"Fast fashion should worry all of us" was The Guardian newspaper's provocative headline calling for an international response to the exploitation of workers in global garments and footwear manufacturing. Worldwide, 70 million people work producing clothing and shoes, mostly in developing countries but also in advanced economies like the UK. 80% of these workers are women. The industry is worth US$2 trillion per year, yet workers receive poverty wages to live and work in dangerous conditions. In 2014, for example, over 1000 workers in Bangladesh were crushed to death in a factory collapse, highlighting the prioritisation of profit at the expense of people. Although workers in supply chains are vital to our everyday lives, we know very little about the women who make our clothes and shoes. The UK government's Work and Opportunities for Women programme highlights urgent concern that there is a lack of systemic collection and reporting of gender-disaggregated data by companies and other organisations involved in managing global supply chains. Women workers in supply chains are simply invisible workers. Sustainable Development Goal 8.8 targets "safe and secure working environments for all workers". Yet without systemic data the problems that lessen women's quality of life in the garment industry are not fully known and are therefore are hard to address. This Future Leaders Fellowship addresses this knowledge and practice gap by generating evidence and promoting action on the specific threats posed to female garment workers. In the global South, as well as the UK, most garment workers are young women from poor households, often living far away from home. Building on a commitment from the International Labour Organisation to eradicate gendered violence in "the world of work" (Convention 190, 2019), including acknowledging threats that occur beyond the workplace, we will evidence the risks that women workers face inside and outside of the factory, where malnutrition, mass fainting, reproductive and mental health crises, and sexual and physical abuse are reported to be commonplace. Using feminist theory and methods, we aim to highlight and challenge where gender-blind health and safety programmes hide or ignore these pervasive threats to women's wellbeing. We focus on four producer countries that represent different sites in the evolution of supply chain outsourcing: Cambodia, Ethiopia, Jordan and the UK. Across these locations, a combined 1 million people work making clothes and shoes for leading UK brands including M&S, Topshop and ASOS. Bringing together a diverse and transdisciplinary team, the project uses a participatory and ethnographic approach to investigate women's health and wellbeing at 8 industrial sites in each country, before examining the (inter)national organisation of labour and trade governance, to understand the institutional processes that make and unmake healthy working bodies. Our global approach allows us to identify the complex, more-than-local factors that perpetuate women's vulnerability in garment work and target action to address the systemic causes of inequity within supply chains. To ensure our project amplifies women workers, we are collaborating with global partners and advisors, including international organisations (ILO/IFC Better Work), labour rights advocates (Worker Rights Consortium), women's rights charities (Care), trade justice campaigns (Traidcraft Exchange) and social movements (Fashion Revolution). We will share our findings in 10 academic papers, 6 interim briefs, 4 local workshops and exhibitions, and an accessibly written final report and monograph. Our initial phase of research for impact culminates in a global launch and exhibition of outputs at Fashion Revolution Week in 2025, intended to counter the invisibility of women workers, generating media attention to galvanise policy and public support for transformative change towards just garment supply chains.

