships, decent work, and opportunities to be involved in community and political life. Ultimately, the goal is to enhance quality of life with relatively fewer resource inputs (Büchs & Koch, 2019).

Other scholars highlight how transitioning to a wellbeing economy involves reducing energy and resource consumption while maintaining a safe and responsible economy within planetary boundaries (Hickel, 2021). This is because a wellbeing economy puts more focus on less tangible aspects of socio-economic lives, such as wellness and conviviality, society, better human and ecological health, and multidimensional conceptualisations of wellbeing which have a lower call upon natural resources to meet these needs (Andreoni & Galmarini, 2014; Büchs & Koch, 2019; Fioramonti et al., 2022; Klamer, 2002; The European Environmental Bureau, 2019; Weinhardt et al., 2021). It is important to remember that intangible elements may have different meanings to different communities, so we must ensure everyone is positively impacted by this transition (Büchs & Koch, 2019).

Reviewing the work surrounding the wellbeing economy concept, we identified five key aspects which can be directly mapped on to injustice and unsustainability in the fashion industry. The first key element is establishing limits, which includes concepts such as ‘sufficiency’, and ‘consumption corridors’ that set a reasonable range within which consumption practices should remain (Brand et al., 2021; Vladimirova, 2021). In addition to simply consuming less, limits in fashion can be achieved via better care and repair of existing clothing, second hand and collaborative consumption practices (Fletcher, 2013; Frick et al., 2021; Henninger et al., 2019; Kleinhückelkotten & Neitzke, 2019; Vladimirova, 2021).

The second is the need to establish new indicators to incorporate wellbeing. This can also be a challenge because wellbeing is inherently subjective, as is the idea of needs (Büchs & Koch, 2019). Andreoni and Galmarini (2014) attempt to delineate diverse types of wellbeing capital as follows: social capital, health capital, consumption capital, and the quality of natural capital. They highlight that social, health and the quality of natural capital positively correlate with wellbeing, while consumption capital has diminishing returns for wellbeing. One approach to measurement is the Sustainable Wellbeing Index (SWI) (Costanza et al., 2016), where SWI is a function of net economic contribution, natural capital/ecosystem services and social capital/community contribution. O’Neill et al. (2018) find that meeting basic needs and eliminating poverty can be achieved whilst remaining within planetary boundaries. Still, high life satisfaction at a community and population level is impossible without a larger shift towards sufficiency and equity-based approaches. When we think about data and metrics concerning fashion, we encounter a lack of reliable, high-quality data that accurately portrays the environmental and social impacts of the industry (Bick et al., 2018; Niinimäki et al., 2020; Vladimirova, 2021).

The third wellbeing economy tenet is to promote fairness on a global and intergenerational plane. Sharpe et al. (2022a, 2022b) highlight that the fashion industry has different implications and impacts when we look at the global north versus south. The sector is firmly embedded as part of an industrialisation and development model in many emerging economies while having profound environmental and social costs. This is linked to the fourth wellbeing economy theme of just governance, which is based on inclusive and participatory processes (Sharpe et al., 2022b). In the case of fashion, it is found that moving the industry into a post-growth future oriented towards sustainability rather than profit will require collaboration between all those involved in the industry’s diverse supply chains, which have a complex geography (Brydges et al., 2018; 2021; Taylor, 2019; Williams, 2019; Wubs et al., 2020).

The fifth key element of a wellbeing economy is linked to new exchange systems, which for fashion includes fulfilling social and environmental goals to move beyond conventional industry metrics, like sales growth and profit margins (Fletcher, 2010; Taylor, 2019). One alternative organisational model could be social enterprises or not-for-profit businesses (Thorpe, 2014; Hinton, 2020). Furthermore, new exchange systems could also encompass collaborative consumption practices such as peer-to-peer fashion sharing, business-to-consumer fashion rental, fashion libraries; and swap shops (Henninger et al., 2019, 2021, 2022; Möhlmann, 2015). However, such models remain a small part of the contemporary fashion industry, with estimates that collaborative consumption makes up less than 1% of the industry share in the US (ThredUp 2020). There is also a question about whether rental leads to more consumption (Retamal, 2017). Second-hand would also fill into this category, potentially reducing the demand for new items and increasing an item's use before disposal (Machado et al., 2019). In Table 2 we summarise our concept of the wellbeing wardrobe and the elements therein.

Table 2. Wellbeing wardrobe elements.

