Breakthrough, by Dr. Camilla Pang
Dr. Camilla Pang
Fashion is a strange industry. There are so many things about it that I don’t understand. Products are designed by people who have no idea how they’re made, and they’re made by people who are manufacturing experts but have little influence over what they make.
Most fashion business models rely on outdated forecasting models and arbitrary minimum order quantities, meaning that winter clothes are in stores in summer and vice versa. A significant amount of clothing produced is unsold (due to overproduction due to minimum order quantities) and is incinerated or shredded for low-quality materials such as mattress stuffing.
This business model has been made economically sustainable for brands by outsourcing production to factories in developing countries (often based on third-party audits rather than on-site visits). “Outsourcing” means that the brand sources the finished product from a clothing manufacturer, who sources materials, researches and develops the product on the brand’s behalf. The brand’s involvement is usually to approve samples, negotiate prices and place an order. But this approach is no longer “sustainable” from a social, economic or environmental perspective, and sourcing products without knowing where and how they were made is riskier than ever. Just this week, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) was adopted in Europe, and as an aspect of this, all textile products sold on the EU market will be given a Digital Product Passport (DPP) with detailed materials, design and manufacturing data, as well as recycling instructions.
Today’s fashion industry operates in a disconnect, with a disconnect between brand (the “creative”) and production (the “technical”). Designers, the arbiters of the industry, have long been taught to prioritize “vision” and aesthetic inclinations at the expense of everything else. And they’re at the top of the food chain when it comes to coming up with products that drive corporate revenue. But designers (and buyers) in the Global North are making these decisions largely without knowledge of the impact on producers in the Global South. The industry needs a breakthrough to come together and meet the regulatory, environmental, and social challenges ahead, and today a major book has been published that can restructure how the industry works to make that possible.
“Observations” illustration by Dr. Camilla Pan
Dr. Camilla Pang
Dr. Camila Pan is a scientist and author of Explaining Humans. In a video interview, she explained how her new book, Breakthrough, helps us solve problems by applying scientific thinking to everyday challenges, including creative ones. “The scientific process is not just technical. It’s actually a very fluid, complex, creative process that uses design and personal expression, as well as scientific thinking. [scientific] Methodology. Like a designer, you need to design an experiment and take into account various nuances. [of them]”Designers should be creative and technical. It’s not a zero-sum game,” she says.
But educators, society and often the industry tend to disagree: “This is the dogma we’re taught in school: you’re either technically good or you’re creative. This book helps to dispel this myth,” which, at least in part, stands between fashion designers and fashion producers, where designers are taught that technical constraints will “compromise their vision” and technicians are taught that they are powerless within the industry’s hierarchical structure.
In Breakthrough, Dr Pan uses his neurodiversity (he has Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and ADHD) to reinterpret established scientific processes through his own “non-linear” ways of thinking and working. Breakthrough shows us how to think like a (creative) scientist, learn from our mistakes and embrace the unknown, but what can fashion professionals learn from it?
First, observation is the starting point of any major scientific discovery. Observing a process or problem is “the spark that ignites ideas to pursue, hypotheses to test, theories to develop, and conclusions to hone,” says Dr. Pan. In the fashion industry, observation must begin with observing how a product is made and its raw materials are used — the process by which an idea becomes a physical product. But most fashion designers have never been to a textile or clothing factory, because it is not part of their training to experience industrial production. So they have never seen the process that determines their designs and product choices.
Dr. Pan believes this lack of observation disempowers designers and prevents them from fully expressing their creativity. It is unthinkable for her to not design and run an experiment. Think of a nurse who trains and works without ever being in a hospital or medical facility. It is unthinkable. Yet a designer, having neither observed nor learned, chooses a chemical process that is toxic or dangerous for industry workers.
For fashion products, fiber production represents the largest part of the footprint during the production phase, and design decisions determine the type of fiber and process used. To address the design-technology disconnect, Dr. Pan suggests that brands introduce “programs, internships, or apprenticeships” in factories for designers to observe the production process. This allows designers to begin to hypothesize about how to design with intrinsic sustainability, grounded in their knowledge of what the product is made of and how it is made. Far from compromising, this will empower a generation of designers who have risen through the ranks to create something “better.” To this end, Dr. Pan shares a cautionary tale. “The Barclays boycott is one example,” she says. 220 university students declared a “career boycott” of the bank because of its climate policies, including continued funding for fossil fuel companies. The students’ response was, “We’re going to take our talents elsewhere, forever.”
