Cedecs-TCBL joined the final day of METAMORPHOSIS – Dialogues About Change, the talk series Fashion Council Germany ran with Vogue Business and eBay.de during Berlin Fashion Week. The 4th of July session focused on Community, wrapping up a three-day program that had already covered Design and Technology & Innovation. Here’s what caught our attention in three sessions.

Rethinking skills for fashion’s next generation

Dr. Gemma Vallet - Vice Dean of Berlin School of Business and Innovation

Bengisu Berispek - Researcher and Lecturer at Technische Universität Berlin

Liza Sander - Future Strategist and Facilitator at Circular Society

The panel on future skills opened with some numbers worth sitting with: Gen Z now makes up 24% of the global population, and fashion education alone reaches over 1.2 million students spread across more than 500 schools worldwide. The speakers agreed on one thing right away — curricula are overdue for a serious update.

Systems thinking kept surfacing throughout the conversation. Students need to figure out who their stakeholders really are, understand where their work actually has impact, and get comfortable questioning or redesigning systems instead of simply operating inside them. AI literacy came up, too, though the panel framed it more as knowing where AI’s usefulness runs out, and human judgment needs to step in, since AI can never carry responsibility for the consequences of a decision.

Context mattered a great deal to the group as well. Clothing was described as a political and sociological signal, so students need to learn to read that layer just as fluently as they read a trend forecast. Collaboration, critical thinking, and sound decision-making rounded things out — skills the panel sees as genuinely irreplaceable by automation.

On teaching methods, the group pushed hard for workshop-based learning over traditional lectures. Their vision: send students into their own environments to do field research first, then let them build a concept from what they actually find, so they end up solving real problems rather than hypothetical ones. There was also a call to bring students into companies’ real decision-making processes early, so the data they learn to work with stays grounded in reality. One tension never really got resolved: technology keeps evolving faster than teaching methods can adapt, and AI-generated content risks flattening ideas into shallow fragments instead of deepening them.

Resale is a strategy that needs to be embedded into the company’s core structure

Muchaneta Ten-Napel - Founder of Shape Innovate

Janis Kuenkler - Managing Director of Trove

Carlo Bellmann - Strategic Partnership Lead Fashion of ebay.de

Achille Mathot - Co-Founder & CEO of Trosort

The resale panel took direct aim at a common misreading of the space — treating resale as a bolt-on revenue stream rather than something structural. The panellists argued that resale needs to be built into a company’s core investment plan and brand identity from day one. They offered a concrete fix, too: care labels could carry information that makes reselling an item much easier.

The fear of cannibalising new sales came up openly. The consensus landed on this: some short-term overlap is real, but the long-term payoff for brand loyalty and material circularity makes it worthwhile.

Digital Product Passports were seen as genuinely useful for traceability, though the panel was quick to note they won’t fix resale’s deeper structural gaps by themselves. One sharper observation stood out: fast fashion resale is still a downstream activity, managing waste afterwards rather than preventing the production problem further upstream. Because resale currently functions as an add-on to existing business models, scaling it stays difficult, and the panel left an open question hanging in the air — whether the real fix is a broader system change rather than a better resale program.

Circularity needs a matching strategy

Marie Bastian - CEO&Founder of World of Mesh

Kim Berndt - AI Creator & Creative Technologist of WE:ART

Antonia Pfeifer - Master graduate and Winner of FCG Istituto Maragoni Scholarship

Schirin Negahbani - Creative Director & Technologist of Polygondressing

A separate discussion named the gap most brands still face: sustainability goals and business strategy often run on separate tracks instead of one shared plan. The panel pointed to four drivers that need to move together for circularity to actually take hold — technology (AI and hardware), governance through clear sustainability KPIs, regulation at both the product and marketing level, and a genuine mindset shift across the whole organisation.

Regulation itself got split into two worth distinguishing: rules imposed from outside, and strategic targets a company sets for itself, which need to stay realistic rather than aspirational.

A new creative role is forming

One idea that stuck with us: fashion may soon need a new kind of role, something like an “AI creative director.” It’s less about typing the right prompts and more about genuinely understanding how these AI systems work underneath. That way, even as production tools get more automated, the creative vision stays firmly in human hands. Cross-border trade came up as one way to give circular commerce a real push forward. But the conversation kept coming back to a familiar truth: the biggest obstacles are still human behaviour and disconnected value chains. No single piece of technology is going to untangle that on its own.