Wellbeing Economy Elements	Application to Fashion and Textiles	Implementation Principles
Establishing Limits	Radical reduction in production volumes, zero waste, use of natural fibres, ensuring supply chain transparency and no greenwashing Restricting advertising Defining how much clothing a person can purchase/use/consume to remain within planetary boundaries	Global agreements and collaborations across sectors Dematerialising and dismantling the incumbent global fashion system
New Indicators	Measuring progress in terms of wellbeing in both qualitative and quantitative terms A new narrative for fashion to align with UN SDGs	Including industry stakeholders such as consumers, workers, and those dealing with fashion waste management at end-of-life Data to establish which business models and materials offer more sustainable options
Promoting Fairness	Redistributing benefits to improve livelihoods and cover reparations from high income to low income communities in the supply chain Making sustainable fashion more accessible and affordable Enabling and nurturing a diversity of clothing cultures	Engage with a wide range of stakeholders in the supply chain and in communities
Just Governance	Shift ownership structures and power dynamics by decolonising and localising fashion governance and empowering suppliers producers Collaboration between civil society and fashion initiatives Incorporate indigenous knowledge	Policy-based industry transformation, including extended producer responsibility Deliberating and ‘staying with’ the challenges ahead
New Exchange Systems	Making new forms of clothing provision, such as fashion libraries, sharing platforms, between consumers, second hand markets, social enterprises, repair shops, and makerspaces Engaging customers to recognise the value of clothing	Reconfiguring and distinguishing between different types of value including social and environmental, not only financial

5. Applying the Wellbeing Wardrobe Framework to encourage a just transition towards a more sustainable fashion industry

In the first part of this paper, we identified five ‘problems’ within the dominant global fashion industry in its current form – overproduction and consumption, negative health and wellbeing impacts, deep inequalities on multiple levels, poor governance and limited drivers for transformational change. In section 4 we identify a number of insights from wellbeing economics literature that help us to address these issues, and can move the industry towards more sustainable and just futures. Now we add these insights together into a more practically oriented framework – the Wellbeing Wardrobe – with its key attributes of establishing limits, new indicators to incorporate wellbeing, promoting fairness, just governance and new forms of exchange – could be operationalised in the policy arena.

Firstly, as we already know from well-established literature on the multilevel framework of sustainability transitions (Geels, 2002, 2011), policy for wellbeing will need to work in a complex multi-level environment. Indeed, what is inherently difficult in the wellbeing approach to policy is that post-growth strategies need to encompass both micro-level changes to individual lifestyles and consumption behaviours, and macro-level economic, political and technological shifts to move away from pursuing growth (Büchs & Koch, 2019; Kallis, 2011; Schneider et al., 2010).

There is emerging evidence of policy ambition in taking on this challenge. For example, national governments, such as Wales with the Well-Being of Future Generations Act (2015) and members of the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership (WEGo), are prioritising social and environmental outcomes over GDP growth Local communities and businesses are also pursuing a wellbeing economy through initiatives like Scotland's community wealth building program (The Scottish Government, 2022). Civil society organisations like Economy for the Common Good and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) promote a vision of human and ecological wellbeing across policy, business, and community.

Secondly, policy for wellbeing needs to be inherently inclusive of different global communities and businesses. Sustained dialogue between community stakeholders, policymakers and businesses will be required, along with clearly articulated guidelines as to technological innovation's role, and how to rethink growth and profit within the economy and business models (Khmara & Kronenberg, 2020). There will be a challenging transition period whilst businesses move into a wellbeing frame: business models and legally defined business structures must be altered to encourage companies to focus less on profit and more on creating social and environmental value (Hinton, 2020). Transitioning to a sufficiency rather than growth mindset will be required (Bocken & Short, 2021) at individual, household, national and global scales (Sahakian et al., 2021), whilst setting informed limits to consumption (Brand et al., 2021; Spengler, 2016).

One possible way of doing so is via setting ‘consumption corridors’, where a minimum standard is set to enable people now and, in the future, to meet their need, but also a maximum where the ability of others to meet their current and future needs is not compromised (Fuchs et al., 2021; Godin et al., 2020). The ‘consumption corridors’ concept has already been trialled in the fashion industry (see: Godin et al., 2020; Vladimirova, 2021). Another avenue is through setting targets or quotas for materials and goods – as it has been applied in other areas of natural resource management and climate policies e.g. fisheries and carbon budgets.

