The Sustainable Fashion Read on July

Circularity has had years of pilots, promises and proof points. July’s stories moved into the slightly trickier phase of making it work.

The month’s most shifting updates sat in seller fees, grading systems, unsold stock rules, zipper tape, sorting capacity and training budgets. Small operational details, until you realise they decide whether a garment is resold, recycled, redesigned or destroyed.

July showed circular fashion becoming more specific, more commercial and more accountable. Value is moving towards the businesses and teams that can make lower-impact choices easier to adopt, easier to operate and easier to recognise.Circularity has had years of pilots, promises and proof points. July’s stories moved into the harder phase: making it work.

Secondhand is building better (but also more) reasons to buy

Secondhand already has attention. July’s movements focused on converting that attention into repeat behaviour, stronger economics and more distinctive experiences.

The market is growing through several routes at once: cultural relevance, integrated take-back, seller incentives, luxury service and platform consolidation. Value is accumulating around the garment through curation, convenience, access and personal connection.

✷ A new report found that UK consumers spent £1.372 billion on sustainable fashion in 2025, with secondhand accounting for 93% of the category. The scale is significant, although it still represents a small part of Britain’s £61 billion fashion market. Explore the market data here.

✷Vestiaire Collectivereported that 83% of orders replaced an equivalent new purchase and 56% of users search the platform first when they need clothing. It also found that 31% buy more because resale is affordable, giving the industry a more honest view of substitution and rebound. Read the full impact report.

✷ UK regulators cleared eBay’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Depop, bringing its younger resale community into an eBay fashion category already generating more than $10 billion in annual merchandise volume. See the commercial detail here.

✷Depop moved its Australian seller fee to buyers, following the structure already used by Vinted and Depop in other markets. The change gives people a stronger financial reason to list their wardrobes and increases pressure on platforms to prove value at checkout. Explore the fee change.

✷ Depop also launched a Zara Larsson campaign and exclusive shop, continuing to build resale through music, personality and styling culture. Discover the campaign.

✷ Studio Phini relaunched from the Loom marketplace into a luxury redesign studio after finding that craftsmanship, appointments and personal relationships created the strongest customer value. Read the relaunch announcement.

✷MORI partnered with LittleLoop on a managed resale and take-back service for outgrown childrenswear, with LittleLoop handling photography, listings, sales and shipping while customers receive credit. Explore the partnership.

These stories reveal a resale market becoming more segmented and more commercially literate. Secondhand value now sits across taste, price, liquidity, service and emotional attachment.

For founder-led brands and circular platforms, the opportunity is to choose the value you can own. That might be a trusted edit, a seamless take-back service, a better seller return or a deeply personal redesign experience. Circularity gives the model context. The experience gives it momentum.

Funding is following circularity’s bottlenecks

July’s investment stories clustered around the difficult parts of keeping products in circulation.

Sorting, grading, listing, pricing and wardrobe management carry significant labour and operational cost. The businesses attracting capital are turning these pressure points into infrastructure.

✷Fleek raised $25 million to scale Fleek Sort, an AI system trained to identify, grade, price and merchandise secondhand garments. The technology targets an industry still shaped by manual processes, inconsistent standards and fragmented supply networks. Read more about the investment.

✷ Wardrobe and styling app Whering secured $7 million from eBay Ventures and the Google AI Futures Fund after growing its digital wardrobe platform beyond 10 million users, putting capital behind tools that increase use from clothing people already own. Explore the funding story.

✷ Berlin startup reverse.fashion received seven-figure backing from High-Tech Gründerfonds to commercialise AI-powered sorting technology that categorises used garments for resale, repair, upcycling and recycling. See how the system works.

✷ VNYX launched an automated resale system capable of processing 100,000 secondhand items each year, covering identification, content creation and online listing within one industrial workflow. Dive into the technology here.

Capital is moving towards measurable improvements in throughput, accuracy and recovery value. The circular economy needs compelling brands, and it also needs machinery capable of handling enormous volumes of inconsistent products.

For circular businesses, the commercial story sharpens around the bottleneck you remove. Processing time, grading accuracy, recovery rate, seller return and cost per item all translate circular ambition into something investors and industry partners can evaluate.

Policy is moving closer to consequences

July’s policy stories focused on what happens after fashion’s commercial decisions are made: unsold stock, short-lived products, missing evidence, deforestation and unsafe factories.

Regulation is reaching further into operations, although the boundaries remain politically uneven. The same month brought stronger controls on excess and ultra-fast fashion, lighter reporting requirements and the removal of leather from a major deforestation rule.

✷ The EU ban on destroying unsold apparel and footwear took effect for large companies on 19 July, requiring businesses to prioritise resale, donation, repair, refurbishment and remanufacturing while retaining compliance records for five years. Read the full development.

