Enhancing Fashion Sustainability Through a Data Systemic Approach

Today everyday life is characterized by the interaction with an ever-increasing flow of digital data. The research aims to analyze the fashion industry as a data-driven enterprise in which the correlation of data characterized by greater information power and higher quality gives the chance to make a more informed decision making that lead to undertaking better and more sustainable actions in all the value chain. Data, in this focus, could have the power of increasing the efficiency of the system and reducing its impact at the same time, creating a new model that is not only able to improve environmental, economic and social sustainability but also communicative, enabling a more human-centered products and services designing. This research highlights the importance of giving an integrated and holistic perspective through a data systemic approach to deal with a complex and fragmented sustainable problem, proposing an information flow strategy that makes accessible information improving transparency and traceability. This paper presents several case studies that show how data-oriented projects can contribute some benefits to a fashion system that has environmental sustainability as its priority, but also that the lack of correlation of all these strategies is not yet able to generate and lead to a systemic change.