However, attention also need to focus on unintended or short-term impacts of transitioning. There is a danger that, in the short term, the reduction in the demand for energy, materials and light manufacturing associated with adopting wellbeing economy principles will have disruptive and unintended consequences on employment and livelihoods in the Global South (Dengler & Seebacher, 2019). These impacts will also be unfairly gendered (Dengler & Seebacher, 2019), particularly in the fashion and textile sector in the South (which depends on low-paid labour by women) (Anderson et al., 2021; Sharpe & Retamal, 2021). Understanding and mitigating these impacts will be a clear task for just transition actions.

Thirdly, such a policy shift towards wellbeing will require new approaches towards measurement monitoring and evaluation. Indeed, new indicators of what constitutes a healthy economy are needed to facilitate an equitable transition. Metrics should not only track economic growth but also cover wellbeing, social equality and ecological regeneration. It is also vital that mechanisms are developed to measure and recognise currently invisible, undervalued contributions to prosperity from the caring economy and volunteering and to shift the wider emphasis from materiality to relationality (Jackson, 2021). However, we currently lack the tools and frameworks to do this, and the just transition to a wellbeing economy will require a new approach to measurement, monitoring and evaluation to be developed.

Here we provide specific examples of policy opportunities to envisage the just transition towards the wellbeing economy in the fashion and textiles sector. We highlight enablers of change, collaboration and roles that emerged from our stakeholder co-creation workshops.

5.1. Establishing limits

Under this rubric, the main policy priority is finding ways to limit production and consumption and enabling us to live within planetary boundaries. This, in practice, might mean lower and upper thresholds or corridors being implemented to acknowledge that not all people have the same needs or resources. As such, the dimensions may be different in the Global North and South. The Hot or Cool Institute (2023) has estimated that the number of items a consumer in the Global North can purchase (excluding items such as socks, underwear and hats) is five items per year.

Practically, limiting production and consumption might mean implementing a comprehensive strategy of eco-design requirements, labelling and extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes that make sustainable clothing and textiles the norm. This could be accompanied by EPR fees, which could be increased once volume thresholds are reached, to encourage brands to supply high quality and lower volumes of clothing.

Further, we could instigate levies for virgin fibre use, increasing the re-use and repair economy through investigating tax incentives, rebates, and other forms of support for consumers and businesses providing repair, reuse and second-hand sales services, and options for mandating fashion brands to provide these services for their customers. As an example of this strategy in action, in France, in late 2023, the government launched a ‘repair bonus’ of between 6 and 25 euros that will serve as an incentivise for consumers to repair rather than discard their clothing, while also supporting jobs in the repair sector.

5.2. New indicators incorporating wellbeing

Our current economic indicators are not fit for purpose of a wellbeing economy. We require new approaches to guide progress towards meeting human and ecological needs. These new indicators should incorporate mental and physical health, living and working in dignity, opportunities for community, and political participation while also supporting ecological health. For the fashion and textiles sector, this would mean developing and using wellbeing indicators in the fashion and textiles sector that focus on health, social and environment indicators, rather than only financial and income measures. Since we do not have them already, we would need to develop methods for establishing clothing, resource, and pollution budgets or limits.

There is the opportunity to learn from other sectors such as carbon budgets and fishing quotas systems. Because of the history in the fashion industry this process would need to be resilient to gaming by corporations, in which case we would need to set a clear legislative framework for the claims that can be made about products in advertising to combat ‘greenwashing’.

5.3. Promoting fairness

This element will involve designing distributive systems to ensure global and intergenerational equity and redistribute global resources and wealth across diverse contexts and communities. Specific policy actions under this theme include banning the export of textile waste and destruction of unsold or excess clothing and textile goods.

We could use Due Diligence requirements and standards in EU Trade Agreements to eliminate hazardous and toxic chemical use, regulate the use of other chemicals and materials, and to obligate brands, and buyers to ensure safe and just working conditions (including living wages) throughout their whole supply chain. We would also need to address the damage done in the past by making investments in regenerating environments from the impacts of the fashion and textiles sector, such as water pollution, which have disproportionately been felt in the Global South.

In response to the rising concerns about greenwashing in the fashion industry, a burgeoning policy framework has emerged in Europe and beyond to ensure that businesses claiming to use ‘eco-friendly’ materials and support workers across supply chains are doing just that. Greenwashing legislation is being implemented to require businesses that assert sustainability benefits in connection with their products to substantiate these claims transparently and verifiably through independent third-party verification processes.

