Search Results (311)

The study of sobriety in fashion can be understood as a form of spiritual exercise within a Christian ecological framework. This article argues that sobriety, understood as a virtue that shapes desire and moderates consumption, offers a theological response to the environmental and social consequences of contemporary fashion. Drawing on biblical sources, patristic and medieval theology, and early modern reflections, it traces the evolution of sobriety from a principle of bodily moderation to a broader philosophy of life. Through a theological analysis of fashion consumption, the article shows how sobriety can function as an ethical and spiritual practice capable of resisting hyperconsumerism and fostering ecological responsibility. The shift from modesty to sobriety thus provides a renewed framework for linking Christian virtue ethics, fashion consumption, and care for the planet. Full article

This article offers an exploratory overview of the contemporary Ethiopian textile, fashion and apparel system. The contribution originated from a teaching experience in Addis Ababa within the framework of the AICS–UNIDO-funded project “Ethiopia: Support to Youth and Women through Products and Services Development and Public–Private Partnerships in the Fashion Value Chain” which prompted the authors to deepen their understanding of the local fashion ecosystem. Drawing on informal conversations, observations, and ethnographically oriented field notes, the authors developed the analysis through desk research and a review of the relevant literature. The picture that emerges reveals both the creativity and strong entrepreneurial drive of Ethiopian designers, alongside the structural barriers they commonly face, including limited access to materials, investment, and institutional support. Designers are shown to negotiate ongoing tensions between cultural heritage and global aesthetics, while also contending with local consumption patterns situated between second-hand clothing markets and international brands. These dynamics highlight both the challenges and the potential of the Ethiopian fashion scene, pointing to opportunities for mutual learning and for fostering fashion practices that are sustainable, globally relevant, and firmly grounded in local contexts. Full article

Second-hand clothing is increasingly promoted as a sustainable alternative to reduce the fashion industry’s environmental impact, yet evidence on why consumers purchase second-hand apparel remains fragmented across disciplines. This literature review synthesizes prior research to identify the main motivational drivers and inhibitors of second-hand clothing purchasing and to translate them into a coherent conceptual explanation. We reviewed and conceptually integrated the academic literature on second-hand apparel consumption, focusing on how studies define, operationalize, and relate sustainability concerns, economic value, uniqueness and identity motives, and socio-cultural influences to purchase intention and behavior. The reviewed evidence indicates that pro-environmental values often coexist with utilitarian and symbolic motives, while barriers frequently involve perceived risk (e.g., quality and hygiene), effort, and access constraints. Building on this synthesis, we propose an integrative model that organizes key antecedents and mechanisms leading to purchase intention and repeat purchasing, highlighting enabling conditions and boundary factors that may strengthen or weaken these relationships. This review consolidates dispersed findings, clarifies theoretical gaps, and provides a testable framework to guide future empirical research and managerial interventions aimed at scaling circular fashion adoption. Full article

Nacer Khemir’s Bab’Aziz (2005) treats the dervish cloak (khirqa) as more than costume: a site where ascetic practice contests fashion’s novelty-driven logic. Focusing on the narrative shift from the Prince’s conspicuous consumption of silk to the dervish’s adoption of rough wool, this article argues that the film visualizes an “anti-fashion” stance rooted in Sufi discourses. In this cinematic setting, the khirqa functions as a kind of haptic archive—a tactile record of transmission and wear—through which spiritual lineage, authority, and continuity become legible. Bringing Ibn ʿArabī into dialogue with film theory’s concept of haptic visuality, the study shows how the cloak operates as a primary cinematic signifier of sartorial regulation, where disciplined appearance is figured as ethical formation rather than fashion trend. Bridging history, sociology, and material culture studies, the article suggests that the khirqa endures as a transhistorical emblem mediating spiritual identity across changing spatiotemporal contexts. Full article

