The fashion industry is at a stage of profound transformation of its operating paradigm. Because of their stakeholders’ pressure, companies have begun to pursue strategic solutions that include sustainability as a guiding principle. Such strategies push for effective organizational solutions and production models that take into consideration the conservation of the planet’s resources, respect for people, and the sustainability of their profits. In this context, the fashion industry is now recognizing the circular economy (CE) as the primary BM to address sustainability-related industry issues. The authors have adopted a specific technological-driven perspective that attempts to analyze today’s context and map digitally driven practices in European fashion companies. These practices are emerging to support fashion organizations so that they can focus their sustainability agendas and better implement circular BMs. This perspective is consistent with the current fashion context, where digital transformation is recognized as an asset that could transform the industry into a more sustainable business. This proposed objective is realized through an iterative process of modeling data. The BMIs identified here are grouped according to Bocken’s eight archetypes: maximize material and energy efficiency; create value from ‘waste’; substitute with renewables and natural processes; deliver functionality rather than ownership; adopt a stewardship role; encourage sufficiency; re-purpose the business for society/the environment and develop scale-up solutions. They guide the authors in modeling mechanisms and solutions that help build business innovations that work to ensure circularity. Analyzing the current best practices, this article introduces a taxonomy that highlights current approaches that lead to incremental changes toward CE through digital solutions.

Fashion industry investments drive the choice for textile solutions characterized by radical experimentation and a firm commitment to sustainability. In the last five years, textile innovations have been strongly related to biobased textile solutions evolving to become effectively feasible and strategic. The produced qualitative knowledge implementations consider new production patterns, innovative technical and digital know-how, and new consumption scenarios. The directions the industry is tracing may provide new opportunities for future textile development in the circular biobased economy. This paper presents a map of current European practices. It discusses the possible passage through a holistic paradigm that goes beyond the boundaries of the old productive systems to accompany the sector towards a new sustainable and transversal state. It also presents three selected best practices that return the actual context in which the phenomenon occurs. A model is presented to demonstrate how these circular processes of biobased materials production enable more process innovations which are developed through implementing the process itself: companies’ search for rethinking and implementing the traditional practices or designing new ones (as determined by the doctoral research of one of the authors).

Purpose: The state of interactive digital technology is evolving rapidly and has shifted the ways in which customers shop dramatically. This trend heightens the need for research that examines the latest interactive digital technology tools adopted in fashion retailing. In response, the purpose of this paper was to examine fashion retailers’ incorporation of new interactive digital technology – in both online and offline retailing formats, and including new hybrid contexts – and its results in providing new experiential quality that contributes strongly to engage with customers. Design/methodology/approach: The paper first reviews the literature and then proposes the research questions. This is followed by exploratory substantiation of those propositions with the findings from case studies that examined the new interactive digital technology implemented by six leading fashion retailers. Findings: Various digital technology tools implemented in brick-to-click, click-to-brick and brick-and-mortar retailing offer customers a variety of experiential qualities that allow them to co-create products, engage in emotion-driven sensational and personalized shopping experiences and seamless shopping virtually, all of which derive from interactive digital technology implemented to enhance customer engagement. Originality/value: This research examined the implementation of interactive digital technologies across the full spectrum of the fashion retail settings above. This paper makes an original contribution by adopting a customer-centric perspective and assessing the advantages technology provides to customer’s engagement quality in shopping, which differs from the traditional firm-centric perspective that views technology as a way to innovate retailers’ operations.

Industrial sectors’ innovative and sustainable development relies not only on solid government, society, academia, and industry but also on how they interact to set and implement strategic goals. In the fashion industry context, the new sociocultural scenario is increasingly driven by pressures from stakeholders to limit the impacts of industrial practices and to move toward new open ecosystems to create and maintain sustainable innovation. This article explores how such innovation can be enabled by design-driven actions in the context of the quadruple helix. Such a model aims to revitalize the areas of technological innovation and gradually advance the construction of the infrastructure needed for sustainable fashion growth, combining and integrating different knowledge. An initial literature review, complemented by case studies analysis, identifies the European fashion industry dynamics of innovation and the roles of industry, government, university, and society. In particular, the government is transforming from a mere controller to a facilitator of innovation synergies. Society relies on citizens revising their consumption habits by shifting toward a performative economy. Industry understands the need for collaboration and adopts new closed-loop supply chains to create and maintain its sustainable development. Universities enable new open system flows to make innovations concerning knowledge, technologies, and systems thrive, from technology transfer to knowledge co-creation. Based on the analysis, we propose a conceptual framework to understand the micro- and macro-dynamics of open innovation with a quadruple helix model to implement sustainability practices in the fashion sector through design-driven actions—reuse, repair, recycle, and refashion—that aim to eliminate the concept of waste to support local ecosystems toward establishing a closed-loop chain.

Branded content appears to be the most promising frontier of contemporary companies’ strategies within our hyperconnected society. This new context requires brands to demonstrate an increasing capacity to engage customers in continuous interactions and cultural exchanges through on-going narratives co-created with their audiences and perceived as authentic components of their hybrid physical-digital daily experiences. Within the physical-digital networks of interactions, (fashion) brands assume a new social role largely as original contents’ producers and editors. Products lose their ultimate meaning while narrations that deliver brands’ values become the true reason the public engages in conversation with the brands and recognises their social and cultural influence as their actual value. Maintaining distance from the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility as a mere greenwashing act, this paper presents an exemplary design practice seeded and nurtured in Mumbai and later grown globally, rooted in the idea that social innovation and culturally intensive industries such as fashion can enfranchise social innovation.