In this interview, a representative from Politecnico (Speaker B) discusses the challenges and opportunities surrounding the digital transformation of the fashion industry. The conversation begins by highlighting a significant digital skills gap in both fashion education and among small‑ and medium‑sized fashion enterprises, which often lack the resources and awareness to adopt new technologies. A parallel trend is the rise of fashion‑tech startups that are demonstrating how digital tools can not only streamline technical tasks but also reshape business models and improve sustainability through more efficient, resource‑saving processes. The discussion moves to the growing demand for 3D design skills, explaining how these tools enable a circular, iterative creative workflow compared to the traditional linear sketch‑to‑prototype process. The speaker emphasizes a pedagogical shift at Politecnico: rather than teaching specific software, the curriculum aims to cultivate a “learning‑how‑to‑learn” mindset, giving students a broad exposure to multiple tools and the ability to adapt continuously. A flagship initiative, the DEFINE project, seeks to connect the fragmented fashion‑tech ecosystem across Europe—linking SMEs, universities, incubators, accelerators, and startups via a shared platform and incubating best‑practice projects. The speaker envisions an integrated future where smart factories, smart products, and smart networks converge to create circular business models that place consumers as active participants, demanding radical transparency about product lifecycles. Sustainability and circularity are presented as central themes, with education now embedding these concerns into student theses and projects. Students are described as increasingly ethically conscious, shifting fashion’s narrative from pure style to responsible expression. The role of government is identified as crucial yet lagging: outdated regulations can hinder circular initiatives, and public administration is often slow to adopt digital transformation. Finally, the interview touches on the expanding relevance of design thinking beyond products, extending to policy and service design, and concludes with mutual appreciation for the dialogue.
Chapters
Being at the intersection of the old and the new, brands, education, there's a lot, a lot to cover. And as we were saying earlier on, there's a bit of a gap in the digital skills that are being developed within education at the moment.
Absolutely. And there are several problems because there is a problem of traditional fashion companies which sometimes are not aware of the new professionals they would need to embrace a transformation which is really possibly impacting in their processes, improving them. So there is also this issue because, for example, in Italy, but in Europe in in general, the majority of fashion companies and manufacturers are still small and medium enterprises, so they do not have the knowledge and the resources also to understand what's really going on and which could be the potentials that they could get from the digital transformation. And on our side, as educators, we are also quite long-lasting institutions, so based on models that have been, let's say, conceived long ago, that many features of current universities are still based on concepts that were created during the Enlightenment. So it's a very, I would say, conservative context also to change.
But the truth is same for some fashion companies. The way you make clothes hasn't changed very much in a couple of hundred years as well. So maybe you're perfectly married in that way.
Absolutely. So we both need to change. And the interesting thing is also that there's an ecosystem in place that made out of new actors, because while we were catching up and SMEs were catching up on this transformation, a new world of startups, which are fashion tech natives, were created, and they are offering solutions and showing how much these new technologies can transform not technical tasks, but really the business model of the system. And what's interesting for us as as also public institutions, is that this can also positively impact on the sustainability of the system, because having more efficient processes, producing less, using technologies to do things that were before using resources, water, people, is really beneficial for also the environment. So that is one of the topics that we are focusing on now.
Do you have students queuing out the door to learn 3D skills in today's world?
Absolutely. So actually, there is a whole debate on how creative professionals in fashion, but in general in creative industries, are changing their, let's say, daily processes and cognitive approaches. And 3D is certainly a skill that is required because you can possibly interact with the three-dimensional features of what you're conceiving in real time. So it's something that is a real potential if you compare it to the traditional process, because the traditional process was linear. So you did design sketching, you did create the technical drawings, pattern makings, and then seeing the model in real, and then there was the full fitting process that was a nightmare where you would change many things and go back to the design sketching and so on and so forth. Now, if you are a designer and you can manage a little bit of these new tools, you can design and already see in three-dimensional features what you've been designing and interact with that and change it throughout the process. So do not— you can really make the process a circular process as the creative process is. So it's even more natural if you manage the the tool to apply your creative ideas.
How do you go about choosing which tool to use?
So we are really a big, larger university. Politecnico has 40,000 students, and in design we have— of course, it's a large engineering, architecture, and design school, but we have also many designs. So we really think that the digital transformation requires individuals different from the past, so they do not have anymore the idea that they should learn a specific tool, but we need to understand that we educate professionals to be able to learn continuously and in a certain way to develop a familiarity with technology in a way that they enter a specific environment of technology and they can learn what's the tool used. So they need to understand the framework behind it, the concept, how this type of tool works, which are the potential but also be ready to learn every day something new, and this is the real challenge. So learning how to learn and not a specific technology. That's the reason why we offer them a very broad spectrum of tools, technological experiences, in a way that they can be in a certain way augmented professionals where the familiarity technology is certainly a specific attitude.
Yeah. For you in your role, what do you find the most exciting thing that you're doing at the moment?
