Is Southeast Asia fashion’s next sustainability frontier?

“Pasuruan has a long history of silk cultivation and handloom weaving,” says Janet Teowarang, a lecturer at the Fashion Design and Business department at Universitas Ciputra Surabaya who collaborated with KaIND on the initiative, which won the brand the Impact Award at the 2025 Be The Change Summit organised by the Singapore Fashion Council. “But over time, the ecosystem weakened—farmers faced unstable demand, weavers were ageing and the material itself came to be seen as too ‘traditional’ for contemporary fashion.”

Rather than preserving eri silk as heritage in isolation, KaIND re-embedded it within modern production systems through long-term, demand-led relationships linking farmers, artisans and designers. “Sustainability starts by restoring value—both cultural and financial—to communities and materials that already exist,” expounds Teowarang.

The same principles surface in Vietnam. Founded in 2022 to make Vietnamese silk more wearable and enduring, Lo Silk works exclusively with silk produced in Bao Loc in the Lam Dong province and several other historic silk villages, partnering with long-standing sericulture communities and employing natural dye traditions. In an interview with Tatler Vietnam, founder Thao Tran described immersing herself in these regions to understand silk as a living system of craft and place. “Behind every product, there is a history,” she reflected.

If silk and cotton speak to continuity, other fibres in the region tell a story of adaptation shaped by agricultural realities. In the Philippines, pineapple leaf fibre has long been woven into ceremonial piña textiles. Today, brands such as Ananas Anam, a materials innovation company, transforms discarded pineapple leaves into lightweight, eco-conscious fabric. Across Southeast Asia, fibres such as banana, abaca and ramie—once cultivated out of necessity—are being revisited for their climate suitability, local availability and regenerative potential.

In Indonesia, biotechnology company Mycotech Lab (MYCL) extends this material practice into cultivated matter. Its core material Mylea is grown from mycelium, the root-like network of fungi, using agricultural waste such as rice husks, corn cobs and sawdust. “Indonesia is an agricultural country with fertile soil, but most agricultural waste is just thrown away,” says co-founder and chief business development officer Ronaldiaz Hartantyo. “We saw an opportunity to turn that waste into something valuable. We can grow a leather-like material with comparable strength, using less time and less water [in the production process compared to that of traditional leather]. Even though it looks like leather, it is its own material and has its own patina.”

Since 2021, MYCL has stabilised its production process, keeping contamination rates consistently low—an indication that cultivating materials, like working with natural dyes or fibres, demands adaptation rather than control. This systems-led approach has drawn both recognition and capital. The company has since collaborated with Japanese fashion label Doublet, which replaced leather with Mylea in collections showcased at Paris Fashion Week. MYCL, which counts DBS Foundation and Temasek Lifesciences Accelerator among its investors, was also one of five recipients in the inaugural 2024 cohort of the Amplifier mentorship programme, a collaboration between Temasek Trust’s Philanthropy Asia Alliance and Centre for Impact Investing and Practices.

As materials evolve, so, too, must production. Across Southeast Asia, long-standing manufacturing expertise is being reorganised through systems enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) that challenge fashion’s dependence on scale and excess. Emerging from this intersection of legacy workflows and new expectations is the Singapore-based AI company Six Atomic, which evolved from earlier work in digital pattern-making, when its team recognised that the bottleneck in fashion lay not in creativity but in production systems.

“The pattern is the core part of garment production,” says business development manager Caan Vilailuck. “It’s like a blueprint.” At the heart of the platform are AI-driven tools that automate the creation of these production assets—translating sketches or technical briefs into patterns that can be used directly in manufacturing. This significantly shortens development timelines, allowing brands to respond to demand in days rather than weeks. “When customers design their own garment, the inherent value goes up,” Vilailuck adds. “They spend more, but they buy less [overall].”

Six Atomic works with manufacturers individually, streamlining the development pipeline that precedes production. By compressing what is traditionally a slow, iterative sampling process into near-instant outputs, smaller runs become more viable and excess inventory can be reduced. Technology here does not replace human skill but reallocates it, reducing manual pattern work while freeing up time for design and refinement. What Six Atomic makes clear is that fashion’s environmental footprint lies not only in materials, but in upstream decisions—patterns, quantities and assumptions about demand.
 

As production becomes more decentralised, other issues come into focus: how emerging systems are measured, compared and held accountable. Many Southeast Asian start-ups are already redefining fashion through their innovations, but without shared frameworks, even the most promising advances risk remaining siloed.

One response lies in platforms such as EcoLens, an AI-powered tool designed to embed biodiversity and sustainability assessment at the design stage itself. “Most existing solutions focus on isolated parts of the value chain,” an EcoLens spokesperson explains. “We realised that biodiversity must be considered from the design table itself.” Utilising data from sources such as Ecoinvent and the Higg Index, the platform translates design decisions into measurable impact, storing results in digital product passports that enable traceability across fragmented supply chains.

What distinguishes this moment is not only the emergence of new materials or tools, but the growing effort to connect them into systems that can scale responsibly across borders. This is where Singapore’s role becomes visible—not as a stylistic centre, but as a convening force. “Across the region, there is incredible innovation happening,” says Zhang Ting-Ting, chief executive officer of the Singapore Fashion Council. “What’s critical now is creating spaces where these ideas can connect, scale and translate into real industry change.”

Through platforms such as the council’s Be The Change Summit and Singapore Stories, designers, technologists and manufacturers are brought into shared dialogue, foregrounding Southeast Asian perspectives. “It’s crucial for Asian voices to be heard and actively shape what the fashion scene will look like tomorrow,” Zhang expounds. “We’re stronger together.” She points to a convergence of conditions that make the region uniquely positioned for this next phase: deep reservoirs of craft knowledge and cultural diversity that create opportunities to blend heritage with modern practice; a young, digitally fluent population open to tools such as AI and circular design; and a growing alignment across the value chain around sustainability and shared prosperity.

“Together,” says Zhang, “these strengths create fertile ground for Southeast Asia to become a global leader in responsible fashion, one that balances economic growth with environmental stewardship and social equity.” The region’s role as a manufacturing and distribution hub, she further notes, gives it the ability to influence supply chains and standards far beyond its borders.

Seen this way, Southeast Asia’s contribution to fashion’s future is neither derivative nor delayed. It is being written through systems that link land to labour, tradition to technology, and local knowledge to global relevance—collectively and on its own terms.

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