The textile industry is due an overhaul, here’s how to stay ahead

Textiles, as an industry, radically needs reform. For decades, the relationship between a brand and its textile supplier has been transactional and unglamorous, one footnote in a murky chain that the press and consumers rarely hear about. But change is coming. Digital Product Passports (DPPs) will soon be mandatory for all garments sold in the EU, and, given the absolute necessity of finding more sustainable practices, similar policies will likely follow.

BYBORRE are well ahead of this curve. In contrast to the most textile developers, a collaboration with them is a spotlighted part of a brand’s collection – something to mention in show notes and press releases. To illustrate how open they are, Borre talks about his collaboration with Kiro Hirata from KAPITAL. “He came to Amsterdam, and we sat at the [knitting] machine together to translate a jacket Kiro’s father got from a native tribe in the States. It meant a lot, translating his family history and a cultural history into new techniques.”

Despite focusing almost exclusively on textile development and innovation, Borre’s background is in fashion. He studied at New York’s FIT before graduating from Eindhoven’s Design Academy and spent years in Paris under Lidewij Edelkoort. In fact, many people know BYBORRE from its previous guise, a popular fashion line. “I knew I wanted to work with textiles and to do that, I had to understand how textiles shape clothing,” Borre says. “I never believed fashion was made from sketches. I believed it was made from textiles and fibres.”

In the back of the studio, there’s a large table dotted with colourfully knitted swatches. Amidst them, you can find sheets with the knit’s breakdown, composition, raw material origin, environmental footprint and more – precursors of the soon-to-be mandatory Digital Product Passports that contain “everything designers and brands need to communicate, both internally and to the consumer.” The next space is home to several knitting machines. Borre points out a large, circular one with nearly 4000 needles traditionally meant for knitting double jersey. He explains that, by adding yarns in between, you get the textured 3D-style knit signature to BYBORRE. This process traditionally requires three people: a machine technician, a software operator and a graphic expert. It’s complicated to scale without compromising on quality. “Every step becomes open to interpretation. We were dealing with language barriers and other thresholds, which are inherent to this industry.”

The company “combined the knowledge of the machine technician, software technician and graphic designer into one tool.” It started as an internal solution, and most textile companies would’ve kept it that way. This industry is notoriously territorial and opaque. Young designers can’t just Google a textile manufacturer. They need long-standing supplier relationships and a lot of purchasing power to access high-quality production. It took Borre “12 years to access good yarns, to these knitting machines and a responsible supply chain.”

In 2021, the company launched Create, an iteration of its textile translation tool that any potential client can use – with an emphasis on any. Borre recalls a studio visit from a 16-year-old winner of a national high school art prize. “I showed him around. He was very enthusiastic and curious, so I let him use the tool to make a sample. Later, he came by the studio again and showed me the sweater he made, and the quality was good. He’d posted about it on Instagram, saying where the yarns are from, how it’s fully transparent, amazing, produced in the Netherlands and how he’d made it in a week. These machines and yarns were incredibly hard to work with. At first, I thought about how it took me 12 fucking years to get here. And how this kid – not even in design school – used it like it’s nothing.”

Simultaneously, he realised the tool helped “democratise the industry,” which was always the goal. “You design in Photoshop or Figma, and every pixel translates to a needle,” Borre says. Before uploading their design (which can be any format from JPEG to SVG), users can pick from various knit types and compositions, ranging from a merino wool blend to recycled polyester. Each option is accompanied by environmental footprint information and use suggestions.

According to Borre, most users create about 10 digital samples before ordering one or two physical ones, which are 140 x 100 cm and created by the company’s circular knitting machine within a week. Production starts at 50 metres at the company’s partner facility in Belgium. Meanwhile, the lab’s circular knitting machine is dedicated to producing new samples daily. Next to it hang some recent creations: an illustrative knit ordered by an interior artist and another distinct print from a hospitality business. But Borre is also proud of the design students who come here to sample their textiles. “They can use responsible materials from day one, rather than having to work with [poor quality] for ten years before finally meeting a factory’s MOQs.”

Create was met with resistance at first, especially by established players who were set in their way of working. “People were used to selecting textiles. They understood this was more creatively free, but it was different. It was hard for me to comprehend that ‘different’ is such a boundary.” The tool might’ve been made to be so accessible that a high school student can use it, but this industry hesitation led to a lot of hand-holding. “It became difficult to implement,” Borre says. In April this year, the company launched its Textile Room to meet “many of our clients, like architects or interior designers, who prefer to select from existing options.” Textile Room is a library of pre-designed textiles. Some are designed in-house, others through artist collaborations. They’re fully customisable, in colour tone and pattern repeat. Like the textiles ordered through Create, they come with a Textile Passport and can be ordered from 50 metres onwards.

For a textile developer, BYBORRE’s studio holds surprisingly little textile stock. This is a conscious choice, as every textile here is made to order. “Traditionally, every order means an overproduction of textiles,” Borre says. “Even if that’s 500 metres, that overproduction is rarely used by other clients, who want their full textile order to be consistent. Meanwhile, deadstock can only be used by small brands.” According to Borre, deadstock treats the symptom rather than the cause.

Ironically, the only things on stock at BYBORRE are rolls of yarn. There’s a large stockroom with hundreds of them, some stacked neatly into numbered racks, others in cardboard boxes piled up to the ceiling. The irony stems from the fact that, in the traditional textile industry, yarns are custom-dyed for each order. “We used to do that too,” Borre says, pointing at the cardboard boxes. “But since you have to ensure you have enough dyed for a textile, you’re already overproducing in the yarn stage.” Now, they work exclusively with a digital colour stock, which is what the neatly organised yarns are for and what designers have to choose from when using the company’s tools.

Overproduction is one of the many issues Borre has noticed with his 18 years in this industry. “The textile industry scaled up during the Industrial Revolution of the last century. With the beginning of fast fashion in the 80s and 90s, it scaled even more in terms of production speed. It moved across the world for cheaper labour and access to raw materials. So when digitalisation came, I think the industry was reluctant to change again. Some companies implement forms of digitalisation individually. But the textile industry, as a whole, is still in Web 1. It’s built on spreadsheets. Information gets passed on from one source to the next. That needs to change.”

Of course, these issues are closely tied to issues in the fashion industry, which drives the majority of textile consumption. “Fashion is an industry of creation, but mostly a marketing industry. Product value is almost exclusively created in the supply chain, of which the textile industry is a part. But income is generated at the brand level, through marketing and sales.” But recently, fashion has focused disproportionately on perception rather than tactility. You can see it every Fashion Month, in the runway gimmicks, viral moments and influencer-filled front rows. “It proves that quality hasn’t been the highest priority in the last two decades,” Borre says. He agrees that it’s amplified now that we mostly engage with fashion through social media. “I think that a lot of new, young brands tapped into the power of online presence. If they can build a cool presence and connect that to a product with aesthetic value, then it’s all about the moment of sale.”

According to him, “the moment of sale shouldn’t be the most important. Right now, that’s the case. Because that’s when you cover all your costs,” which doesn’t benefit quality, durability and wearability. He says fashion should focus on “users” rather than “consumers,” and fashion advertising (in its current, consumption-oriented form) should be banned. “Why not? We did it with tobacco ads. Tobacco kills people. Fashion kills the planet.” He talks about lowering margins, fashion-as-a-service, making repairs and reselling fashionable. “Instead of terms like second- and third-hand, you simply talk about use.”