5.4. Just governance

Just governance is an important area for policy action to focus on. We need to design participatory and deliberative processes for a just transition that are inclusive and open to debate. Just governance is also needed to manage system transitions via robust participatory approaches with efforts to build skills and capacity to ensure a diverse range of participants can contribute. Public dialogue and social movements can help to establish momentum for these wider conversations. From a governmental perspective, there are several solid actions that could be taken to achieve this goal.

One suggestion is to hold stakeholder assemblies to create an agenda and strategy for transitioning to wellbeing economies for the fashion and textiles sector. This would bring together all stakeholders across the globe with an agenda for a global living wage and coordinate multilateral organisations and national and international institutions in addressing several key sustainable trade practices, including trade volumes, material and chemical composition, traceability, and transparency. Governments can support local and global social movements that champion deliberative processes for the wellbeing economy and use these processes to inform and scrutinise public policy. We can also create transformational education and learning systems for wellbeing economies generally, and then specifically for the fashion and textile sector.

5.5. Just exchange systems

We require new business structures and systems for providing and exchanging goods and services in ways that do not only depend on overproduction and overconsumption. Creative business exchange models could meet social needs (such as conviviality and reciprocity) and provide meaningful work while being environmentally regenerative. One policy action would be to support public awareness-raising campaigns that emphasise less consumption and stimulate consumers to investigate the people, materials and processes that go into making a garment. Here, policymakers could support existing initiatives, such as Fashion Revolution, who have served to mainstream questions such as ‘Who Made My Clothes’ with their viral campaigns.

We could also enhance support for new sustainable fashion and other non-market exchange fashion practices, including facilitating the availability of physical space (e.g. within existing city centres and shopping centres) and accessibility (for example, subsidising access for all members of the community) to design and repair services, clothing swaps, and supporting wide access to training and skills for clothing repair and re-design.

These measures need to be accompanied by changes to legal and regulatory frameworks that encourage/prefer not-for-profit business structures and provide obligations on businesses to ensure environmental and social value creation. This could include public procurement guidance to integrate not-for-profit, social economy partners in all bids.

Under each of these themes, we were able to derive several suggestions from the stakeholders involved in our participatory workshops that we undertook as part of our action research approach to this research. We collected more insights and suggestions that we can present in one paper and have summarised and group these together above into the most profound suggestions and pathways we could recognise from combining all the different responses we received. Furthermore, we collected the responses and mapped them onto an image which presents the wellbeing wardrobe framework and suggestions for action in a visual manner under the different themes we identify as part of our approach.

These actions are separated by actor types; however, we see the role for policy cross-cutting them all because individuals and industries need to be enabled, and in some cases required to make change, which requires the role of policy to sit across all actors. We also see the actions not as a numerical list that should be followed in order, but a suite under which all are important.

6. Conclusion

This article introduces a novel approach to achieving a just transition in the fashion and textiles industry – a sector notorious for its unsustainable practices and mistreatment of workers. We propose the wellbeing wardrobe as a useful tool to help us move towards a just transition in the industry. We not only present the concept, but also offer insights into its application through identifying specific actions and policies that can be put in place. Our findings are based on extensive research on sustainable fashion and wellbeing economies, as well as co-creation workshops with fashion and textiles industry stakeholders.

Our research aims to find common ground and intersections that can help us move towards a fashion and garment sector that operates within planetary boundaries while ensuring dignity and livelihoods for everyone involved. To achieve this, we need to implement innovative business models such as social enterprises, B-corps, and not-for-profit configurations. We also need to explore alternative ways of consuming clothing, including slow fashion, second-hand, swaps, and rentals. Additionally, we should reconsider the fast fashion model and find new ways of using, making, and remaking clothing to reduce end-of-garment-life waste. By combining different actions under five rubrics within the wider wellbeing wardrobe framework – establishing limits, developing new indicators, promoting fairness and just governance, and instigating just exchange systems – we see that the fashion and textiles sector can move towards a just transition.

On a methodological level, our study highlights the importance of involving stakeholders in co-creation participatory workshops to envision a just sustainability transition. Furthermore, the use of the Three Horizons framework has enabled us to share and test the wellbeing wardrobe concept with stakeholders and co-create together new visions for the future (Crownshaw et al., 2019). We propose to continue to use this framework to engage stakeholders with the concepts of a wellbeing-oriented fashion sector and how we might facilitate that transition.