Significant challenges lie in the collation, analysis and assessment of data generated to determine the environmental impact assessment (EIA) of products, processes and behaviours throughout the fashion and textiles value chain. The root cause of these problems lies in the absence of standardised test methods when quantifying impact and has led to a lack of industry trust, with many brands developing their own ways of measuring impact. Adding further, is the development of The Green Claims Code in 2021 by the UK government which implements governance to avoid companies making unsubstantiated or inaccurate environmental claims, often leading to accusations of greenwashing. Kering for example, have developed their own Environmental Profit and Loss tool that relies on self-reporting methods of primary data from brands and suppliers to relate impact to financial progress. In comparison, Pangaia in collaboration with Green Story (project partner) adopt a lifecycle analysis (LCA) approach using 13 impact metrics. These diverse measurement methods further add to the blurred boundaries of EIA and prohibits comparability across the industry. Furthermore, data generated is being utilised to inform policy development, industry action and consumer behaviour, meaning reliable, authentic, and useable EIA data is paramount. Critical issues encountered with current EIA methods include: - Collation: data generated being siloed by stages within the value chain resulting in fragmented measures and preventing comparability; methods of data collection relying on self-reporting from brands/suppliers with a lack of verification; accessibility to EIA tools requiring financial buy-in, limiting transparency and data accessibility - Analysis: a lack of standardised test methods to determine and categorise environmental impact; small or limited data sets being scaled up and applied in unsubstantiated contexts; vested interest from funding sources or board members creating biases with the generation and interpretation of data - Assessment: no consideration of the collinearity between measured factors, failing to acknowledge primary, secondary, and tertiary impacts; disparate efforts from stakeholders and disciplines resulting in the lack of collective action; an absence of accepted baselines and thresholds for environmental impact; the invalid use of sustainability scales impeding understanding and comparability In response, the IMPACT+ Network aims to: 1) assemble critical knowledge from the scientific (environmental, forensic and data) and fashion design communities to examine the reliability, authenticity and usability of current EIA methods (e.g., The Higg Index, EU Ecolabel, Good on You); 2) build a world-leading, multi-stakeholder network (brands, manufacturers, retailers, textile recyclers, consumers) to build a greater level of transparency and accuracy in the EIA of products, processes and behaviours. This will be achieved through the delivery of a collaborative programme of activities, across the 24-month project duration and structured across 4 methodological phases (P): P1 - IMPACT+ Symposium; P2 - Impact Analysis; P3 - Discipline Hopping; P4 - Beyond IMPACT+. Central to this will be NetworkPlus funded projects that will explore environmental impact through discipline hopping activities in 4 different areas: materials; manufacturing; consumer use; end-of-life. Critical dialogue between projects and disciplines will develop circular knowledge systems to generate innovative insights and new knowledge. Impact will be generated across 4 critical areas (scholarship, industry, consumers, policy), each contributing to the advancement of knowledge to improve the collation, analysis, and assessment of EIA metrics. This will be reflected in key project outputs including: cross-disciplinary hybrid methodologies; a stakeholder co-created framework; new knowledge demonstrated through publication; the legacy of the IMPACT+ Network.

The Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing project represents a significant attempt to seek to understand how creative activities might shape individuals' sensibility for sustainability (that is the way in which they think through, imagine and practice sustainability) in relation to clothing. Our interdisciplinary approach provides a novel methodology that promises to push forward the boundaries of work on pro-environmental behaviour change. It also makes a significant contribution to the emergent field of sustainable fashion and to research on the relationship between craft processes, creative making and material affect. The project is grounded in 'social design' and co-production methodologies, which means that we are not interested in just producing knowledge, but also in working with others in the process of generating knowledge. This approach is important because fashion industries, cultures and imaginaries are multi-faceted and complex issues with significant personal (i.e. emotional) social and environmental implications. We argue that participatory arts and craft practices are potentially an important tool for generating a sensibility of sustainability and therefore for informing policy on behaviour change. Arts and crafts therefore require a serious test bed as a behavioural intervention, not least because political scientists have, now for a number of decades, recommended that multiple knowledges be drawn together to solve policy problems. The project consists of five interrelated work strands: Work strand 1. Individual research participants and experts (including our local community textiles / fashion partners and national and international policy -making and -shaping actors) come together to discuss the social and environmental problems associated clothing, and to inform and shape the workshops that follow through exposing the challenges of making fashion sustainable and engaging in asset mapping to address these challenges. Work strand 2. Throughout a series of workshops (8 series of 5 half day workshop), groups of 6-10 participants explore different elements of the clothing life-cycle in a participatory manner. They are encouraged to share knowledge and be reflexive and interactive by passing creative outputs (see Case for Support for details of these) artefacts and written and self-evaluative films on to a group of similar peers in a different part of the country. Work strand 3. Clothing practices are assessed before and after the workshop series to identify any changes in clothing sensibilities and choices using a survey, interviews and a wardrobe audit. A smaller group of key volunteers will keep a reflective clothes-purchasing diary throughout the life of the project, recording clothing purchases as well as reflecting on any changes in their feelings, attitudes and behaviours. They will record their perceptions about the role of engagement with material processes in shaping any changes. Work strand 4. We adopt a 'politics of affect' by exploring in-depth the way people feel about clothing and the material processes involved in making fabric and clothes explored in the workshops. We do this through inductively analysing talk during the workshops, interviews and participants' blogs and the reflective films. Work strand 5. Our findings are assembled carefully after liaison with our extensive network of project partners, consultants and participants into a policy brief that will help policy-makers work towards promoting pro-environmental behaviour change. In liaison with our project partner Fashion Revolution, we will arrange meetings with DEFRA and the All Party Parliamentary Design and Innovation Group at which we will share the policy brief and some creative output from the project (e.g. reflective videos and artefacts). A small select group of 2-3 participants from each location, some key partners, the investigators and project researchers will attend.

