At a time in history when fashion is called upon to rethink itself — its pace, its supply chains, its responsibilities — Zoe Romano appears to be one of the most lucid and radical voices on the Italian scene. An activist, designer and pioneer of craftivism, Romano intertwines creativity and politics with the same naturalness with which threads are woven on a loom. For her, embroidery, sewing and textile techniques are not simply craftsmanship: they are tools of cultural subversion, capable of bringing practices historically confined to the domestic sphere back into the public arena.
Her research moves between open design, self-production and digital manufacturing, imagining a more agile, cooperative and distributed fashion economy. In her view, the body becomes a political surface, garments are transformed into acts of self-determination, and technology ceases to be a fetish and returns to being a community tool.
Romano invites us to rethinking training, the role of designers and the culture of making, reminding us that a more sustainable future cannot be achieved without economic and collective awareness. “It is not enough to know how to use sustainable technologies if we do not understand why the system we live in makes it so difficult to adopt them,” she says. And this is precisely where we start, exploring new possibilities for production, participation and transformation with her.
How can craftivism help redefine the relationship between production, participation and politics in fashion?
Craftivism is a form of activism that uses the aesthetics of textile techniques to convey political messages and acts primarily as a kind of spatial subversion because bringing embroidery, sewing and knitting into public spaces such as squares, museums and streets is perceived as a deeply destabilising gesture, as it violates the historical habit that has confined these practices to domestic invisibility. There is a beautiful book by art historian Rozsika Parker, published in 1984 but not translated into Italian, which documents how, since the mid-19th century, an art such as embroidery, for example, has been systematically feminised and devalued: transformed from a respected art (think of medieval tapestries or ecclesiastical vestments) into a “harmless pastime” for middle-class women, an occupation that kept them docile, patient and confined to the home while their husbands were travelling or at war. It was during this period that the common narrative changed, presenting these techniques as an expression of a “natural” female aptitude for decoration and care, diminishing their creative, technical, intellectual and political dimensions. Through Craftivism, clothing once again becomes a means of self-determination rather than an imposition of brand identity, because the body becomes a political surface when wearing garments modified with slogans, colourful mending or alterations that tell stories of resistance, messages of protest or even testimony to a know-how that rejects planned obsolescence and celebrates the deep relationship we establish with certain clothes. This practice, in collective or personal moments, becomes a fundamental exercise in the recovery of marginalised knowledge, transforming it into tools for social emancipation.
What are the challenges and potential of digital craftsmanship as a sustainable and community-based practice?
I would start by reflecting on the term “digital craftsmanship”. It has certainly been a useful concept for bringing people closer to this type of manufacturing, which has been spreading since 2005, but I have always found it conceptually misleading because it suggests a simple technological replacement, as if, for example, laser cutting were just “faster scissors”. This reductionist interpretation obscures the transformative nature of digital manufacturing technologies because their use changes both the craft and industrial paradigms, i.e. the way we conceive, design and manufacture most objects. Both the industrial model of mass production and the craft model remain trapped in an obsolete logic in which the production is anticipated With regard to demand, manufacturing is centralised, energy is wasted in distribution to points of sale, and there is the risk of unsold stock, which is a real structural waste due to the need to predict sizes, variants and quantities. This logic generates systemic inefficiency and high risks. Even a “slower” artisan brand has to produce stock, transport it somewhere, manage warehouses, and often discount unsold items. Slowness certainly reduces the problem but does not solve it. Digital manufacturing changes the rules of the game, because it shifts from a “push” logic to a “pull” logic, where production is driven by real demand rather than pushing consumption. Only what has actually been requested is produced, completely eliminating the need to maintain stock, manage unsold items or organise end-of-season sales. The item comes into being because someone has purchased it after discovering a physical sample or digital version of it, and not because a brand needs to fill shelves and warehouses in the hope that someone will buy it.
The second transformative element is that it is files that travel, not physical products. The potential of distributed production allows for localised production close to the point of consumption, drastically reducing transport, packaging and all the logistical complexity of the traditional model. This also creates systemic resilience: a crisis in a global supply chain does not block the entire production system, because manufacturing capacity is distributed geographically.