Our aim for the wellbeing wardrobe approach is to inform practice and not only remain a theoretical construct. In achieving just transitions, the role of policy and good governance cannot be overstated. Our paper has uncovered several actions to take on a policy level. By doing so, we have contributed to the agenda of helping to provide guidance and tangible suggestions as to how a just transition could be achieved in one of our most unsustainable sectors.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editors of this special issue for their care and support throughout the process. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments which helped us to improve this paper. All authors would like to acknowledge the European Environmental Bureau for funding the research ‘The Wellbeing Wardrobe'. Dr. Mariangela Lavanga would also like to thank the European Union's Horizon Europe funded project ‘FABRIX - Fostering local, beautiful, and sustainably designed regenerative textile & clothing ecosystems', grant agreement N. 101135638, and the Convergence Resilient Delta Initiative funded project ‘Towards Textile-form Futures' for the opportunity to develop further some of the ideas presented in the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rhiannon Pugh

Rhiannon Pugh is a Senior Lecturer in Innovation Studies at the Centre for Innovation Research at Lund University (CIRCLE) and the Department of Design Sciences. Her work sits at the intersection of innovation studies and economic geography, and she is especially interested in the spatial actualisations and impacts of innovation processes, broadly defined. She is especially interested in how sustainable modes of regional development can be supported through research and policy in different geographical contexts worldwide.

Taylor Brydges

Taylor Brydges is Research Principle at the Institute for Sustainable Futures. As part of the Resource Stewardship team, her research focuses on sustainable production and consumption, the circular economy, and the fashion industry. Working with Dr Monique Retamal, Taylor led the development of the ongoing project, ‘Sustainable Fashion in Australia and sectoral resilience during the pandemic.’ She is also involved in supporting the work of the Product Stewardship Centre of Excellence. From 2018 to 2021, she was the PI of the project ‘Circular is the New Black: Investigating the Implementation of Circular Economy Principles in the Swedish Fashion Industry,’ funded by the Swedish Research Council. This research was carried out at Stockholm University, Sweden and the Institute for Sustainable Futures, Australia.

Samantha Sharpe

Samantha Sharpe is Research Director at the Institute for Sustainable Futures. Her research focuses on the employment and labour market implications of climate change and climate action. This includes understanding the process of enterprise and industrial transition to sustainability, at the firm, sector, and labour market levels. Her particular focus is innovation processes, public policy development for just transition. Samantha's work is focused on environmental and social sustainability in the global textile and garment sector and energy sectors. She currently leads UTS’ involvement in an International Labour Organisation (ILO) project on environmental sustainability in the textile and garment sector in Asia and other work on the sustainability and circularity of textiles. She is interested in the public policy settings for sustainability transitions, particularly for labour markets and has led a number of projects examining the public policy dimensions of just energy transition in Asia.

Mariangela Lavanga

Mariangela Lavanga is Associate Professor of Cultural Economics and Entrepreneurship at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is the Academic Lead on Fashion Sustainability Transition at the Design Impact Transition (DIT) platform, part of the Erasmus University ‘Strategy 2024’. Mariangela is also the Academic Coordinator of the MA in Cultural Economics and Entrepreneurship as well as co-founder and coordinator of the Minor Fashion Industry. Mariangela researches and teaches on cultural and creative industries and sustainable urban development with active stakeholders’ engagement. In particular, she focuses on the transition to a more sustainable and just fashion and textile industry. She is currently PI in the Horizon Europe project ‘FABRIX – Fostering local, beautiful, and sustainably designed regenerative textile & clothing ecosystems’ with Rotterdam and Athens as case studies. FABRIX adopts a human-centred approach to digital and industrial technologies with an eye for spatial dynamics in a way that would include a more localised and socially inclusive regenerative and innovative manufacturing sector. In parallel to FABRIX, Mariangela is also co-leading the Convergence Resilient Delta project ‘Towards Textile-form Futures’ which focuses on on-demand and local production of circular textile-form systems, such as integrated circular micro-factories.

Monique Retamal

Monique Retamal is a Research Director and Program Lead for Resource Stewardship at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology, Sydney. She has a background in environmental engineering and social research and fifteen years’ experience undertaking research into sustainable urban systems, including for water, sanitation and solid waste. She specialises in sustainable systems of consumption and production in the Asia-Pacific region. Her research is currently focused on circular supply chains and environmental governance for plastics and textiles. Monique is currently leading UTS’s contribution to an international research collaboration between six research institutions in India and Australia to identify pathways for a circular economy for plastics in India, which includes a focus on policy frameworks and circular business models.