Actually, as all academics, I'm engaged in education, but I'm also engaged in research. For example, the one on skill gaps I was speaking earlier is a very interesting part of my research today. Another very interesting project that we are running, it's called Define: Developing a Fashion Tech Innovation Network for Europe. And it's very interesting because we are trying to put in place, at least to connect the potential fashion tech ecosystem, which does exist, but it's not at all interacting. So we have SMEs, we have educational institutions, we have incubators, accelerators, a system of startups, and there is a possible ecosystem, but these different actors do not interact with each other, and this makes each one lacking of a certain knowledge or a a certain potential to really change the paradigm of the fashion system, because I, we really believe that this is what is truly happening right now. So in the project, we are starting to connect all these different actors through a platform, as well as incubating several projects within the fashion tech paradigms that would serve as best practices for all the system to see what's really possible in terms of changing and improving within the field.
Yeah, what do you think is possible?
I think many things. So the most important one is that usually the type of approach that conservative fashion companies have towards this digital transformation is to catch up, see the latest innovation, the latest software, and trying to implement it within the organization. While I think that what is is really lacking is the concept of all the different aspects and technologies that working and interacting together could really change, first of all, the business model of fashion. So it's not only 3D, but it's how smart factories, smart products, and smart networks can work together as three polarities to create a circular system where you design differently, you prototype and experiment differently, you produce differently, you interact with your supplier in a different way, and also customers in this way are at the very center because they become not anymore passive consumers but really active actors, and they can also support you in many of the process of improving your designs and your, in general, efficiency towards markets.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We're seeing that a lot more consumer power and it affects how you design a product.
Absolutely.
With circularity, that's obviously such a really important thing in the future as well, and we're seeing even today and yesterday, you know, companies talk about circularity in a big way. How do you include that into academia?
That is becoming a very important topic, I think, not only in academia but in general, because in the last few years we we are really perceiving the environmental problem as something that is starting to affect our daily life. So circularity means a more efficient process and a process where you have the radical transparency of the products throughout all its life cycle. So this is possible through technology, and as educators, we should really be able to transfer different professionals, so different students the capacity of interpreting the value of these process within the specific area of work they will be operating in. And we know now, everybody knows that fashion is the second polluting industry in the world. So that should make us think. And another thing that is connected to what we were saying about the, the power of consumer is that it's not only a problem of the environment to be affected but also the way things are produced, the fact that there are people behind the production. And we had so many events and bad stories about this that customers are becoming much more aware. And actually, in a certain way, they were very generous toward brands, giving their data to the brands. But what they are asking right now is that they want back this transparency and these data from companies. So they want radical transparency. They want to know which is the process, who are the people, which is the story, and they want to know this in an authentic way. So they don't want to, to hear fake story about what companies are doing.
Yeah, yeah, we hear a lot of things that people are aiming to do this by 2025 or 2030. You know, people want to see what are you doing now, actually. I think that's a more powerful story.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Um, do you find that, uh, The— you've probably been at Polytechnico for a while.
Yeah, sure.
Have you seen in them recently that students have become far more conscious?
Absolutely, that's a huge change that we saw. I was at the graduation ceremony last week giving the diploma to students and families, and what happened in that session of graduation was that all the thesis that were— and the thesis project that were discussed had a component of sustainability, circularity, so the impacts that design can have on all these different aspects. So there has been a huge change because only 10 years ago fashion was all about style, also the mediatic attraction towards this sector was very strong, so fashion as the dream job a job of being in this type of VIP society. Now we see that at least our students are completely different, and they are looking at this sector with an interest because it is also related to our identity, the way we express ourselves, to creativity. So it's something that for sure it's a dream job, but at the same time they do have this strong ethical vision of their profession. So they also have again this idea willing to change the world, which is nice to have in fresh and young people.
Yeah, for sure. How have you found being at Pyaparole so far?
Very good experience, very interesting, and also interacting with companies to understand which are the emerging skill gaps that they are feeling throughout this process of transformation was very interesting to me.
Yeah. Finally, I just want to ask about something about government regulation, because it's not something that we discuss very often. But I feel like you have a number of players here. You have the brands and manufacturers and the technology providers and the educators. What part do governments have to play in all of this?
It's a very important part that they have to play for all this transformation, because, for example, we were you were speaking about circular process and sustainability. Sometimes there are regulations that belong to our previous world before we really understood that the environment is an issue now, that somehow are going against what we would need to implement new processes. For example, in Italy we have regulations about trash in fashion, what you consider trash and what you consider something that you can use to produce, that actually are not let's say, compatible with what some companies could do using trash to recirculate it and put it again into the, into the process. And this is just an example, but there is a whole process of transformation that also government has to play to be able to embrace the transition. Then, of course, talking about technological transformation, public administration Government is possibly one of the slowest adopters that we have about digital transformation, and that's certainly another issue.
Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully with more students coming up and learning these skills and having socially conscious and aware minds and being taught socially conscious sort of processes to live by, hopefully that will then have a knock-on effect on government administration as well.
Absolutely. Now, then, I'm coming from the design field, so the boundaries of our disciplines are moving, embracing new fields. And for example, design skills are now very useful also, for example, for designing services, policies, because they bring in these attitudes towards looking at what you are designing and imagination also, imagining which will be the scenarios that you are producing, the feedbacks, what is then happening in the final users. That for policies are citizens. So that is very interesting as a new field.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I just want to thank you for coming in and speaking to us today.
