texfash

India's craft sector employs millions of women in home-based work, often paid by the piece and rarely counted in corporate accountability. As machine-made imitations spread, the question of fair pay grows sharper. Katherine Neuman, who runs House of Wandering Silk in Delhi, examines how replication, pricing and storytelling together decide the fortunes of traditional makers.

Himroo, a centuries-old silk-and-cotton weave from the city now called Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar, had fallen from thousands of handlooms to none still working. Arushi Chowdhury Khanna, who founded the social enterprise LoomKatha, argues that reviving such a craft depends less on preserving skill than on rebuilding the market and the visibility that sustain it, not on the loom alone.

Sustainability credentials and AI capabilities are increasingly shaping how textile buyers evaluate suppliers, yet the gap between exhibition-floor claims and commercial application remains significant. Intertextile Shenzhen 2026 drew over 20,000 visits from 74 countries and regions. Wilmet Shea, General Manager of Messe Frankfurt (HK) Ltd, assesses which innovations translated into tangible business outcomes and where the industry's direction is shifting.

Governments in more than two dozen markets are adopting or planning Extended Producer Responsibility schemes for textiles, building funding architectures designed to make fashion brands pay for end-of-life waste management. The infrastructure to sort and recycle what those schemes collect barely exists. A new analysis by WRAP maps how the gap between collection mandates and processing capacity is producing stockpiles, exports and at least one regulatory enforcement action.

Sustainability efforts in fashion have largely focused on optimising an existing linear model: cleaner dyes, better sorting, more efficient factories. Asha Singhal, Director, Nature of Fashion at the Biomimicry Institute, argues this approach overlooked a structural absence rather than a technical shortfall. Pilots run by the programme in the Netherlands, Germany and Ghana tested whether biological decomposition could process textile waste current recycling infrastructure cannot.

Clients who built relationships with personal stylists have started asking a question consumer resale apps cannot answer: what happens to clothing once it leaves the wardrobe. Stéphanie Crespin, Founder and Chief Executive of Reflaunt, has answered with Folio, a private resale system that lets stylists manage client wardrobes, earn commission and protect discretion others did not offer.

Premium retail in India is no longer defined by a narrow set of traditional luxury buyers, as a younger, more globally connected consumer base reshapes demand across categories. Pushpa Bector, Group Executive Director, DLF Retail and Whole-time Director, DCCDL, discusses how this expanding aspiration is reshaping leasing strategy, brand curation and the long-term positioning of premium retail destinations.

The textile industry has spent years producing pilot-scale sustainability successes that rarely translate into supply chain-wide adoption. The constraint is purchasing behaviour, not available technology. Eva Baumann, Chief Executive Officer of CHT Group, draws on CHT's foundation-owned structure and portfolio depth to make a case that is less about ambition than about where industrial reality and procurement logic continue to diverge.

Regulatory pressure on the global secondhand clothing trade is building in Brussels, Washington, and Geneva, shaped by the widespread belief that exports to Africa amount to little more than waste disposal. Field evidence from East African markets tells a different story, one in which market incentives, trust-based quality systems, and consumer affordability constraints combine to keep textile waste to a fraction of imported bales.

Europe’s textile fair circuit is crowded, and buyers are weighing travel, time and sourcing returns more carefully as sourcing budgets face sharper scrutiny. For Serhan Pul, Managing Director of B Group US and organiser of Intertex Portugal, the answer lies in efficiency, relevance, buyer qualification and Portugal’s manufacturing strengths rather than scale alone today.