Colours within planetary boundaries? Applying the Three Horizons framework to a critical review of natural dyes in the textile industry sustainability transformation

Abstract As a fossil-dependent industrial system, the fashion and textile industry is operating outside safe planetary boundaries and requires a systemic sustainability transformation. Starting from this premise, this review focuses on natural textile colourants with two complementing aims. First, to examine how the present and future of natural colourants are discussed and framed in the research literature. Second, to explore how these framings situate natural colourants in the larger context of textile industry sustainability transformation. The paper synthesises the literature on natural textile colourants in socio-cultural contexts beyond the laboratory, combining reflexive thematic analysis as a method and the Three Horizons framework of change as an analytical tool. The literature reviewed portrays natural colourants as a re-emerging field with potential to challenge and reshape established textile practices and thus support sustainability transformation in the industry. Simultaneously, natural colourants are burdened by the dominance of synthetic colourants as well as the established consumer and producer mindsets concerning, for example, the abundance, appearance and cost of products. To balance with these tensions requires the fashion and textile industry to consider both (infra)structural and mindset lock-ins, fragmented system perspectives and the unavoidable trade-offs of change. By applying the Three Horizons framework to the analysis of literature, this review carries out a futures-oriented reading of natural colourants, drawing attention to the performative and instrumental roles of our images of the future and a transformative intent in making comprehensive change. Whichever trajectory the textile industry considers worth pursuing will have resources devoted to it, improving it and giving it an advantage over any other alternative future.