The fashion system needs urgent and radical rethinking to make it fit for a future in which we address the interconnected challenges of climate change, environmental degradation, and inequality. Trailblazing ventures have an important role to play in that change.

In 2020-21 we scoped, designed, and delivered Rethink Fashion: a learning journey with a cohort of pioneering ventures to accelerate the transition to a regenerative future. The journey was hosted by the RSA, in collaboration with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and a cross-sector faculty of guest contributors from fashion and systems innovation.

Read Changing Fashion: learning from the Rethink Fashion project on growing capacity, capability and collaboration among trailblazers for more details.

This project formed part of and helped us shape our Regenerative Futures programme, and builds on previous RSA work designing and hosting impactful learning accelerators.

Thanks to People’s Postcode Lottery Dream Fund and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular initiative, for supporting this work. Special thanks to the Rethink Fashion cohort and the guest contributors and faculty.

The challenge and opportunity

Pioneering ventures can shape markets with new business models and offers, but they cannot succeed in isolation; each plays a role among many. For transformation they need to operate together as a field.

Rethink Fashion set out to build capacity and support collaborations for greater collective impact, and in doing so to influence wider change in the fashion system.

Find out more in our Changing Fashion report which shares our approach and learning from the project.

Meet the Rethink Fashion cohort

Meet our cohort of trailblazers, from a diverse range of backgrounds, skillsets, and parts of the fashion system: manufacturing, textile design, material development, marketing, journalism, community organising and more. All are creative innovators working on initiatives which tackle the extractive and linear status quo in the fashion system yet each is addressing different challenges in different ways. Together they are system-shifters.

Our impact

We tracked our impact across three layers: the trailblazers and their ventures, the cohort as a collaborative field of practice, and the wider fashion system the individuals and cohort are part of and looking to shift.  Across each of these we have mapped signals of impact and evidenced the outcomes of the learning journey.

Funders and partners