Features

India's craft sector employs millions of women in home-based work, often paid by the piece and rarely counted in corporate accountability. As machine-made imitations spread, the question of fair pay grows sharper. Katherine Neuman, who runs House of Wandering Silk in Delhi, examines how replication, pricing and storytelling together decide the fortunes of traditional makers.

Himroo, a centuries-old silk-and-cotton weave from the city now called Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar, had fallen from thousands of handlooms to none still working. Arushi Chowdhury Khanna, who founded the social enterprise LoomKatha, argues that reviving such a craft depends less on preserving skill than on rebuilding the market and the visibility that sustain it, not on the loom alone.

The shapewear buyer has changed, and the product is catching up. Across the US, Japan, and India, brands are retiring the corrective brief and replacing it with an essentials proposition: breathable, inclusive, designed for daily use, and increasingly dependent on fit technology and supply-chain sophistication to deliver what the new consumer language promises. What looks like a category evolution is, on closer inspection, a category reset.

Few apparel categories are being asked to do as much at once as compression wear. In the space of two years, brands have pushed the garment into premium athletic performance, post-surgical recovery, smart-textile development and sustainable material sourcing, each requiring a different standard of proof. What that simultaneous expansion reveals about the category's commercial ambitions and their limits is the subject of this analysis.

Activewear has become one of the defining fashion shifts of the past decade, moving from gym bag to daily wardrobe with a speed that caught even its own industry off guard. The clothes now travel everywhere: errands, social occasions, the school run, the home office. What has not travelled with them, new research suggests, is the confidence the industry has spent years promising they would deliver.

Performance outerwear is among the most technically complex categories in apparel—and among the hardest to recycle. Multi-material construction, bonded membranes, and inseparable trims have long made end-of-life recovery a structural impossibility rather than a logistical inconvenience. A new research and development project is testing whether design for disassembly can change that calculus from the ground up.

High-performance outerwear has been optimised, for decades, around functional benchmarks that left little room for circular thinking. A project built around one garment—drawing on down insulation, heat-dissolvable stitching, and recycled nylon shell fabric—is testing whether that incompatibility is real or assumed. The findings, drawn from contributors across the supply chain, suggest the conflict is more a question of material selection than structural limitation.

The gap between recyclable components and a recoverable product has long defined the limits of sustainable apparel. The Peak Performance R&D Helium Loop Anorak, built in collaboration with four specialist partners, was designed to close that gap—by treating end-of-life disassembly not as an afterthought but as the primary constraint governing every construction and material decision.

Textile recovery infrastructure in the United States is expanding, but remains uneven in scale and capability. Garment quality has declined, fibre complexity has increased, and industry-wide standardisation remains limited across the value chain—widening the gap between circularity ambition and material reality that recycling technology alone cannot close.

The United States generates roughly 17 million tonnes of textile waste each year. Approximately 85% of it ends in landfill or incineration. Extended Producer Responsibility legislation is now moving through California and several other states, with the EU tightening its own parallel framework simultaneously. The ambition is clear. What remains unclear is whether the collection infrastructure, sorting capacity, and economic incentives required to deliver on it exist in any coherent form.