New Thinking: Fashion, AI and Sustainability

Should we be renting our clothes instead of buying new ? Plus how robots are influencing the colour of our fashions. Mark Sumner and Stephen Westland both teach in the School of Design at the University of Leeds and they're involved in the Future Fashion Factory. This is a major government funded project working with industry and university research aiming to boost sustainability in fashion by using technology in new ways, looking at what we can do to change consumer and company attitudes to #fastfashion and the way neural networks can cut waste by accurately predicting what colours we really want to wear next season. Shahidha Bari hears from them and New Generation Thinker Jade Halbert from the University of Huddersfield describes her trip to a clothes recycling facility in Yorkshire.

Colourpedia project at Leeds https://www.colourpedia.org More information also at https://futurefashionfactory.org/

This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation. New Generation Thinkers is an annual scheme to showcase academic research in radio and podcasts. You can find more information on the Arts and Humanities Research Council website https://ahrc.ukri.org

Producer: Torquil MacLeod