BRUSSELS — After more than a decade in London, Future Fabrics Expo, the largest showcase of sustainable fashion, footwear, and interior textiles and materials, concluded its two-day run in Brussels with over 3,000 visitors engaging with 120 exhibitors.

Nina Marenzi, founder and chief executive officer of Future Fabrics Expo, said they are betting that a new location and broader demographic can turn material innovation from a niche talking point into a meaningful and profitable business play.

Moving to Brussels, she added, was also driven by opportunity. When she discovered that 36,000 square feet sat empty next to the Textiles Recycling Expo’s venue, she moved quickly to secure the space.

Most exhibitors and visitors were already traveling from outside the U.K. when the fair was held in London, so shifting to Brussels and sitting alongside a show dedicated to textile‑to‑textile recycling made sense, particularly as travel budgets tighten.

For Marenzi, that convenience served a bigger purpose, as the climate crisis, extreme weather, and price volatility have turned sustainability from a reputational issue into a core management concern.

“Anyone who’s ever talked about sustainable fashion for sustainable fashion’s sake went down the wrong path,” she said. “It’s about integrating sustainability where you can, starting small, with a small percentage that you require to replace conventional ones with more sustainable ones, and then you drive real progress.”

Marenzi believed the momentum is already there, just poorly communicated.

“A lot of these innovations actually have positive business cases that really work for the business long term, make them more resilient, and uncover inefficiencies,” she said.

“You’re actually looking at what is good for the business — being more efficient, using less water, using less energy, having a more diverse fiber portfolio, not dependent on petrochemicals and fossil fuels,” she added.

With fertilizer costs and fossil‑linked agriculture under pressure, she argued, regenerative practices and diversified man-made cellulosic fibers are becoming financially attractive.

“All of a sudden, these things have price volatility issues, and you don’t have that dependence on these inputs, so it’s a real game changer now,” she said.

“Yet currently we’re not really moving the dial. Brands are too slow; there’s not enough acceleration,” Marenzi added, even as she expects momentum to build as climate impacts and pricing shocks hit home.

On the ground, that acceleration is what the fair’s chief design officer Amanda Johnston was trying to engineer. The Brussels edition was built for openness and what she called a “cross‑pollination of ideas to lift things off the moon.”

The layout was deliberately open and welcoming. “You don’t put them in a box; you make it super open, like collaboration this way, so it’s designed purposefully to feel like the place you’re going to spend all day. There’s a free-flow feeling. You want people to concentrate on the information,” she explained.

The Innovation Hub and Innovation Hive spotlighted lab‑scale concepts and businesses ready for commercial partnerships, respectively. Early‑stage innovators begin in the Hub, and once they attract brand or investor interest, they “graduate” into the Innovation Hive, a cluster of booths that signal readiness to scale.

Funding is built into that progression. “We do collate the investors together with various presentations, so that they can see what’s going on in material innovation,” Johnston said, noting that exhibitors flag on their posters when they are seeking capital.

Strategically, Johnston said Brussels was part of a broader pivot to reach new decision makers. “We don’t want to always be speaking to the same audience,” she added.

A partnership with Munich-based Performance Days sees a curated Innovation Hub dropped into fairs in Munich, New York, Portland and Shanghai, giving early‑stage material companies recurring exposure to multiple markets throughout the year.

Claire Weiss, head of innovation at Future Fabrics Expo, singled out algae as one of the clearest themes this edition. One table alone gathered four innovators using algae or seaweed as feedstock, from algae‑derived silica for glass to high‑seaweed‑content fibers and cosmetic applications.

Dye innovation was another hotspot. Weiss highlighted Wtrlss by Lab Denim, whose digitally dyed denim eliminates multiple stages from the traditional process.

“It basically eliminates most of the water and most of the chemicals in the process, so it’s really an exciting one,” she said, adding that several bacterial dye start-ups are testing new color ranges using strains from Brazil’s Amazon and beyond.

Stretch fibers, one of fashion’s most fossil‑locked categories, were also seeing breakthroughs. Hyosung’s sugarcane‑based bio‑elastane sat alongside a seaweed‑based stretch fiber. “I think we’re finally seeing a lot of innovation in stretch,” Weiss said.

Beyond drop‑in replacements, she was watching entirely new biobased polymers designed from scratch. Some innovators, she noted, are using captured CO₂ to make polyester‑like fibers, while others, such as Mariva, are developing “an entirely novel combination of monomers to make a new polymer that hasn’t been used in textiles before, that’s entirely bio‑based.”

Fashion’s attachment to synthetics is about performance, not oil, she argued. “There’s a functionality there that we’re drawn to.” The emerging biosynthetics aim for the same level of performance as polyester, but without petroleum input, enabled by advances in chemistry and fermentation.

For exhibitors, Brussels was a live test of whether those “better than” products could finally reach scalability.

Christopher Suarez, cofounder of A Blue World and formerly cofounder of Nicholas Kirkwood, believed the previous sustainability wave hit a wall because “green did not sell products. It became polarized,” leaving only a very small addressable market willing to pay a premium.

By contrast, he is positioning seaweed‑ and ocean‑derived inputs around visible health and wellness benefits. Clinical studies on Smartfiber’s zinc‑oxide fiber, which A Blue World now controls, showed that garments containing 20 percent of the fiber “can reduce inflammation by wearing just the garment,” he touted, citing 100 percent success in a study of 40 NHS pediatric patients with skin conditions.

On the farm side, Future Fabrics Expo was pushing brands to treat soil health as a design parameter. The U.K.-based label Nobody’s Child chose regenerative cotton as its first major step beyond organic, which already accounts for more than half of its raw materials by weight.

“It just felt like a natural first step for us,” said sustainability lead and manager Philly Grogan. The brand spent two years developing the collection and visiting farms in India. This year, the brand brought a team to Brussels “so that we can just be really efficient in feeding back to the team and trying to use even more innovative materials and roll out regenerative cotton across more of our collections.”

British Pasture Leather cofounder Sara Grady said they have been working on adding traceability to leather.

“We’re only taking the hides of cattle that are pasture-fed and that come from farms following regenerative principles,” she said. Typically, “when a brand or a designer is choosing or sourcing leather, there’s little or no information about the agricultural practices in which the animals were raised.”

Working within a 100‑mile production radius has limited scale so far, but interest is growing. “We are seeing a bigger reach here in terms of European brands and luxury brands,” Grady said, pointing to a recent collaboration with Mulberry as a vote of confidence in the model.

The fair will return to Brussels for 2027, slated for 16 to 17 June.