Fashion faces ESPR knowledge gap: Why education must catch up with regulation

Europe’s new eco-design laws are about to shake the global fashion industry, and most players aren’t ready. From Asian factories struggling with data demands to universities slow to update design curriculums, the knowledge gap is widening just as regulators and investors push for rapid change. At the centre of this shift, this year’s Redress x TAL Ecodesign Challenge shows how tomorrow’s designers and today’s suppliers are testing ways to bridge creativity, compliance and commercial reality.

In conversation with FashionUnited, Christina Dean, founder of educational NGO Redress, stressed the urgency of integrating ESPR into both education and supply chains. “Despite the fact that we’ve been talking for years about design being the starting point for the transition to the circular economy, with ESPR around the corner, it really is signaling that there is truly no time now,” she said. “The designers and businesses that are in somewhat denial about this need to break that denial because we need to see a lot of design changes in a short amount of time.”

In the world of textiles, ESPR is a major shift. The EU is among the world’s largest importer of clothing, with about 70 percent of its textiles made in Asia, meaning the ripple effect of regulation will be felt across global supply chains. According to a report by UBS, fashion already accounts for 10 percent of global carbon emissions, while 85 percent of textiles end up in landfills. Regulation is designed to reverse these trends, but it adds pressure to an industry where margins are already tight.

For suppliers, the biggest challenge right now is clarity. As TAL’s president, Rod Henderson, explains: “There’s a big challenge in gathering the data from a very complex supply chain and also being consistent in how the data is gathered. As an example, we’re starting to do work on DPP with some of our bigger clients, but it isn’t clear what data is required and how it needs to be laid out.” Even small details, like fabric interlining, create trade-offs – improving durability but reducing recyclability.

Redress’ 2025 Ecodesign challenge embeds ESPR into structure

For designers coming into the industry, it is also imperative that there is a clear understanding of what is expected of them when they enter the job market. Akin to suppliers, there is a disconnect between knowledge and application. Dean emphasised that the challenge goes beyond individual designers, with current university curriculums often lacking in the way of education surrounding ESPR. “From fashion lecturers to deans in Asian universities and elsewhere, most have not heard of ESPR yet. Integrating new design material into curriculums is extremely slow because they are already full. That’s why we need to raise the urgency now, otherwise we will face a mass scramble later.”

Dean added that universities should see ESPR readiness as a competitive edge. Just as suppliers risk losing orders if they cannot prove compliance, universities may risk losing students if they cannot prove relevance. Positioning circularity and regulatory literacy as a skillset could become a benchmark of academic excellence, and ultimately of graduate employability.

To help close this gap, this year Redress extended its relationship with TAL through a continuation of their annual Ecodesign Challenge, held at TAL Apparel’s Vietnam factory. Here, 10 Redress Design Award finalists, hailing from nine countries, were tasked with reconstructing defective shirts and deadstock fabric into commercially-viable, genderless garments for Redress alumni brand, Jann Bangcaras. Over 1.5 days, the young designers had to integrate at least two of four core ESPR ecodesign requirements: durability, repairability, recyclability and minimal waste.

For many, this was their first direct encounter with ESPR. By embedding legislative principles into real-world prototyping, Redress and TAL aim to prepare the next generation of designers, and the supply chains that support them, for a future in which compliance and competitiveness are inseparable. Dean stated: “Designers have understood sustainability in their normal practice, but they haven’t ever been able to clearly articulate it within the framework of ESPR. What this regulation will do is drive us to one common language – and they need to learn this language.”

When participating in the competition, Filipino finalist Mara San Pedro said lowering waste generation was the biggest challenge: “When you’re upcycling a very complex garment like a shirt, you have to take into account all the parts of the shirt and make sure that you generate the least amount of waste and know that you are also able to scale into production. Canadian finalist Wen Hanzhang said he had to design “not only for aesthetics but also as an engineer”, justifying every decision. Yet he saw ESPR as creative fuel, not a constraint. “You’re thinking about new solutions and working with what you have, so I do think ESPR values push us further with creativity. We have to design within the realities and the real constraints that are affecting the environment.”

‘ESPR should be music to the ears of designers…’

Naturally, the responsibility of ESPR doesn’t fall entirely onto the shoulders of young designers, who will likely only have limited impact over compliance among the brands they work in. “At best, what we’ve seen is that introducing sustainable designers into brands creates a ripple of excitement in design teams, but of course it doesn’t affect compliance or strategy at the C-suite level,” Dean noted.

The impact of size also extends into manufacturing. For firms like TAL that work with a wide range of businesses, compliance requires delivering sustainable products at scale. Henderson said that while larger brands often arrive with sustainability teams and detailed expectations, smaller players are less prepared. “The bigger organisations are more driven to meet legislative requirements and have sustainability teams embedded,” Henderson noted. “With smaller organisations, it’s often a more collaborative process – sometimes we’re educating them, and sometimes they’re educating us. It’s really a two-way street – it’s not one person’s responsibility, it’s an industry responsibility.”

That responsibility carries costs. Henderson noted that TAL has invested in staff and systems to prepare for ESPR, but not all factories can afford to. “Initially, complying costs are very real. Margins in the apparel business are very small, cost pressure is very real. But if you know that the drive is towards more sustainability, then the long-term opportunity will outweigh those costs,” he said. UBS echoes this, noting that urgent investment in circularity and digitalisation is necessary for Asian suppliers to remain competitive in the European market.

Less prepared markets like Bangladesh or Vietnam, where smaller factories with limited capacity may struggle to adapt, are at risk of seeing clients move away unless resources are quickly reallocated to upskilling and compliance. “If you’re a small factory with 20 sewing lines producing for a brand, it’s very difficult to make all these levels of investment in order to comply,” Henderson said. Investment can also not be limited to factories and IT systems, it must also flow into people. Without balanced investment in education, both at university level and within corporate training, the skills gap between Europe’s regulatory expectations and Asia’s production capacity will widen.

If anything, this only reaffirms the perspective of Redress’ Dean: that ESPR is not a future problem, it’s here now. Naturally, ingraining such values into an already congested education system is a challenge in itself, and won’t happen overnight, but in getting ahead of the curb, designers will be able to ingrain this knowledge to exhibit their competency in future careers. “At the heart of a designer is the desire to continuously create something that is better and more suitable for the world in which we live and for the customers they’re designing for. So I think ESPR should be seen as a challenge to do better, not as a whip to be punished. It should be music to the ears of designers,” Dean concluded.