This study examines how Saudi consumers evaluate the commodification of cultural symbols in fashion amid intensified heritage branding and symbolic market expansion. It addresses a gap in the literature on internal cultural commodification, where tensions surrounding authenticity, legitimacy, and commercialization emerge within the same cultural community rather than across clearly separate cultural groups. Drawing on a culturally grounded application of the Theory of Planned Behavior and related literature on consumer ethnocentrism and moral evaluation, the study investigates how perceived authenticity, perceived cultural appropriation, ethical sense, and consumer ethnocentrism shape attitudes toward cultural commodification and purchase intention in the Saudi fashion context. Data were collected through an Arabic-language questionnaire-based survey of Saudi consumers (N = 552) using a non-probability purposive sampling approach. The measurement model employed reflective scales adapted from prior literature and was assessed for reliability and validity. To strengthen methodological rigor, the analysis also considered common method bias diagnostics. The proposed relationships were tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with bootstrapping. The findings indicate that perceived authenticity is positively associated with attitudes toward cultural commodification and relates to purchase intention primarily through attitudes. Perceived cultural appropriation is negatively associated with both attitudes and purchase intention, suggesting both a direct deterrent effect and an indirect pathway via attitudes. Consumer ethnocentrism shows a negative association with purchase intention and a weaker negative association with attitudes, while its moderating role appears statistically significant but limited in magnitude. Ethical sense displays a more complex pattern, combining negative indirect effects through evaluative pathways with a positive direct association with intention, consistent with qualified rather than purely restrictive participation in symbolic consumption. The study contributes to the literature by clarifying how consumer responses to heritage-based fashion commercialization are shaped by representational, ethical, and normative evaluations in a non-Western setting. Practically, it suggests that fashion brands operating in Saudi heritage markets should manage authenticity claims, symbolic legitimacy, and appropriation risk with greater cultural and ethical sensitivity. Full article

Despite the success of artificial neural networks in solving numerous tasks, they face significant challenges, including difficulties in online adaptation and rapidly increasing energy consumption. As a biologically plausible alternative, spiking neural networks offer promising capabilities for efficient cognitive computing. Recently, a three-element spiking neuron model consisting of a threshold selector, a tunnel diode, and a capacitor was proposed. In this work, we experimentally validate this model using a threshold selector hardware emulator and demonstrate its dynamical equivalence to the biologically plausible Izhikevich neuron model. To evaluate the novel neuron’s applicability for cognitive computing, we implement a liquid state machine (LSM) reservoir architecture with spatially dependent random topology for synaptic weight distribution. Our simulations on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST benchmarks demonstrate competitive classification accuracy (97.9% and 89.5%, respectively) while offering estimated energy efficiency and processing speed enhancements compared to existing FPGA-based and memristor-based spiking reservoir implementations. The developed reservoir is feasible for processing neuromorphic sensors output, including visual perception tasks. Full article

The rising computational demands of deep learning models have intensified concerns regarding their energy consumption and environmental impact, motivating the development of Green Artificial Intelligence (Green AI) approaches. This paper proposes a multi-objective Green AI optimization framework based on the Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) to design efficient multilayer perceptron (MLP) architectures. Unlike conventional strategies that focus solely on maximizing accuracy, the proposed method jointly optimizes validation accuracy, training time, number of trainable parameters, and estimated floating-point operations (FLOPs). Evaluated on the Fashion-MNIST dataset and compared against a baseline MLP and Random Search, the GWO-based approach achieves competitive predictive performance while drastically reducing model size, computational complexity, and training time. Pareto front analysis confirms that GWO consistently identifies non-dominated architectures that offer superior trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency. Additional equal-accuracy evaluations demonstrate improved convergence efficiency and stability despite reduced model complexity. The results provide empirical evidence, within the MLP design setting considered in this study, that bio-inspired multi-objective optimization can support Green AI by identifying more compact and efficient architectures with competitive predictive performance. Full article

In recent years, the literature has concentrated on consumers’ sustainable attitudes and purchases, and the underlying mechanisms behind consumers’ sustainable buying decisions. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, studies that examine the impact of culture on attitudes and purchase behaviors towards sustainable fashion, through the prism of consumption values, and moderated by gender, are fragmented and limited. Elaborating on the dynamics of culture, gender, and consumption values, this study applies an online survey with 171 U.S. and 157 Greek participants to delve into sustainable fashion consumption. Notably, it reveals the effect of country on purchase behavior via consumption values and attitudes toward sustainable fashion, in the moderating presence of gender. U.S. (vs. Greek) men demonstrate higher attitudes and purchase behaviors towards sustainable fashion, driven by enhanced emotional and social value. U.S. (vs. Greek) women exert enhanced purchase behavior and social consumption value, while Greek women demonstrate higher levels of emotional value. These findings provide fruitful evidence with respect to the impact of cultural and demographic dynamics on sustainable fashion consumption, through the prism of consumption values. The study also highlights potential paths for future research that could help marketers delve into understanding sustainable fashion consumption. Full article

