Welcome to Slow Fashion Season 2026! 

Symposium, Career Fair, Workshops and much more coming soon!

The complexity of textile sustainability is technical and social: The global textile industry is only 0.3% circular (Circle Economy 2024) and apparel waste is 2.3% of Metro Vancouver’s garbage (Storry & McKenzie 2002). There exists a deep need to adjust social attitudes toward and demand for fast fashion. To shift demand and begin cherishing the possibilities of reinvention and renewal, we respond to the seemingly simple question: how can textiles be made more sustainable?

The annual Slow Fashion Season at UBC asks us to think about sustainable fashion. The upcoming January to March 2026 season includes textile workshops, student design challenges, textile and research in sustainable fashion exhibitions and a slow fashion show. The Season is led by the Slow Fashion: Circular Textiles and Sustainable Fibre research cluster, an emerging interdisciplinary group working on the complex problems of sustainability in textiles and clothing. The cluster interweaves research and knowledge-exchange threads, technological and creative experimentation, cultural research with Indigenous and traditional fibre traditions, and methods for reducing, processing and re-using textile waste.

Our knowledge-exchange and mobilization activities are public-facing and present sustainable initiatives and opportunities to share knowledge with the public and other researchers.