✷ France passed its long-awaited anti-fast-fashion law after more than two years of negotiation. Its final scope concentrates environmental charges and advertising restrictions on ultra-fast-fashion operators, leaving much of the wider volume market untouched. Explore what survived the final law.

✷ Germany, France and the Netherlands called for coordinated EU action against short-lived, low-quality ultra-fast fashion, pushing the issue from individual national policies towards shared European enforcement. See the joint position here.

✷ Revised European Sustainability Reporting Standards cut mandatory datapoints by more than 60%, lowering reporting costs while creating a lighter evidence framework for companies and suppliers across EU value chains. Read through the revisions.

✷ The European Commission removed leather from the scope of its deforestation regulation despite research and criticism linking cattle hides to forest loss, exposing the continued influence of industry pressure over where responsibility is drawn. Explore the criticism.

✷ Following successive industrial deaths, West Bengal announced plans for a new factory safety policy covering enforcement and working conditions, grounding sustainability in the physical safety of the people producing goods. Read the full report.

The EU destruction ban removes one of fashion’s quietest release valves. It raises the commercial value of forecasting, repair, reverse logistics, controlled resale and remanufacturing. It also creates a new test: whether surplus is genuinely recirculated or simply pushed into other markets.

For sustainability teams, compliance is increasingly connected to buying, merchandising, sourcing and inventory. Stronger systems begin before the product becomes surplus, and credible responsibility stretches across materials, labour conditions and end-of-life planning.

Circularity is moving into the spec sheet

July’s product stories focused on the quiet details that determine whether circular design survives production: fibre blends, zipper tape, feedstock access, traceability and performance.

Recycled materials are entering standard assortments and industrial partnerships. Their progress now depends on compatibility with existing mills, components, quality requirements and purchasing processes.

✷ Circ, Lenzing, AGI Denim and H&M brought textile-to-textile recycled pulp into two men’s jeans sold through H&M’s standard denim offer, moving the collaboration from pilot announcement to an available product. Discover the collection.

✷ YKK developed an EXCELLA zipper concept using tape partially made from used clothing, then placed it inside Yuima Nakazato’s couture collection. The component shows how recyclability has to reach trims and findings as well as main fabrics. Explore the zipper development.

✷RE&UP launched its Fiber Club to pool brand demand and widen access to next-generation recycled cotton and polyester, targeting the pricing and minimum-volume barriers that keep smaller businesses away from new materials. Read about the consortium.

✷ Syntetica raised $30 million from investors including Lululemon, MAS Holdings and Etam to scale technology that processes elastane, addressing a fibre blend that has historically been difficult and expensive to recycle, along with disrupting recycling potential streams. Deep dive into the chemistry.

These developments show that material adoption is an orchestration problem. Recycling technology, fibre production, component design, manufacturing and retail all have to meet at the same specification.

For biomaterial innovators, recyclers and suppliers, performance alone carries limited commercial power. Adoption grows through reliable supply, workable minimums, compatible manufacturing, clear evidence and partners who can move the material through an existing product system.

Sustainability partnerships and award winners

The sustainable skills sector is growing and diversifying.

Training programmes, design competitions and city-level coalitions all focused on capability: translating waste, regulation and material limits into decisions made by designers, buyers, legal teams, logistics teams, educators and policymakers.

✷ Dior partnered with Institut Français de la Mode on global sustainability education spanning design, sourcing, legal, logistics and leadership, embedding environmental knowledge across the organisation. Explore the programme.

✷ REDRESS selected sustainably motivated eight designers from seven regions whose collections use damaged textiles, industrial waste, reclaimed leather, excess yarn and zero-waste knitwear as practical design inputs. Meet the finalists.

✷ Yoshita 1967 and RWRK Studio’s Farouk Braimoh won the European and UK rounds of the R|Elan Circular Design Challenge, taking artisan production and cross-industry textile waste into a global programme spanning France, India and the UK. Explore the European round and meet the UK winner.

✷ Paris Good Fashion launched a coalition connecting eight global fashion capitals through shared resources, local workshops and a common method for turning proven projects into city-level action. Read about the coalition.

✷ UK fashion students were recognised at Parliament for technically demanding upcycled designs, with the finished garments entering a Barnardo's resale auction rather than ending at the awards ceremony. See the winning work.

Circularity is becoming a professional skillset with technical, creative and organisational value.

For founder-led brands and industry organisations, capability determines how far an idea travels. Teams need to understand how circular decisions affect design, costing, sourcing, operations and communication. Education turns sustainability from a specialist conversation into shared business practice.

Where Irigai sits

At Irigai, we work at the point where sustainable fashion becomes strategy: helping founder-led brands, circular businesses and material innovators turn complex work into clearer positioning, sharper communication and stronger commercial relevance.

July’s stories show how much of the industry’s progress now depends on translation. New systems need buyers to understand their value, teams to know how to use them and customers to recognise why they matter. Irigai helps that work land with the people who can move it forward.