The transition to circular models in fashion and textiles requires changes that go beyond technical innovation. The literature recognises that systemic change depends on the transformation of shared meanings around consumption and production, and that spaces for co-design and collaborative learning are crucial to generating this transformation. This article documents how Living Labs operate in this capacity, analysing the Madeback Circular Fashion Festival (May–November 2025), a pilot project of the Fashion & Textile Living Lab at the Politecnico di Milano. The study employs the Living Lab Integrative Process (LLIP) as both a design framework and an analytical lens. Adopting a qualitative and participatory method, the study documents how the three spaces of the LLIP—Problem Space, Solution Space and Implementation Space—simultaneously structured both design innovation and empirical analysis. The results point to three main contributions: (i) Living Labs can function as cultural infrastructures in which performative and narrative dimensions may contribute to the gradual normalisation of alternative practices; (ii) the Quadruple Helix operates as a living process characterised by distributed intentionality and emerging trust; and (iii) transformative learning appears through the co-production of knowledge in embodied and relational practices. The article identifies contextual factors that enabled the project—from its location in a design university to its multi-year funding—and the related constraints on transferability, concluding that Living Labs are promising infrastructures for sustainable transitions when they consciously integrate performative, cultural and relational dimensions. Full article

With evolving consumption trends, the coffee market is experiencing increasing demand for high-quality, traceable coffees, which, in turn, has led to price growth. Therefore, due to its increased economic value, coffee has become a constant target of fraudulent actions. As result, many analytical techniques have been explored as tools for coffee classification and authentication, of which the use of digital, hyperspectral and/or multispectral imaging is noteworthy. This type of analysis provides rapid, non-destructive, environmentally friendly, and increasingly accessible alternatives to conventional analytical methods. By consulting three different databases, this work systematically revised articles published in the last 10 years, which utilize digital image analysis and hyper/multispectral imaging for the botanical and geographical classification and authentication of coffees. The reviewed studies (n = 17) demonstrate that, when paired with classification algorithms, discrimination across species, origins, and quality categories can be achieved. A critical point to highlight is the importance of using whole beans and standardizes roast degree to avoid biasing the models. Concerning digital images, relying solely on color features limits the robustness of the classification models. Incorporating complementary textural and shape features is thus necessary to capture the coffee botanical or geographic information, as shown in a minor number of the selected studies. In a similar fashion, for hyper/multispectral imaging, there is still potential to further exploit the spatial information, thus achieving the technique’s full potential. The evidence indicates that image-based methods are steadily progressing into reliable tools for coffee authentication. Full article

Textile and fashion designers play a strategic role in sustainable development within the textile chain. Several studies highlight the decision-making role of designers, emphasizing how their choices influence the entire production sector. The aim of this research is to examine how design decisions within the Portuguese textile and fashion industry influence the implementation of sustainable development principles by exploring designers’ perceptions, practices, and the challenges they encounter throughout the design process. To achieve the proposed goal, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 designers from the industry. The collected data were qualitatively evaluated using NVivo software, highlighting the complexity of incorporating sustainability into the design process. The findings revealed that daily challenges are primarily related to fashion business models, greenwashing, limited knowledge of raw materials and finishing processes, cost constraints, lack of transparency and traceability in the supply chain, and low consumer awareness. By examining both the conceptual understanding and practical application of sustainability in the design process, this research provides strategic lines into designers’ decision-making processes, highlights barriers to sustainable practice, and underscores the importance of design education. The study contributes to academic debate and identifies opportunities for advancing sustainable practices and circularity in the textile and fashion industry, in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDGs 9, 12, and 13, to transform the current industrial and consumption models. Full article

