OpenFashion: Co-Creating a Sustainable Future through Open Design

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Fashion and design are increasingly focused on addressing critical contemporary issues like sustainability, digital transformation, and social inclusion. The impact that these two activities have on the world around us is immense therefore is now more important than ever to utilize their power towards the twin transition and new business approaches. Notwithstanding the sensitivity that the sector has for these topics, addressing these challenges concretely is difficult due to well-established unsustainable practices as the fast fashion supply chain. Overcoming these obstacles requires new education systems and new skills, tailored for what the market is looking for and for an always increasing demand of sustainable fashion. Hence, capacity building within the Vocational Education and Training (VET) and Continuous Vocational Education and Training (C-VET) across EU and South Mediterranean countries is fundamental to developing digital fluency, interdisciplinary thinking and appliance of sustainable practices. OpenFashion, is a project that aims at operating in this multi-faceted context, with an innovative approach: applying new technologies–such as 3D prototyping and co-design– and the open-business approach – which fosters transparency, collaboration, and shared innovation – to the fashion industry by connecting VET providers in Europe with those in Tunisia and Morocco. The open model lays its foundation on three pillars: accessibility, knowledge sharing, and co-creation. OpenFashion, encourages shared resources, open-source solutions, and collaborative ecosystems, and this will challenge traditional proprietary approaches and will create the right environment to nurture innovation and sustainability. Through co-designing principles, VET, C-VET providers and the local stakeholders involved, will not only learn the benefits that sharing knowledge and creativity entails, but they will also understand how to increase their digital competences.