Fashion industry emissions, resource use, and waste are attracting increasing consumer and government attention, with broad agreement that a new approach is required along the supply chain. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, a move to digitalisation facilitated an accelerating interest in digital applications, including immersive technologies such as augmented and virtual reality. This systematic literature review explores the intersecting topics of fashion, immersive technologies, and sustainability to determine the trends, examine the solutions offered, and discuss the implications of immersive technologies for sustainability. Four resources were consulted (Scholar, SCOPUS, WOS, and ProQuest), resulting in 74 articles for the review. Grey literature was included due to the currency of the topic and gaps in the available academic literature. The findings highlight immersive technology uses in the fashion industry, which are part of a move towards sustainability. These technologies are used to reduce online returns, educate consumers, reduce waste in design and manufacture, and remove the need for physical items. However, issues include high energy costs, consumer reluctance, and skill shortages. Results suggest future research and industry discussions should focus on empirical studies to measure the sustainability impact of immersive technologies, monitor technology diffusion and uptake, and measure the industry skills gap.

Fast and effectively disposable fashion has seen clothing reduced to transient items, worn for a short period of time then discarded. This has pushed down prices, moving textile and clothing production to low-cost labour countries and decimating the traditional Scottish textile economy. Fast fashion drives consumer demand for newness and uses finite resources that are damaging to the environment. In 2019, the pressure to move towards a more sustainable fashion and textile industry is intense. Traditional textile manufacture using natural, renewable sources that are inherently long-lasting offers a slow fashion alternative, epitomized by the Harris Tweed handweaver community in Scotland. Fashion has embraced digital, with growing online sales and increasing focus on digital content. This presents an opportunity to redress the balance by using technology to shape a sustainable future for traditional textiles. Utilizing an interpretive paradigm and inductive approach, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded networking grant is presented as a qualitative case study, investigating how immersive technologies can be used to safeguard the future of traditional textile products, to educate contemporary, global audiences on the provenance and human hand behind manufacturing processes and to encourage consumption of products with longevity. This explanatory case study finds that fashion brands are using immersive technologies for virtual changing rooms or creative customer experiences but are not exploiting the possibilities of immersive technologies in engendering a sense of place or people behind the product. Findings also reveal that the Harris Tweed Authority and Harris Tweed Hebrides brand successfully use landscape to convey a sense of place, but are under-utilizing the handwoven value and sustainable, slow fashion credentials of Harris Tweed. China is identified as a potential place for Harris Tweed to gain valuable market share, with increasingly wealthy Chinese Generation Z consumers seeking individual exclusivity and sustainability in their clothing purchases, criteria that embody Harris Tweed.

Scotland’s Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is diverse with many situated in rural and remote northerly peripheries, today still retaining human idiosyncrasies free from the uniformity created by mass-globalization. They include textile craft practices such as Harris Tweed^® weaving, which, as protected by an Act of Parliament, can only be produced on the Western Isles of the Outer Hebrides. The chapter discusses a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project between Harris Tweed Hebrides and Robert Gordon University that supported the future growth of this unique intangible cultural heritage by exploring new product opportunities and new international markets, with the aim of providing year-round and sustainable business demand for the Harris Tweed Hebrides brand and the home weaver industry on the isles of Lewis and Harris. Second, the Augmented Fashion research project explored leveraging immersive technologies to secure global interest and demand by preserving traditional textile cultural practices such as handwoven Harris Tweed^®, to facilitate a new future for the industry in the minds of contemporary consumers. In a time when authenticity is increasingly sought after, the inherent provenance and human hand behind Harris Tweed’s^® all-wool product, localized place of manufacture and short-run, handwoven production adds value to the product in the eyes of the consumer and preserves employment for the mills, community and heritage of the home weavers located on the islands of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. The research project considered how the use of digital media could enhance the Harris Tweed^® brand profile by communicating its unique production in novel ways, facilitating new understanding of handwoven fabric, acting as an antithesis to the globalized fast fashion industry and seeking to encourage more responsible clothing consumption habits. <!----> <!----> <!----> <!---->

This paper on Harris Tweed ^® today discusses projects with Scottish textile manufacturer Harris Tweed Hebrides (HTH) that focused on reducing the seasonality of their all-wool product, exploring new markets, and digital and sustainable innovations within their communication, design, and production processes. The partnership project was between HTH and Robert Gordon University where they collaborated on a 2-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) and funded research project, to address the needs of the industry in producing, promoting, and protecting Harris Tweed ^® in the twenty-first century. Reflecting on the projects, the authors detail the new practices instigated within the context of the changes that have taken place in the Harris Tweed ^® industry since Judith Ennew’s chapter ‘Harris Tweed: construction, retention, and representation of a cottage industry’ in Esther Goody’s (ed.) From Craft to Industry (1982) book. While a timespan of over 40 years has passed, elements of Ennew’s media constructed Hebridean Myth continue to play a role in the communication and marketing of Harris Tweed ^® ; however, digital and immersive interventions provide opportunity for modernisation of both the brand’s processes and consumer perceptions about Harris Tweed ^® .