This article is a contribution from Next Gen Assembly 2025 Member Vibhuti Amin and opinions expressed do not represent the views of Global Fashion Agenda nor those of its Partners.

Long before innovation was extracted, patented, and globalised, it was place-based. Fashion was born from village ecosystems, where artisans shaped material futures through deep relationships with the environment and community. They were not labour at the end of a chain, but authorities over material, process, and creation.

In a world where crafts are endangered, ecological species are becoming extinct, and inequalities are intensifying, fashion must pause. Not simply to slow down, but to reflect on the systems it has inherited, and to consciously reshape the future it is building.

Fashion has, in many cases, been built on colonial legacies of extraction, which persist today in the way we produce, consume, and dispose. These legacies are not abstract; they are visible in the disproportionate environmental degradation faced by communities in the Global South, many of whom have historically sustained the very material innovations that built this industry.

Attending Global Fashion Summit 2025 provided me with a platform to engage with these histories and to understand the inextricable link between planetary and social justice in fashion. Without social equity, sustainability remains a marketing aesthetic rather than a moral commitment. Restoring degraded lands, such as those affected by overgrazing in cashmere production, must also mean working with herders to maintain their livelihoods. For too long, ecological resources and human labour have been treated as infinite, but by designing with a commitment to the regeneration of both lands and communities, we can begin to shift this mindset from viewing nature as capital to viewing it as a co-creator.

I often return to Céline Semaan’s writing on the colonial inheritance of design. As she reminds us, “the communities most impacted by extractive design have been excluded from shaping its direction”. I believe the next generation of materials must, therefore, emerge not only from laboratories or boardrooms, but from the places that fashion has long extracted from – places where ancestral knowledge, ecological wisdom, and community-driven practices already exist, yet now face the harshest impacts of climate change.

Material innovation must work with artisans to restore agency, regenerate livelihoods, and reposition craft not as heritage to be preserved, but as an active partner in designing resilient futures for both humans and the more-than-human worlds with which they are entangled.

“To design for adaptation is to reclaim design and address its colonial ties.” – Céline Semaan

My current project, Nafaskāri, explores this framework of material innovation through kalamkāri, an ancient hand-painted textile tradition from India’s Coromandel Coast. Once sustained by local ecologies and rivers, Kalamkāri was transformed into chintz under colonial rule: the first “mass fashion” and symbol of extraction from the Global South. The desire to imitate chintz fuelled the industrialisation of textile printing in Europe, while systematically dismantling craft communities in India. Although revival efforts exist today, extreme climatic conditions and the dominance of synthetic dyes continue to threaten the survival of Kalamkāri in Srikalahasti.

Nafaskāri reimagines Kalamkāri’s future through microbial dyes cultivated from local soils. These living pigments offer a climate-resilient alternative that restores ecological intimacy while honouring Indigenous knowledge systems. Meaning “breath work,” Nafaskāri invites fashion to slow down: to breathe, repair, and return. It calls for a fashion system grounded in interspecies and intergenerational justice, where nature and marginalised communities shape the future of material innovation.

Innovation without context risks repeating the very extractions that built this industry. If we want a truly regenerative fashion future, innovation must be place-based, rooted in care, reciprocity, and accountability to the people and ecologies that make fashion possible.

In this way, the next generation of materials shifts fashion away from the extractive roots of textiles toward powerful tools for climate adaptation, the reclamation of Indigenous craft practices, and interspecies justice – a framework that emerged from my work on our Next Gen Assembly manifesto, which continues to shape my practice in material research and design.

As E.F. Schumacher reminds us in Small Is Beautiful, meaningful technological progress demands tools that are “cheap enough so that they are accessible to virtually everyone, suitable for small-scale application, and compatible with man’s need for creativity.” Only through such an approach, he argues, can we build a lasting, nonviolent relationship among people, technology, and nature.