Two questions ran through TCBL’s keynote at the TEX-DAN and Green-Tex final event in Budapest, 19–20 May 2026: has circular fashion really moved from pilots to practice and is the sector ready to act together? And can the way a project like TEX-DAN is conceived, run and concluded show how to operate?

Why this matters

Circularity in textiles and clothing is no longer a question of whether, but of how — and, increasingly, of together with whom. Europe now has an unprecedented regulatory framework pushing the sector toward durability, traceability and recyclability; the technologies exist and the market is moving. Yet most of the effort still happens in isolation: talented players, each doing excellent work, rarely in coordination. Closing that gap between individual excellence and systemic change is exactly what TEX-DAN set out to do in the Danube Region.

The context: a project built as a method

TEX-DAN is an EU project, co-funded under the Interreg Danube Region Programme, and the Budapest event was held to mark its conclusion. It brought together 14 partners and 6 associated partners across 11 Danube Region countries to help textile and fashion SMEs adopt sustainable technologies and embed circular-economy principles. TCBL Association — the Textile and Clothing Business Labs Association — took part as the project’s associate partner, invited by REGINNOVA NE (North-East Romania), itself a TCBL founding partner.

What stands out is how it was done. TEX-DAN moved deliberately from analysis, to real-world Living-Lab pilots, to a mapping of 118 good practices, to stakeholder workshops in every country — and only then to its flagship TEX-DAN Strategy, a macro-regional framework of seven objectives and thirty measures. That Strategy now feeds eleven regional action plans, a Joint Action Plan and the new Danube Circular Textile Cluster. Conceived, run and concluded this way, the project is itself a working answer to the second question: a replicable model for how to operate (Results).

The keynote: from solos to symphony

Opening the second day, TCBL delivered the keynote — From Solos to Symphony: Is the Textile and Clothing Sector Ready?, given by Luca Leonardi, founding member of the association — stepping back from any single project to ask whether the sector as a whole is ready. The talk reached for a familiar image — knowingly, since the orchestra metaphor is well worn — but used it because it describes the circular economy in textiles today with uncomfortable precision: brilliant musicians, each playing flawlessly, yet each playing a different piece at a different tempo. We have many talented soloists; what we do not yet have is a symphony.

The path so far gives real reasons for confidence. Circular fashion has moved beyond the pilot phase and into the market: resale is now outpacing overall apparel growth, while repair, buyback and authentication models are going mainstream. Investment is concentrating on the technologies that matter — recycling, traceability, the Digital Product Passport and artificial intelligence, the last increasingly acting as the connective tissue that links design, production and recovery. And at the regulatory level something historic has happened: with the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the Digital Product Passport and Extended Producer Responsibility for textiles, circularity has shifted from a voluntary choice to the legal licence to operate.

But the keynote was equally honest about the gap between ambition and reality. The architecture is coherent; the transition we are living through is not. Fragmented national EPR schemes, siloed and incompatible data systems, and the absence of common standards mean that even well-designed instruments fail to connect to one another. A company can invest in recycling, but without upstream collection and sorting the recycled fibre never arrives; a brand can design a circular product, but without traceable data the Digital Product Passport stays empty. This is the heart of the matter: fragmentation is the enemy of circularity, because circularity is not a product feature — it is a system property. It works only when the whole chain works as one.

From there, the keynote offered the image not as a prescription but as a suggestion: to play together, the sector might need three things. A shared score — common standards and metrics, interoperable systems, and a Digital Product Passport built on shared responsibility rather than compliance imposed from above. A conductor — an institutionalised structure able to coordinate brands, suppliers, recyclers, technology providers, regulators and civil society, a role no single actor can hold alone. And rehearsal — the patient, cross-border system-building that TEX-DAN exemplifies, the work that never appears in a regulation yet makes every regulation implementable.

Working together

TEX-DAN ended in Budapest not as a final bow but as the end of the first movement. Its real legacy is twofold: a strategy others can adopt, and a way of working others can repeat. The Danube Circular Textile Cluster now carries the score forward, and TCBL — whose mission is to connect labs and partners across borders — looks forward to keeping the ensemble playing.