Fashionably Early event report

October 23, 2025

On October 10th, 2025 as part of the Dutch Sustainable Fashion Week (DSFW), the event Fashionably Early: Exploring Circular Futures in Fashion brought together researchers, designers, businesses, and policymakers at the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam to exchange ideas and shape next steps toward a more sustainable and circular fashion sector.

The morning plenary session, co-organised by the FABRIX partners (City of Rotterdam, Rotterdam Circulair, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Osmos), and moderated by Adrian Hill (Osmos), introduced three EU-funded Horizon projects and national initiatives that connect academic research with practice to rethink production, consumption, and institutional frameworks shaping the fashion system.

Mariangela Lavanga (Erasmus University Rotterdam) opened the morning session with a keynote on the current challenges in fashion practices emphasizing the importance of a wellbeing economy approach and the cultural dimension in sustainability transitions. She presented links between culture, industry, policy, behaviour and Rotterdam together. Jeroen van der Aa, project manager at TU Delft, followed with a presentation on the EU-funded Horizon project EKIP , a flagship innovation policy platform for the European cultural and creative industries. Emma Samsioe (Lund University) then introduced the EU-funded Horizon project CARE that focuses on empowering households to adopt more circular consumption behaviour across everyday life in clothing and food. Younghyun Kim (Erasmus University Rotterdam) presented insights from the EU-funded project FABRIX on the spatial and relational dynamics of design, manufacturing, and circular fashion practices in Rotterdam and the wider Netherlands. The session concluded with Malique Mohamud (Niteshop) who shared the Tailor of the Future project in Rotterdam, encouraging a reimagining of neighbourhood spaces as sites where craftsmanship, youth creativity, and cultural diversity come together.

The discussions continued in two parallel workshops. The FABRIX session explored the needs and challenges in developing locally rooted and regenerative textile and clothing ecosystems, where Adrian Hill presented the FABRIX platform and its features, sparking lively engagement among participants. At the same time, the EKIP expert meeting focused on future policy directions for fashion and textiles, centring on an exploratory vision for a micro-factory in Rotterdam as a step toward a more sustainable and distributed fashion production landscape.

Participants at Fashionably Early also had the opportunity to visit the show Linnen Beyond Fashion, a project organised by Jeanette Verdonk from Buijtenland van Rhoon. This project and final exhibition, accompanied by presentations and panel discussions, explored the life cycle of local flax farming and cultivation in Rhoon, just southwest of Rotterdam, and highlighted the role of biodiversity in sustaining healthy soil. At the centre of the exhibition was the showcasing of a year’s work of three designers, Petra Laaper, Florian Regtien, and Trinity Williams, who experimented with this Dutch-grown linen to create new products, with the support of textile expert Maaike Gottschal. Their designs revealed a fascinating variety of products that can be made with the local flax harvest. From the structured pyramid bags made by Florian, the flexible workers’ jeans made by Trinity that allow all ranges of movement (as showcased with a spectacular breakdancing performance during the show), to Petra’s experimentation in how the flax takes different dyes and how the byproducts can be made into paper, the show presented a wide diversity of uses for the Dutch-grown flax.

From morning to evening, the day was filled with energy and buzz among creative, academic, and community actors, jointly shaping a more circular and locally driven future for fashion. For FABRIX, these dialogues and showcases reaffirm the importance of place-based collaboration, community-building, and experimentation in advancing circular futures.