Recently, I visited garment factories in Bangladesh and Vietnam with two Gen Z voices as part of the Puma Voices of a RE:GENERATION program. The voices included food content creator Luke Jaque-Rodney, who has explored the lives of garment workers from factories to home kitchens with Stitch and Spice, and visual artist Jade Roche, who has documented the environmental impacts of industrialization and the role of fashion through Made in Vietnam and Made in Bangladesh. Their observations transformed our understanding of the industry and the lives of garment workers, overturning the stereotypes they learned in Europe. The observations are powerful, but they also challenge the status quo.
“Hypothesis” illustration by Dr. Camilla Pan
Dr. Camilla Pang
Breakthrough explains that in the journey of problem-solving and discovery, observation is followed by a hypothesis, or “ideation.” Dr. Pan interviewed fellow scientists for the book, who explained that they believe hypotheses shape creative narratives, much like detective stories where you solve a mystery by observing clues and thinking about which questions to ask. Breakthrough offers “a thriller you can’t put down until you finish it” as the perfect product of observation and hypothesis, but what’s the fashion equivalent? Jeans that “don’t fall off”? How does “ideation” lead to the perfect (and in this case, sustainable) end product?
Hypotheses, Dr. Pan explains, are a way to “build and hone in on ideas.” Far from being a linear process of observing, hypothesizing, testing, and sharing findings, it’s a much more chaotic and iterative process. To use the analogy of clues in a crime, clues lead to questions, answers lead to more questions, and sometimes you can rearrange clues to look at them from different angles and ask more questions. Maybe the perfect jeans are ones where every material and process is a clue, and you rearrange them to ask the question: “What is the impact, utility, and commercial desirability of this combination?” If they’re not optimal, you have to rearrange and hypothesize again.
Hypothesis may soon come into its own in the fashion industry, with unprecedented data requirements imposed by the new European Union Ecodesign regulation. The regulation will require individual product-level data on a product’s materials, design, disassembly instructions, and recyclability (as part of a digital product passport). In the hypothesis stage, all these requirements can be explored as a system, based on the complete manufacturing process documented during observation. For designers without observation and subsequent hypothesis, failure can be costly, as they lack the tools and research to pursue ecodesign compliance.
Breakthrough presents focus as the next important step in the scientific method of deciding which line of investigation to pursue (in this case, to solve the product sustainability problem). Dr. Pan gives the metaphor of a nut to crack and two possible approaches: an obvious and quick approach (the hammer) or an indirect and slow approach (a solvent that dissolves the shell, giving you time to think about how the shell “works” and what that means for the nut in a codependent system). Industries and individuals who favor fashion and short-term thinking have clearly chosen the hammer.
“Focus” illustration by Dr. Camilla Pang
Dr. Camilla Pang
In fashion, examples include choosing organic or other “low-emission” raw materials instead of conventional cotton, while ignoring the subsequent synthetic dyes and textile treatments required to create the final fabric. “Simply applying the most obvious solution may feel like progress, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to anything,” says Dr. Pan. In science, focus equates to untangling a clutter of information that, she says, “can yield valuable insights if we put it into a more manageable form.”
Breakthrough explains that this debate requires a system, a set of rules, and a way to group data into clusters so they can be more easily visualized. Instead of designing products based on random decisions, imagine that every decision belongs to a data cluster and each cluster can be evaluated to be a focus area or ignored (based on evidence, not confusion that leads to simply missing information). Such a scientific approach structure can help fashion designers work within a design framework, a “toolkit” of clustered design and product information, to evaluate how designs can and might be modified, thus improving the credibility of their products ahead of the coming into force (from 2026) of the Ecodesign regulation for sustainable products in Europe.
Breakthrough is a treasure trove of guidance for observing, questioning, analyzing, and reinterpreting the fashion industry; extracting ideas and structures from its chaos to produce better economic, social, and environmental outcomes. Only the first few chapters are covered here, but other chapters cover analysis, troubleshooting failures, collaboration, and how to seek evidence and be objective. The book culminates in “Imagination: How to Build Worlds and Augment Reality.”
Dr. Pan believes that “there is a scientist hidden within us all. The greatest gift science gives us is not formulas, but enabling the urge to discover.” That “makes us truly human.” For humans, we are either creative or technological, and the myth that we can remain divided along these lines while trying to solve today’s greatest challenges of environmental and social sustainability is false and dangerous. Breakthrough provides a blueprint for using structures and methods to reshape the way we think and solve problems. Unleash creativity and imagination, but they need each other. Not zero-sum, but a sum greater than the parts.
