From Fashion Design to the Value Chain: What Designers Don’t Control

Jenny Daphne Pitsillides – Editor | Re:Fabricate — Real Solutions for a Better Fashion Industry

The moment the drawing leaves the room

There’s a moment, usually quiet, when a design stops belonging to you.

It doesn’t announce itself. There’s no ceremony. The drawing is finished. The sample is approved. The email is sent. And then the garment moves on, sliding into a system that feels both intimate and completely out of reach.

In design school, we’re taught authorship. Vision. Personal language. The cult of the singular idea. We talk about silhouettes and references and intention, as if those things remain intact as they travel. As if the hand that sketched the first line stays present all the way through.

It doesn’t.

What design school doesn’t teach

What follows is a long middle that designers rarely control, yet are increasingly held responsible for. Factories. Minimums. Fibre availability. Lead times. Labour realities. Energy costs. Freight routes. Political instability. Decisions made under pressure, often far from the studio, often without us.

For a long time, I thought this gap was a personal failure. A lack of experience. A stage I hadn’t yet earned access to. If I could just get closer to production, closer to sourcing, closer to the value chain, then maybe design would feel whole again.

But the closer you get, the more fragmented it becomes.

The long middle of the value chain

The value chain isn’t a line. It’s a mesh of compromises, dependencies and inherited systems. Designers sit near the beginning, but not at the centre. We initiate, but we don’t orchestrate. We influence, but we don’t govern.

That’s a difficult thing to admit in an industry that still celebrates the designer as auteur.

Much of the current conversation around sustainability leans on design as a corrective force. Design as problem solver. Design as leverage point. And yes, design decisions matter. Material choice matters. Volume matters. Longevity matters.

But designers don’t set freight prices. We don’t own factories. We don’t control wage structures or national labour laws. We don’t decide how electricity is generated in the regions we produce in. We don’t decide whether a mill closes, or whether a supplier suddenly changes fibre blends because availability has shifted overnight.

Power without authorship

The industry often talks about responsibility as if it maps neatly onto authority. It doesn’t.

Research from organisations like Ellen MacArthur Foundation has long outlined the structural nature of fashion’s environmental impact. The problem isn’t a lack of good intentions at the design stage. It’s a system built for speed, extraction and scale, where design is only one voice among many louder ones.

And yet, designers are asked to answer for outcomes we only partially shape.

This creates a strange emotional terrain. You care deeply, but you are structurally limited. You see the consequences of decisions you didn’t make, moving under your name. There’s pride and discomfort sitting side by side.

Learning to work inside the limits

In practice, much of a designer’s time is spent negotiating these limits. Working around minimums that force overproduction. Adjusting designs to fit existing machinery rather than ideal outcomes. Accepting materials that are available rather than perfect. Compromising, not out of carelessness, but out of survival.

Reports from consultancies such as McKinsey & Company often frame this as an optimisation challenge. Efficiency. Innovation. Scaling solutions. The language is seductive, but it can flatten lived reality. On the ground, progress is rarely linear. It’s uneven. Contextual. Often slow.

What design school doesn’t teach is how much of this work is relational rather than creative. Trust with suppliers. Long conversations. Returning season after season to the same partners because familiarity reduces harm. Saying no to certain opportunities because the infrastructure can’t support them responsibly.

None of this fits neatly into a portfolio.

Letting go of total control

There’s also an uncomfortable truth that doesn’t get discussed enough. Not all control is desirable. The idea that designers should oversee every aspect of the value chain risks recreating the same concentration of power that caused many of these problems in the first place.

The system doesn’t need more omnipotent figures. It needs shared accountability. Transparency that moves in both directions. Brands listening to factories as much as factories responding to brands. Designers positioned as collaborators rather than moral arbiters.

For me, maturity as a designer hasn’t meant gaining total control. It’s meant recognising where my influence ends, and learning to work carefully within that boundary. Asking better questions rather than offering definitive answers. Designing with an awareness of consequence, without pretending to command the whole machine.

There is a quiet shift happening. Younger designers are more fluent in the language of supply chains. More sceptical of hero narratives. More interested in process than perfection. This doesn’t make the system suddenly ethical or resolved. But it does make it more honest.

Design still matters. Deeply. It sets tone. It shapes demand. It signals what is valued. But it doesn’t operate in isolation, and pretending it does only obscures the real work ahead.

The garment that leaves the studio carries more than intention. It carries labour histories, infrastructural constraints, geopolitical realities. To design today is to accept that complexity without trying to simplify it away.

Control was never the point. Awareness might be.

References

Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2023) The circular economy in fashion. Available at: ellenmacarthurfoundation.org

McKinsey & Company (2023) Fashion on climate: Navigating uncertainty. Available at: mckinsey.com