Mapping fashion networks and pre-consumer textile flows for circular communities

This article stems from a pilot project that identified fashion and textile businesses to inform a circular strategy for pre-consumer textile waste within South-East Queensland, Australia. The circular economy is seen as an overall intervention strategy to shift the fashion industry from a linear to a circular model of production and consumption. New approaches of circularity look at economic and social sustainability in cities and urban environments, designing circularity to enhance urban places and social wellbeing, and empower local communities. Our project advances the concept of the circular city by mapping existing small and medium fashion and textile businesses with social infrastructure in the Brisbane Region, to understand opportunities for local connectivity and circular practices. This article unpacks circularity to underline emerging shifts in circular fashion practice, situating our mapping process within the context of pre-consumer textile waste flows. Through locating businesses and practices, conducting a survey, interviews and a workshop, information collected through this project has provided a clearer understanding of the geographic and sociocultural factors needed to sustain and support local fashion networks to transition to a circular community model that harness social and community interactions based on fashion and textile re-use. One of the key findings is the potential for the development of micro-logistics of connectivity based on intergenerational communities of circular knowledge. This finding considers Crewe’s ‘geographies of fashion’ as an overarching lens and proposes an adoption of Pratt’s ‘contact zones’ and ‘intergenerational contact zones’ to support circular practices through the nexus of fashion, education, community settings and recycling hubs.