Europe wants fashion to prove where its products come from, what they are made of and what happens to them next. But when much of the world’s fashion is made in Asia, who pays for that proof, who gets to shape the system and who captures the value it creates?
In the summer of 2005, roughly 80 million Chinese-made garments sat stranded in European ports and warehouses. The British press, never one to waste a headline, called it the “bra wars”. The quota system that had governed the global clothing trade for three decades had expired that January, Chinese exports surged, and emergency limits agreed between Brussels and Beijing were exhausted almost as soon as they were signed. It took urgent talks in Beijing to free the stock, with half of it counted against China’s allowance for the following year.
The episode is remembered as a farce, but its lesson was serious. Europe no longer made most of the world’s clothes. It could still decide the terms on which they came in. Two decades later, it is drawing that line again, only this time the currency is data. On 19 July 2026, the European Union’s ban on large companies destroying unsold clothing and footwear came into force, aimed at a practice the European Environment Agency estimates affects 4% to 9% of textiles placed on the European market.
Under the same regulatory framework, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), textiles and apparel are among the priority product groups expected to receive a Digital Product Passport. Exactly what information a textile passport will have to contain is still being developed, with textile-specific rules expected in 2027. The direction, however, is clear: information that has historically been scattered across suppliers, brands and systems will increasingly need to become digitally accessible across a product’s lifecycle.
Few people have thought harder about that collision than Leanne Elliott Young. The Co-Founder and CEO of the Institute of Digital Fashion has spent more than 15 years on fashion’s digital frontier, earning a place among Vogue Business’s 100 Innovators and, this year, taking the stage at the inaugural TIME100 AI Leadership Forum. Her latest venture, PATINA, builds on that work alongside longtime collaborator and fellow Co-Founder Cat Taylor, the digital fashion creative and technologist who co-founded the Institute of Digital Fashion with Elliott Young in 2020 and now serves as PATINA’s Chief Creative Officer. Together, they’re turning their attention from fashion’s digital expression to its physical afterlife, based on a simple premise: that the most neglected part of a product’s life is everything that happens after it’s sold.
To Elliott Young, the passport matters less as a record than as an identity, one capable of remaining with a product as it moves through markets, repairs, resale and successive owners. “It’s absolutely a turning point, but documentation alone isn’t transformation,” she tells Beyond the Boardroom. A passport can make information available. It cannot, on its own, make the system behind that information more sustainable, the customer more engaged or the business more valuable. And that distinction is where the real argument begins.
The Cost of Proof
“For years, sustainability has largely relied on brands communicating their commitments,” Elliott Young explains. “What’s changing now is the infrastructure underneath that.” For an industry with a well-documented credibility problem, the shift from assertion to evidence is significant. Saying where something came from is easy. Proving it is not.
Proof has a cost, and that cost doesn’t necessarily land with the companies writing the sustainability reports. “European regulation has enormous power because access to that market can raise standards throughout a global supply chain,” Elliott Young adds. “But we shouldn’t pretend regulation created in Brussels lands equally everywhere.” Bangladesh makes the tension tangible. Garments generate more than 80% of the country’s export earnings, and Europe is its largest apparel market. As the industry prepares for the new requirements, local manufacturers are already confronting questions around digital infrastructure, financing and technical capacity, particularly among smaller factories.
That means a regulation designed to make global brands more accountable could ask factories thousands of kilometres from Brussels to shoulder much of the operational burden of proving that accountability. Elliott Young sees a familiar imbalance taking shape. “If we simply push the cost and complexity of compliance further down the supply chain, we risk creating a system where responsibility travels downwards while value continues travelling upwards.”
If only the world’s largest companies can afford connected-product infrastructure, then we haven’t transformed an industry, we’ve simply created another barrier to entry— R. Todd Ruppert, Founder and CEO, Ruppert International; Strategic Adviser, PATINA
The problem doesn’t end at the factory. It reaches the consumer too. “Sustainability cannot become a luxury product,” Elliott Young argues. If authentication, traceability, repair and circular services can be made economically viable around a US$4,000 (£3,000) product but not a $40 (£30) garment, fashion risks creating what she calls “a premium tier of responsibility”: a system in which the companies and consumers able to afford sustainability infrastructure are also those best positioned to benefit from it.
That’s not simply an ethical problem. It’s also a problem of scale, which is where R. Todd Ruppert’s perspective becomes relevant. The Founder and CEO of Ruppert International and former CEO and President of T. Rowe Price Global Investment Services has spent four decades investing in and scaling businesses across borders. As a strategic adviser to PATINA, he brings that capital and growth lens to the question of how connected-product infrastructure moves from an ambitious idea to something that can work commercially across markets and price points. His conclusion is straightforward: infrastructure that only works for the largest players is not transformative infrastructure.