This study introduces a hybrid point cloud compression method that transfers from octree-nodes to voxel occupancy estimation to find its lower-bound bitrate by using a Binary Arithmetic Range Coder. In previous attempts, we demonstrated that our entropy compression model based on index convolution achieves promising performance while maintaining low complexity. However, our previous model lacks an autoregressive approach, which is apparently indispensable to compete with the current state-of-the-art of compression performance. Therefore, we adapt an autoregressive grouping method that iteratively populates, explores, and estimates the occupancy of 1-bit voxel candidates in a more discrete fashion. Furthermore, we refactored our backbone architecture by adding a distiller layer on each convolution, forcing every hidden feature to contribute to the final output. Our proposed model extracts local features using lightweight 1D convolution applied in varied ordering and analyzes causal relationships by optimizing the cross-entropy. This approach efficiently replaces the voxel convolution techniques and attention models used in previous works, providing significant improvements in both time and memory consumption. The effectiveness of our model is demonstrated on three datasets, where it outperforms recent deep learning-based compression models in this field. Full article

Climate change education requires innovative, action-oriented methodologies to foster student engagement and reflection on sustainable behaviors. This study explores an integrated educational program implemented within the Pathways for Transversal Skills and Orientation (PCTO) framework in three Italian upper secondary schools. The program combined immersive virtual reality experiences, GIS-based image analysis, traditional instruction, and two behavior-oriented web applications. A total of 181 students completed a post-activity questionnaire assessing satisfaction, perceived learning, prior knowledge, and self-reported intentions toward behavioral change. Results show that technology-enhanced and interactive modules were associated with higher levels of perceived engagement and perceived learning (with over 80% of students reporting at least moderate learning in immersive, GIS-based, and carbon footprint activities) compared to theory-only sessions. Modules explicitly linked to everyday behaviors, such as carbon footprint estimation and fast fashion consumption, were more frequently associated with self-reported intentions to adopt more sustainable practices (approximately 70% of positive responses). Given the post-only, perception-based design, findings should be interpreted as exploratory evidence of students’ perceived educational value rather than objective measures of learning outcomes. Overall, the study highlights the potential of experiential and digitally enhanced approaches in climate change education, while underscoring the need for future research incorporating objective and longitudinal assessments. Full article

The circular economy (CE) has emerged as a compelling alternative to the dominant linear “take–make–waste” model, which has contributed to environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and social inequalities across global value chains. By emphasizing the reduction in waste, the circulation of products and materials at their highest value, and the regeneration of natural systems, CE offers a pathway toward more sustainable and resilient forms of production and consumption. Despite its growing prominence, organizational implementation of CE remains uneven and challenging. This paper synthesizes current developments on CE implementation in business, with particular attention to environmental, economic, and social dimensions. Building on this synthesis, the paper identifies key internal and external challenges and proposes a practical framework outlining seven transition steps for organizations, ranging from strategic commitment and governance to monitoring and continuous improvement. Two case vignettes from the consumer goods and fashion industries illustrate how firms implement circular principles through business model innovation, supply-chain collaboration, and consumer engagement, while also highlighting ongoing limitations and trade-offs. Overall, the paper demonstrates that while the transition to a circular economy is complex, it is achievable through coordinated organizational change, stakeholder involvement, and systemic innovation, offering benefits for businesses, society, and the environment. Full article

Climate change threatens the future of the next generations and is already causing widespread destruction in the present through an increasing number of natural disasters. A new model of production and consumption based on sustainability is required, especially in the fashion industry—the second most polluting sector in the world. Therefore, in order to determine whether these companies contribute to people’s and the planet’s well-being, it is necessary to understand their practices. To this end, we analyse the sustainable practices of the sector by studying the ten most responsible fashion companies according to the BoF Sustainability Index, that is based on the methodology of content analysis applied to case studies. To do this, we have defined a taxonomy of the ten most common sustainability strategies and practices: stakeholder engagement, strong governance and transparency, decarbonisation, biodiversity conservation and restoration, circularity, reducing waste and pollution from the use of plastics, eliminating hazardous chemicals, preserving water quality, diversity, equity and inclusion policies, supply chain responsibility, and supporting the communities in which companies operate. The results show that major business groups have integrated axes into their sustainability strategies that address the industry’s primary social and environmental challenges. These plans are based on ambitious goals that go beyond stakeholder demands and the generation of economic benefits. Full article