The third aspect, which is probably the most revolutionary, is parametric variability at no additional cost. In traditional manufacturing, each variant involves significant costs: different moulds, new production setups, management of an increasingly complex inventory. In digital manufacturing, on the other hand, each piece can be different at no extra cost, making mass customisation economically sustainable. The traditional compromise between personalisation and economic scale disappears completely. And this process is not about returning to “slowness” but about becoming more agile and faster in change, not to accelerate consumption but to satisfy the widest possible audience with little effort. This is why I tend to call it Agile Fashion, precisely to express what distinguishes it from industrial and artisanal fashion.
The sustainability of digital manufacturing can only be fully realised when it is integrated into specific social and economic configurations, rather than simply adopted as an isolated technology. From an economic point of view, consistency with sustainability principles requires cooperative models through which knowledge-sharing spaces, such as makerspaces where technologies are practised, connect in networks with coordinated local producers and material processors. Only in this way will we be able to overcome the logic of exploitation and rediscover our collective ability to repair and reproduce objects, only when necessary.
How can training become a tool for spreading a culture of conscious and inclusive action?
Training in the context of digital manufacturing cannot be limited to technical training on the use of machines. Teaching how to use a 3D printer or software to design knitwear is necessary but insufficient: it risks creating uncritical users who replicate consumerist logic with new tools, printing useless objects simply because “it can be done”.
Truly informed training must integrate technical aspects with a critical understanding of the production system. This means helping people to ask themselves why they are producing, what they are producing and for whom they are producing, before even addressing the question of how. When, for example, teaching how to design a parametric object, one should simultaneously discuss whether and how this object can be repaired or updated, where the materials used to make it come from and what the environmental implications are at the end of its life.
The aspect of inclusivity requires a radical rethinking of who is traditionally considered the target audience for technological training. FabLabs and maker spaces have often replicated existing exclusions, becoming domains of young white men with technical backgrounds. In the early years when we opened a Makerspace in Milan, I still had people coming in and asking me why there were sewing machines and knitting machines there! Inclusive training must actively counter this trend by designing courses that welcome people from different backgrounds, of different ages and with different skills, and above all by recognising that skills considered “non-technical”, such as weaving, knitting and embroidery, are in fact highly technological productive skills capable of creating a dialogue between the future and tradition. Not least because a knitting machine is much more complex and sophisticated than a 3D printer!
What skills do you think young designers should develop — or what “toolbox” should they build — to approach your area of expertise, as a representative of one of the possible sectors and fields of application of their future professions?
One of the most pressing shortcomings of design and fashion schools is that they train students to be technically competent but economically naive. Students are taught how to design collections, master software and develop creative concepts, but they are systematically denied an explanation of how the industry in which they will be working actually functions. Unfortunately, this is not a neutral omission: it is often a pedagogical choice that produces designers who are easily exploited and, above all, incapable of imagining alternatives to the existing system. Students leave academies without understanding how fashion conglomerates are organised, who really owns the brands they consider “independent”, how the financial holding companies that control entire sectors work, or what profit-driven logic guides the decisions that are then presented as “creative choices”. They do not know that private equity funds acquire brands to extract short-term value before reselling them. We should teach how the global value chainWho captures value at each stage from raw material to point of sale? How do pricing, mark-up and positioning mechanisms work? What are the actual margins, where do the profits go and what are they spent on?
Training should include analysis of business models alternatives: cooperativism, circular economy, consortium models. Not as utopias but as operational realities, with their advantages, limitations, and concrete challenges. This training serves to give them real agency. Training that omits these dimensions is not “protecting creativity” from economic contamination: it is producing creative workforce unable to recognise and renew the rigid structures in which it operates. It perpetuates the romantic idea of the “creative genius” who does not get their hands dirty with economic issues, when in reality it is precisely those issues that determine who can afford to be a designer, under what conditions, and in the service of whose interests.
The culture of conscious action, therefore, cannot be separated from economic and political awareness. It is not enough to know how to use sustainable technologies if we do not understand why the system we live in makes it so difficult to adopt them. It is not enough to have ethical sensitivity if we do not understand the structural mechanisms that transform good intentions into greenwashing, how industrial lobbies work and how influential they are in getting certain regulations approved or rejected. Truly emancipatory education must give students the tools to decode the system in which they operate and to build alternatives.
A project for the future
The future is already here
Images: Clotho.it
A project founded by Zoe Romano in 2020 to create sustainable, high-quality fabrics that offer protection from electromagnetic fields (EMFs), Circular Clotho is the first closed-loop fabric with shielding properties.
Credits: photo by Margherita Loba Amadio for Clotho.it