“If only the world’s largest companies can afford connected-product infrastructure, then we haven’t transformed an industry, we’ve simply created another barrier to entry.”
For Europe’s ambition to work then, the infrastructure cannot merely demand participation from the rest of the world. It has to be affordable and useful enough for that participation to happen. Yet even that framing risks casting Asia as the region waiting to implement a system designed elsewhere, when parts of the region are already helping to define what comes next.
In March 2026, China established its first national standards working group dedicated to Digital Product Passports, with GS1 China hosting the secretariat. Chinese institutions are also involved in developing an IEEE reference architecture for DPPs. “I would challenge the assumption that Europe is necessarily the innovator and Asia the implementer,” Elliott Young says. “Asia is already building.”
Nor is Asia one market with one set of capabilities or incentives. “Singapore isn’t Bangladesh. Japan isn’t Indonesia. China isn’t India,” she continues. A garment might be designed in Europe, use materials and labour spread across several Asian markets, be sold in the United States, repaired elsewhere and eventually resold across another border. If every jurisdiction, platform or brand creates an incompatible identity, the promise of a passport that survives the life of the product begins to collapse.
That brings the economics of access back to Ruppert’s second concern: scale requires interoperability without uniformity. “The infrastructure can be global, but its application has to understand local markets, consumer behaviour, regulation and commercial realities,” he shares. “Global scale isn’t about making every market behave the same way. It’s about building something robust enough to work differently in different places.”
The real test for fashion’s passport, then, is not whether Asia can follow Europe’s rules. Rather, it’s whether a system catalysed in Brussels can become genuinely global infrastructure without carrying the assumption that the rest of the world must behave like Brussels.
What if No One Wants a Digital Product Passport?
Even if fashion solves that problem, it faces another: nobody has to care. “Nobody wakes up wanting to scan a QR code and read compliance data,” Elliott Young points out. “More information does not automatically create better behaviour.”
That cuts against an industry conversation that can treat transparency as an end in itself. Regulators may want better information and brands may need better records, but neither gives a shopper a reason to engage. Research by PATINA and the Institute of Digital Fashion points towards a more useful distinction. Consumers may not know what a Digital Product Passport is, Taylor says, but they understand what they might want a connected product to do: tell them how to care for it, authenticate it, book a repair or make resale easier. “Consumers don’t necessarily want a DPP. They want what a connected product enables them to do.”
In Asia, where digital ecosystems, retail behaviours, attitudes towards ownership and relationships with resale vary dramatically from market to market, that distinction becomes particularly important. A passport can be globally interoperable without offering every consumer the same experience. It also unsettles one of sustainability’s most repeated instructions: buy less, buy better.
“Better according to whom? And affordable to whom?” Taylor asks.
Her objection is not to durability, but to the quiet transfer of an industrial problem onto individual shoppers, who are asked to spend more, research more and turn every purchase into an ethical calculation. If the responsible option consistently requires more money, more effort and more knowledge, sustainability becomes something most easily performed by those with the resources to perform it. “If sustainable behaviour constantly feels like sacrifice, homework, boring or an obligation, we’re designing it badly,” she notes. “The data creates transparency. The experience creates behaviour.”
Making the passport useful however, changes the stakes. The moment a product starts interacting with an owner, facilitating services and potentially remaining connected as ownership changes, the conversation is no longer only about what consumers can learn from the product. It’s also about what companies can learn from them.
That is where Joyce Brocaglia enters the argument. The Founder of Alta Associates and the Executive Women’s Forum has spent nearly four decades working across cybersecurity, privacy, risk and organisational trust. As a strategic adviser to PATINA, she brings that expertise directly to enterprise governance, organisational resilience and leadership around connected products. A persistent identity that follows a garment through years, services and successive owners immediately raises questions familiar to her world: what information is collected and why, who owns it, who can access it, how consent is handled and what happens when the record is wrong.
“Disclosure is not trust,” Brocaglia says. “It’s only the raw material trust gets built from.”
For Brocaglia, that distinction makes the passport as much a leadership question as a technology one. The more information a business asks consumers, suppliers and partners to contribute to a connected product, the greater its responsibility to demonstrate why that information is needed and how it will be protected and governed. Compliance may determine what a company has to disclose, but trust will determine whether people are willing to participate in the system around it.