The current global fashion supply chain is characterised by its lack of transparency, forced labour, poor working conditions, unequal power relationships and overproduction caused by fast fashion. Lacking ethics, the global fashion supply chain is also highly polluting. The total footprint of clothing in use in the UK, including global and territorial emissions, was 26.2 million tonnes CO2 in 2016, up from 24 million tonnes in 2012 (equivalent to over a third of household transport emissions). The Textiles Circularity Centre (TCC) proposes materials security for the UK by circularising resource flows of textiles. This will stimulate innovation and economic growth in the UK textile manufacturing, SME apparel and creative technology sectors, whilst reducing reliance on imported and environmentally and ethically impactful materials, and diversifying supply chains. The TCC will provide underpinning research understanding to enable the transition to a more circular economy that supports the brand 'designed and made in the UK'. To enact this vision, we will catalyse growth in the fashion and textiles sector by supporting the SME fashion-apparel community with innovations in materials and product manufacturing, access to circular materials through supply chain design, and consumer experiences. Central to our approach is to enable consumers to be agents of change by engaging them in new cultures of consumption. We will effect a symbiosis between novel materials manufacturing and agentive consumer experiences through a supply chain design comprised of innovative business models and digital tools. Using lab-proven biotechnology, we will transform bio-based waste-derived feedstock (post-consumer textiles, crop residues, municipal solid waste) into renewable polymers, fibres and flexible textile materials, as part of a CE transition strategy to replace imported cotton, wood pulp and synthetic polyester fibres and petrochemical finishes. We will innovate advanced manufacturing techniques that link biorefining of organic waste, 3D weaving, robotics and additive manufacturing to circular design and produce flexible continuous textiles and three-dimensional textile forms for apparel products. These techniques will enable manufacturing hubs to be located on the high street or in local communities, and will support SME apparel brands and retailers to offer on-site/on-demand manufacture of products for local customisation. These hubs would generate regional cultural and social benefits through business and related skills development. We will design a transparent supply chain for these textiles through industrial symbiosis between waste management, farming, bio-refinery, textile production, SME apparel brands, and consumer stakeholders. Apparel brands will access this supply chain through our digital 'Biomaterials Platform', through which they can access the materials and data on their provenance, properties, circularity, and life cycle extension strategies. Working with SME apparel brands, we will develop an in-store Configurator and novel affective and creative technologies to engage consumers in digitally immersive experiences and services that amplify couplings between the resource flow, human well being and satisfaction, thus creating a new culture of consumption. This dematerialisation approach will necessitate innovation in business models that add value to the apparel, in order to counter overproduction and detachment. Consumers will become key nodes in the circular value chain, enabling responsible and personalised engagement. As a human-centred design led centre, TCC is uniquely placed to generate these innovations that will catalyse significant business and skills growth in UK textile manufacturing, SME fashion-apparel, and creative technology sectors, and drastically reduce waste and carbon emissions, and environmental and ethical impacts for the textiles sector.