TRACE - Tracing Stories, Community Authorship & Circular Fashion in the Digital Product Passport

Fashion's waste problem is well documented. The people transforming that waste into something wearable aren't part of the systems that decide what a product is allowed to say about itself. Safe Passage Bags has been doing exactly that since 2015 on Lesvos, where refugees and local residents turn materials recovered from Aegean migration crossings into designed bags. The work already stands on its own: pieces are stocked at the Nobel Peace Center, The Whitworth in Manchester, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. TRACE takes that foundation and builds something new: a jointly designed product line, plus the first Digital Product Passport (DPP) layer written by the makers themselves, not just the brands selling the product. Four partners, four different pieces of the puzzle: Lesvos Solidarity / LESOL (Greece, coordinator): 11 years of community production and an established market Fractal Apparel (Greece): design expertise and distribution across Europe University of Girona / OEIAC (Spain): DPP methodology and AI governance research AMB (Spain): a live public authority working through EPR policy on the ground Here's the gap TRACE is closing: under the EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, textiles will soon be required to carry a Digital Product Passport. That schema is being finalized right now, under the current delegated act timeline. And as it stands, there's no mechanism in it for the people who actually make the product to say anything about how or why it was made. TRACE builds that mechanism. Makers contribute their stories however they come, spoken, gestural, or musical. THEAMA, Greece's first professional inclusive theatre ensemble, turns those contributions into short pieces that cross language barriers entirely. This is what it looks like when the maker doesn't disappear. #CircularFashion #DigitalProductPassport #Lesvos #SafePassageBags #SustainableDesign #InclusiveTheatre