That shifts the responsibility upwards. A Digital Product Passport cannot simply be delegated to sustainability, technology or compliance teams and treated as another implementation project. If connected products are ultimately intended to create years-long relationships between brands and their customers, questions of data, consent and accountability become questions for leadership too.
A passport can make information visible. It cannot guarantee that the information is accurate, understandable or responsibly governed, and technology alone cannot make a company credible. Elliott Young draws a similar distinction from the product side: “Traceability tells me where something has been. Accountability tells me what you’re prepared to do about it.”
That completes the consumer equation. Transparency creates proof. Utility gives people a reason to engage with it. But engagement creates a relationship, and a relationship requires trust. Only then does the passport become something more interesting than compliance.
Check Out or Checked Out?
Once consumers have a reason to return to a connected product, the economics begin to change too. Fashion has always been brilliant at understanding the journey to the till and strangely incurious about what happens afterwards. A brand may know who first bought a garment. It often knows far less about whether that garment was repaired, resold, handed down, retained for a decade or discarded within months.
A persistent product identity could make that afterlife visible. “What happens if the sale becomes the beginning of the relationship rather than the end?” Elliott Young asks. For luxury especially, the logic writes itself: provenance enriches value, authentication protects it, repair preserves it and resale demonstrates that a product can retain economic value beyond its first owner. “Profit and purpose do not have to be enemies,” she says.
The same utility that makes the passport worth opening for the consumer can therefore make it commercially interesting to the company behind it. That’s the point at which Ruppert’s investor lens becomes particularly useful. Companies spend fortunes acquiring customers, only for much of that relationship to disappear at checkout. If the product itself creates legitimate reasons for its owner to return through warranties, servicing, repair, authentication or resale, the economics of the infrastructure begin to look very different. If the identity survives a change of ownership, the brand potentially gains a relationship with the second customer as well as the first.
If sustainable behaviour constantly feels like sacrifice, homework, boring or an obligation, we’re designing it badly. The data creates transparency. The experience creates behaviour”— Cat Taylor, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, PATINA
“At that point, you’re no longer simply talking about sustainability or compliance expenditure,” Ruppert says. “You’re talking about commerce infrastructure.” For boards weighing the cost of DPP compliance, that is a materially different proposition. What begins as a regulatory line item could potentially underpin services, customer relationships, circular commerce and revenue long after the first transaction. As Elliott Young puts it: “The breakthrough comes when the sustainable decision and the commercially intelligent decision become the same decision.”
There are limits to how far that argument can be taken. A connected product does not fix a business model built on making too much. “You can regulate the destination of waste without changing the economics that created it,” Elliott Young admits. Europe’s ban on destroying unsold clothing changes what large companies can do with excess stock, not necessarily the incentives that led them to produce it.
Her argument is that post-purchase information could eventually begin to travel upstream. If brands can understand what gets repaired, what retains its value, what changes hands repeatedly and what quietly disappears, they gain information about product performance that the initial sale cannot provide. “The answer to overproduction can’t just be better waste management,” Elliott Young adds. “We have to understand what happens after purchase and change where value is created.”
It echoes the case Parley for the Oceans founder Cyrill Gutsch made to Beyond the Boardroom: that sustainability only becomes consequential once it moves from the corporate sidelines into the decisions boards actually make. The passport faces the same test. Treated as a reporting obligation, it may simply create another layer of compliance. Treated as infrastructure capable of connecting sustainability with product performance, consumer relationships and future revenue, it begins to alter how products themselves are valued.
Whose Passport is it Anyway?
That leaves one final question: if the passport becomes valuable infrastructure, who controls it?
Asia will not simply sit downstream. In Singapore, GS1 Singapore is convening businesses around traceability, while Orobo is developing verification and product-passport technology. Elliott Young sees Singapore as a potential bridge between Asian supply chains and global standards.
But value brings questions of governance. “Leaders who announce a passport programme and stop there are building a press release,” Brocaglia says. If a digital identity follows a product across owners, platforms and markets, who owns the data, who can change it and who remains accountable?
Interoperability matters just as much. “We cannot build a future where that product needs a new digital identity every time it crosses a border, platform or owner,” Elliott Young says. “The infrastructure underneath can be standardised. The experience on top shouldn’t have to be.”
China is writing standards, Bangladesh is confronting implementation and Singapore could become a bridge between technology and trade. Europe may have created the catalyst, but Asia will help determine what comes next.
“Europe may be seen as creating the regulatory catalyst with these textile mandates, but it doesn’t own the future of the product passport,” Elliott Young concludes. “The infrastructure has to be global, and the experience has to be local.”