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After 25 years of trying, the fashion world has suddenly woken up to the imperatives of sustainability, environmental control, wastage and recycling. Technology and synthetics were seen as the enemy, the propagators of stuffocation and fast obsolescence. But not anymore! If we are to really confront the terrible impact of consumption, then we not only have to tackle sustainability and recycling issues in the processing and manufacturing stages but combine them with winning aesthetics at the design stage. To do this, we need to believe in innovation and technology as much as reduction and recyclability as the ways forward to what we most love and aspire to, to fabrics that are desirable, inclusive and serviceable and garments that make us look beautiful. As we say in our Fabric Preview S/S 2020, where we list nine ways to achieve this, we should never forget that its aesthetics that really enable us to connect with what we wear. Technology provides the freedom to create anything we want: our values set the boundaries to make it human and sustainable. It’s a wonderful new combination, as we set out to show in our Lifestyle pages,‘The Next Phase in Making and Creating’.