The LITAC Durability Research Project
The LITAC Durability Research Project is a three-year project, which began in 2022, that builds upon the fashion and textile industry’s baseline alignment with clothing durability standards.
A collaborative project, it has been coordinated in partnership with the Waste Resource and Action Programme (WRAP) and has been supported by participating brands and retailers.
The project builds upon WRAP’s 2014 Clothing Longevity Protocol, a guidebook that presents a framework of tests and performance criteria that brands can use to assess the physical durability of their products, all the while promoting the minimum durability standards that these businesses should strive to achieve.
Longevity of Everyday Wear
Increasing the amount of time we wear a single article of clothing is critical in reducing the environmental footprint of the fashion and textile industry. The Durability Research Project, set to conclude this year (2025), has been exploring both the physical and ’emotional durability’ of garments, or specifically, how we relate to clothing, including the emotive factors that influence how much we use any given garment.
Through the project, project partners such as John Lewis (featured above) have offered their products for rigorous physical and visual testing.
This testing have encompassed wash and drying tests, tensile strength tests, tear strength tests, dimensional stability tests, pilling tests, snagging tests and abrasion tests. The findings from this research will allow ourselves and WRAP to update the existing guidelines outlined in the Clothing Longevity Protocol, better equiping industry to develop protocols for their clothing ranges. Specifically, the benchmarks that result from the project will allow fashion businesses to create products that last longer and are designed to move through circular business models like rental and resale. It will also allow them to evaluate how their products compare to others on the market and communicate the durability of their products more accurately to customers.
This project is helping to inform the circular design workstream under WRAP’s UK Textiles Pact voluntary initiative and is driving progress on the UK Textiles Pact Circularity Roadmap.
Critically, LITAC have recently appointed a second PhD researcher in a 3-year project that will continue the highly successful research at the School of Design and will continue to develop this well-established collaboration with WRAP and the Textiles 2030 initiative.