Seam the Change: A Fashion Hackathon That Brings Together and Transforms

 DigiFashTech • Athens, November 10–14, 2025

Under the autumn sun of Athens, between ancient columns and the winding streets of Pláka, sustainable fashion reinvented itself over five days. Twenty-six participants from eight European cities—Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Istanbul, Milan, Bolzano, Padua, Stockholm—converged on the Greek capital for "Seam the Change," an innovation lab orchestrated by Fashion Revolution Greece (Instagram: instagram.com/fash), SOFFA (https://soffa.gr/), TenMillionHands (https://tenmillionhands.org/), and Impact Hub Athens (https://athens.impacthub.net), where the future of textiles is being tested at accelerated speed.

A Rethought Hackathon

This intensive innovation format brings together diverse profiles to design and test solutions within a tight timeframe. But here, the approach went further: Seam the Change operated as a rapid learning mechanism, where experimentation, collaboration, and mentoring wove together. The goal? To develop the ability to reframe a problem, adjust a hypothesis, and confront intuitions with real-world constraints.

The Ideas Agora: A Collective Starting Point

After an opening day focused on European policy issues, orchestrated by the FABRIX teams, an Ideas Agora enabled participants to form teams around a project.

The event's purpose was precisely this: to allow project leaders to challenge the feasibility of their initiatives. Each person could schedule interviews with expert mentors to confront their ideas with external perspectives. Meanwhile, teams formed naturally, creating peer-to-peer working groups with approaches as varied as they were complementary.

Exchanges sometimes took the form of constructive tension—essential for uncovering blind spots.

Mentoring as a Learning Dynamic

Mentoring occupied a central place, not as a top-down expert service, but as a collaborative methodology. It provided a space to clarify ideas, identify biases, and articulate ambitions with the technical, economic, and social realities on the ground.

This horizontal approach encourages questioning rather than validation. It allowed participants to navigate the sector's contradictions: environmental impact, economic viability, social justice, technological innovation. More than winning a prize, the challenge was to develop collective intelligence capable of embracing complexity.

Among the mobilized mentors, Fashion Revolution France was represented, notably by Catherine Dauriac. This presence underscored the project's European dimension and the circulation of expertise between the movement's different national branches, each bringing their perspective and experience of local sustainable fashion issues.

The Final Sprint and a Demanding Evaluation System

The final day concentrated collective energy: refining pitches, structuring narratives, validating feasibility. The objective: to present projects before a jury gathered in the evening to reward one of the initiatives.

The jury relied on a criteria grid that reflects the complexity of sustainable textile challenges. Five pillars structured the evaluation, each examining an essential dimension of the sector's transformation.

Sustainability in all its facets formed the foundation of the analysis.

Circularity first: projects had to demonstrate how they integrate circular economy principles—circular sourcing, life extension, sharing, or resource recovery. The goal: to design systems that eliminate waste from the outset, keep materials in use, and regenerate natural ecosystems.

Environmental sustainability came next: reducing greenhouse gas emissions, saving water, preserving soil, decreasing fossil inputs, conserving biodiversity, lowering production volumes, limiting waste and pollution. But also the ability to shift behaviors toward more mindful consumption.

The social dimension completed this first grid: fair working conditions, just compensation, gender balance, inclusion of marginalized groups, social purpose reinvestment. All accompanied by transparency and accountability requirements.

From Idea to Reality

Feasibility constituted the second pillar: technical viability to reach the market, credible financial model, risk identification, performance indicators, and precise milestones. However virtuous an initiative might be, it had to be able to exist in the real world. Replicability or scalability: the ability to spread or grow without diluting impact.

Finally, presentation quality: clarity of purpose, strength of narrative, problem-solution fit. Because a transformative idea only fully exists if it can be shared and understood.

This evaluation system demanded far more than innovative projects: it required coherent visions, grounded in reality, capable of navigating between social impact, environmental regeneration, and economic viability.

Beyond the results, the finale celebrated an engaged and creative European community.

The Winning Projects

The jury distinguished two initiatives that each embody a singular approach to textile circularity. ReSilk, led by Athanasia Tsiakiris, draws on the centuries-old tradition of Greek silk from Soufli—a region in the country's northeast where European sericulture took root—which she reinvents through regeneration processes and digital innovation. NOEMA, Barbara Panopoulou's project, offers a platform that connects sustainable resources and ethical manufacturing, in an approach that echoes circular economy principles applied to fashion.

A Signal for the Future of Textiles

The Athens Fashion Hackathon demonstrated the effectiveness of a boundary-free space where learning and cooperation take precedence over competition. It highlighted a collective dynamic: that of a European textile sector seeking to become more just, circular, and regenerative—and advancing, step by step.

Nothing is resolved, but one thing is clear: transformation is progressing. And it's being built together, perhaps as surely as the Athenians once built their Parthenon.

Juliette Malaquin