Sustainable fashion education increasingly incorporates sustainability concepts, yet how textile waste (TW) management initiatives and textile recycling (TR) programs are implemented in undergraduate fashion design education remains understudied. This study aims to examine the range of TW/TR initiatives used across fashion programs and explores the factors shaping their pedagogical value and viability.
A mixed methods design combined faculty surveys and semistructured interviews across 35 fashion schools in eight countries, an undergraduate student survey, and a participatory action research (PAR) case study implementing a campus TW/TR program at a Canadian university.
The study identified three infrastructural configurations: integrated and institutionalized programs, partnership-dependent but fragile programs and grassroots initiatives reliant on individual champions. Across these configurations, pedagogical depth and program viability were shaped less by motivation than by structural support, including budget, defined roles, curricular integration and stable downstream partnerships. Students expressed strong sustainability commitments, but their technical knowledge of textile recycling remained limited.
Findings are based on a single institutional case study and Western fashion program perspectives.
TW/TR initiatives can enrich sustainability learning, but their pedagogical value and long-term viability depend on institutional support rather than awareness or goodwill alone. Programs should prioritize curricular integration, operational support, and stable partnerships, while situating recycling within broader waste prevention and material literacy strategies.
By treating TW as a shared institutional and pedagogical issue, fashion programs can help students connect sustainability values to everyday design practice. The study shows that TW/TR initiatives may support student agency, material literacy and critical reflection, but only when institutions provide the infrastructure needed to sustain them. These findings have social implications for how fashion schools prepare future designers to question overconsumption, work with material constraints, and participate in more responsible systems of production, use, reuse and waste prevention.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study offers one of the first cross-institutional analyses of TW/TR initiatives in undergraduate fashion education and introduces an infrastructural typology explaining why many initiatives are pedagogically promising yet structurally fragile.
