Sustainable approaches to textile design: Lessons from biology

Models such as the circular economy, offer guidance to actors from the fashion and textile industry on how to navigate the negative environmental, ethical, and social impacts of the sector’s current and historic practices. The principles underpinning these models originate from the intersection of biology and general systems theory and have provided us with valuable alternative paradigms via a top-down lens. This paper seeks to explore the potential for additional insight into sustainable textile design practice from biology by reviewing sustainable design principles emerging from top-down (ecology + systems view) within the context of a bottom-up (biology + engineering) approach for opportunities to mitigate the environmental impact of design decisions informing the physical products we consume. The results suggest a novel practice-based conceptual framework that could enable textile designers to better understand the impacts of resource efficiency, longevity and recovery of their design practice by shifting from a substance and energy approach to designing with structure and information.

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