Footwear Innovation Hub @ FUTURE FABRIC EXPO

It’s been an honour to collaborate with The Sustainable Angle and co-curate the Footwear Innovation Hub for two consecutive years, as part of the Future Fabric Expo. The expo, hosted at Magazine London in June, is the largest dedicated showcase for sourcing sustainable and responsibly produced materials, and serves as the flagship fashion and textiles event of London Climate Action Week.

With exhibits ranging from experimental speculative prototypes, through to commercially available brands that signal inspirational new journeys, we showcased diverse sustainable design strategies in footwear which included biomimicry, biofabricated materials and constructions, bio-circular / compostable shoes, design for disassembly and repair, upcycling, repurposing, and remanufacturing. 

The Footwear Hub provides an opportunity to explore how we can design shoes in a smarter, more efficient, less resource-intensive way, while utilising nature’s renewable sources and instigating new avenues of circularity. 

Footwear Hub 2025

As the race to create the ultimate “biodegradable shoe” has just begun, we chose to dive deeper into the fascinating world of biodegradation in this second Footwear Hub edition. The aim was of gain better understanding of this rather complex and easily confusing topic. We were also keen to explore the differences in material flows between biological and technical cycles, which for some reason is a rarely talked about subject in our industry.

You can find both large printed displays / mappings in our Post-Consumer Life resource; FOOTWEAR CIRCULARITY MATERIAL FLOWS is under Circular Economy section, and UNDERSTANDING BIODEGRADABILITY IN PLASTIC is in the Biodegradability section.

Exhibits Featured in 2025 :

☞ click on the images for further information 

Footwear Hub 2024

In 2024, we launched our first dedicated Footwear Innovation Hub – marking a new direction for the Future Fabric Expo after 14 years, and recognising footwear as the most challenging sector in fashion when it comes to circularity. With all the unique complexities, compositions and fabrications of footwear, we chose to highlight its differences from apparel by displaying the VISUALISING COMPLEXITIES OF FOOTWEAR RECYCLING diagram, which you can find in our Post-Consumer Life section.

Alongside, we also featured OPPORTUNITIES in DEVELOPING CIRCULAR SOLUTIONS COLLABORATIVELY by The Footwear Collective. You can read further details about their ambitious programme in our Circular Economy section.

Exhibits Featured in 2024 :

☞ click on the images for further information