This is one of a series of articles on Circular Economy by Lorinda Cramer and Deborah Lee-Talbot, published for #WorldEnvironmentDay 2025
As community repair groups and repair cafés spring up around Australia, a grassroots movement to decelerate our throwaway culture and divert goods from landfill grows.[1] From furniture to televisions to toys, repairers give our household goods a second life. Here, clothes are mended too, replacing broken zips or lost buttons. A second life for clothing is not lost on Australia’s fashion designers. Among the glittering runway shows parading the latest styles at this year’s Melbourne Fashion Festival, the New Again Runway celebrated designers “taking sustainability to higher heights, proving that reusing, reworking and rewearing breeds exceptional artistry, experimentation and innovation”. In this, its designers underlined how “fashion doesn’t have to be brand new to be fresh and cool”.[2]
Yet, fashion has often been defined for its link to new styles that experience rapid change. This makes fashion and sustainability strange bedfellows. The New Again Runway tapped into an increasingly urgent question: is sustainable fashion possible, what does it mean and how can it be achieved? The New Again Runway is not alone in its focus on fashion circularity and sustainability as Australia’s government, industry bodies, designers, manufacturers and consumers turn their gaze to what another event at the Melbourne Fashion Festival heralded as the “circular fashion revolution”.[3]
We know that fashion has a problem. So great is Australia’s appetite for new clothes that the average person purchased a massive 53 items in 2023.[4] Some are unworn or worn only once before they are discarded. Many of these clothes that are bought cheaply as fast fashion will go into landfill.[5] The synthetic fibres they are made from are unable to easily break down, creating long-term environmental concerns. Others are incinerated once they transition from fashion to waste. Not only that. Workers in third-world countries toil in grim conditions for low pay to churn out fast fashion at a rate that meets our demand.[6]
But an escalating body of policies, reports, initiatives and research produced in a short handful of years has set a path forward. The 2024 report of the Circular Economy Ministerial Advisory Group, The Circular Advantage, advised on the critical steps for Australia’s transition to a circular economy. This is one in which “resources are continuously transformed, reused and regenerated, ensuring nothing goes to waste”, with the first recommendation being the development of a National Circular Economy Policy Framework.[7] This new framework has an important aim: to double Australia’s circularity by 2035, while recognising our unique position as an exporter of resources and materials and an importer of many of the consumer goods that fill our homes – including our clothes.[8]
Clothing and textiles are a central focus for Australia’s circular economy. Australia’s clothing stewardship scheme, Seamless, launched in 2023 and became operational the year to follow. Members of the scheme pay a levy for each item of clothing they place on the market, with the funds generated invested in four key areas that are intended to dramatically transform our current linear practices into clothing circularity by 2030. The first encourages circular design and the second fosters circular business models. Expanding opportunities for material reuse and recycling, and inspiring behavioural change for clothing consumption, use and disposal make up the third and fourth priority areas.[9]
Added to this are industry guides including the recently published Refashioned: Accelerating Circular Product Design at Scale. This practical guide recognises that current systems fall short of managing large-scale circularity. The guide invites “designers to lean into the challenge, outlining specific strategies to ensure the garments they design are circular-systems-ready”.[10] Circular design considers not only a garment’s entire lifecycle, but the system that each garment moves in and through. This emphasises a responsibility not only for consumers of fashion, but also for those who produce and sell it.
Clothing circularity, however, is not new – though our contemporary focus on environmental and human issues is. I’ve been considering other times in Australian history where people were encouraged (if not forced) to reuse and refashion their clothing motivated by distinct cultural contexts, social attitudes and material shortages. There are, I suggest, lesson to be learnt from the past. The dynamic mid-nineteenth-century gold rush period is one in which a culture of clothing circularity underpinned a common approach to dress for all but the wealthiest. Many people survived with only a small number of clothes in their wardrobe at any one time, and would never have dreamt of buying an inconceivable 53 new items each year.
To make their clothes last, they carefully cared for and mended clothing over many years. They were encouraged to refashion – through adjusting the sleeves or skirt of a gown, for example – to keep their clothes aligned with fashionable silhouettes. They resized their clothes in order to accommodate weight gain or as clothes were bequeathed or passed down from one wearer to another. They also cut down their clothes to remake them for growing children, conscious of the value contained in the cloth itself. Once clothes were no longer wearable, they served other functions including as rags.
Much like the work of designers featured in the New Again Runway, mid-nineteenth-century practices of clothing circulatory demanded creativity, innovation and skill. This circular culture required that people understand how purchases of new clothing were rare, placing a heightened value on each item that they owned and wore, that they mended, and that they reused in multiple ways. This speaks to ideas for inspiring behavioural change that the repair movement and Seamless advocates for in the present day. The long life of clothes in the mid-nineteenth-century was enhanced by the way they had been made, including widths of fabric that could be taken apart and large seam allowances to aid in sizing clothing up. These design features helped to extend a garment’s lifecycle, and could do so again.
[1] Clean Up Australia, “The Right to Repair”, 2025, https://www.cleanup.org.au/australian-repair-network; Sustainability Victoria, “Repair Cafés Fix Throwaway Culture for Free”, Media Release, 17 October 2024, https://www.sustainability.vic.gov.au/news/media-releases/repair-caf%C3%A9s-fix-throwaway-culture-for-free.
[2] Paypal Melbourne Fashion Festival, ‘New Again Runway”, March 2025, https://www.sustainability.vic.gov.au/news/media-releases/repair-caf%C3%A9s-fix-throwaway-culture-for-free https://melbournefashionfestival.com.au/news/new-again-runway-2025.
[3] Paypal Melbourne Fashion Festival, “Fashion Talks: Circular Fashion Revolution Presented by Museums Victoria”, March 2025, https://melbournefashionfestival.com.au/2025-programme/the-circular-revolution.
[4] Seamless, “National Clothing Benchmark”, 13 November 2024, p. 2, https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6626f3b6b75e22631bdf7c57/67342188a21a1399698f60f9_Seamless_National_Clothing_Benchmark.pdf.
[5] Nina Gbor and Olivia Chollet, “Textile Wate in Australia: Reducing Consumption and Investing in Circularity”, The Australian Institute, Research Paper, May 2024, https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/The-Australia-Institute-Textiles-Waste-In-Australia-Web.pdf.
[6] Gina Snodgrass and Katherine Halliday, Ethical Fashion Report, 10th Edition, Baptist World Aid Australia, 2024, https://baptistworldaid.org.au/resources/ethical-fashion-report/.
[7] Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water and Circular Economy Ministerial Advisory Group, The Circular Advantage: Final Report, December 2024, p. 5, 10, 23, https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/circular-advantage-final-report-cemag.pdf.
[8] Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, Australia’s Circular Economy Framework: Doubling Our Circularity Rate, December 2024, pp. 5–6.
[9] Australian Fashion Council and Consortium, Seamless Scheme Design Summary Report, May 2023, p. 23, https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6626f3b6b75e22631bdf7c57/664b43b8f0f21c1fa4b5f24b_Seamless_Design_Summary_Report.pdf.
[10] C. Holm, J. Boulton, A. Payne, Y. Samie, J. Underwood, R. Van Amber and S. Islam, Refashioning: Accelerating Circular Product Design at Scale, March 2025m p. 8, https://refashioning.org/download/.
