The EU is preparing a "passport" for every garment—a Digital Product Passport (DPP) that records what materials it uses, where it was made, how long it lasts, and where it goes after disposal. Underpinning this system is the EU's 2024 Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR); South Korea, by contrast, is still at an early preparatory stage.

The author, who works at the Korean circular fashion platform CARE ID, is taking part in that preparation. She returned to Korea from the UK last summer and joined the company—focused on DPP in textiles and fashion—as Head of Service, and has since been promoted to Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO). Looking back at her career: she entered the industry 15 years ago as a fashion designer, held roles in the apparel industries of Korea, Japan, Canada, and Australia, witnessed PETA protests while working at Canada Goose, and came to recognize fashion's harm to society and the environment through the documentary The True Cost. She then studied at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) in New York, moved to the UK as a designer and trend researcher, earned a master's in Fashion Futures at London College of Fashion (LCF), University of the Arts London, and was even accepted into a PhD program at the University of Leeds. Her dual experience in academia and industry led her to conclude that fashion's overproduction cannot be solved by corporate goodwill alone—it ultimately requires regulation—and the EU has already provided the answer: the 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan, and the ESPR and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regimes that grew out of it.

She had originally planned to finish her PhD before taking on such work, but CARE ID had already been navigating the Korean fashion industry for years, and opportunities don't wait—so she chose to postpone her studies and jump straight in. Her first month on the job ran from 10 a.m. to nearly 11 p.m., reminding her of pulling all-nighters on assignments as a student.

The regulatory reality is this: the fiber-specific delegated act has yet to be issued, with a target of passage in 2027. What can be done during the waiting period is to interpret the regulations ahead of time. Based on her preliminary research on textiles under ESPR, she redesigned the data schema brands need to prepare their own data. To her, ESPR is essentially about how products are designed, so one must first see clearly what responsible operators—fashion companies themselves—can actually do, where they get stuck, and what the on-the-ground details look like.

Her first project at CARE ID was the 2025 Preview in Seoul (PIS) trade show hosted by the Korea Federation of Textile Industries. At the center of the venue stood a giant T-shirt, made together with multiple stakeholders in Korea's sustainable fashion industry, clearly labeled with its place and method of production, environmental footprint, and estimated carbon emissions—packing a garment's journey directly into a digital product passport. The seminar featured a talk by Andrew Xeni, CEO of Fabacus, who had helped drive DPP adoption in the UK fashion industry, and she herself shared CARE ID's approach. She later exchanged views with global stakeholders in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, confirming one thing: the impact of ESPR and DPP extends beyond Europe to cover the entire Asian supply chain.

The company has also delivered concrete results: it started in 2021 with circular fashion solutions for handling inventory and secondhand clothing, and pivoted in 2024 to the textile and fashion DPP business; it compiled cases implemented jointly with Korean brands, research findings, and interviews with the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment and domestic textile operators into CARE ID's first white paper, and passed verification and received a recommendation as an official partner of the DPP demonstration project CIRPASS-2. In addition, the company won a five-year national R&D project to design "K-DPP" infrastructure capable of reducing the carbon emissions of target products by 30%, and launched an ODA project with KOICA support to help the Lao government and industry respond to relevant regulations.

Her judgment on the industry comes at the end: systemic change does not happen only from the top down; industry, regulators, and everyone who buys, wears, and discards clothes must agree on why this matters. Rather than arguing over who creates demand, we should find ways to make everyone in every part of the chain feel that "what we're doing makes sense." Going forward, she will update weekly on what DPP and ecodesign regulations actually require, where global regulation and technology are heading, what Korean fashion can prepare, and what else is needed to make the fashion industry more sustainable. [Basis for facts in this article: brunch.co.kr, author's own account]

Source: 01화 프롤로그. 떠나는 대신, 쓰기로 했습니다. · Originally published 2026-09-27