e are still recovering from a pandemic that no one anticipated, but that still today painfully conditions our entire life, and left deep marks throughout the Portuguese textile and clothing sector. The present is unstable and uncertain, as is the recovery we have witnessed throughout this year: it encourages us, but does not reassure us, since the future is something to be built, and none of us can safely anticipate it.

ATP did not want to fail to undertake a commitment to the industry it proudly represents, as it has always done when a new community framework starts. Therefore, it’s presenting its usual contribution to a strategic plan for the sector by 2030, seeking to identify the major trends that will frame its development, and suggesting structuring lines of intervention, without avoiding the fundamental recommendations to the Government and Public Administration, to the centres that support the sector and, finally, to the companies themselves, central characters and ultimate recipients of everything we do.

The years that follow will mark a new time that by no means will be the same as the one we lived. That includes the problems and constraints we are used to solving, as well as the solutions that have allowed the resilience and reinvention of the Portuguese textile sector, making it a worldwide case study, notable by its flexibility, adaptability, high reactivity, innovation, creativity and ability to generate value for international clients.

The drives have changed and nothing assures us that the critical success factors, which made the Portuguese textile cluster competitive in the past decade, will maintain effective, especially when the global fashion business is undergoing profound transformations. Even before the COVID pandemic, the consumption of fashion items in developed markets was in sharp decline, due to the radical change in consumer values, especially the younger generations, who demand transparency from brands and producers, scrutinizing where and how they items are manufactured, with what processes, and what are the environmental and social impacts. The new consumer is concerned with the issues of environmental sustainability, but also social and economic, striving for models of productive circularity, and giving a second life to garments or making them the raw materials of the next industrial cycle, which determines less consumption, more responsible purchases and the traceability of the entire system.

The new drives are certainly sustainability and digitization, supported by technology, which will not only be focused on the processes efficiency, but also on the industry’s effects on its surroundings. At the same time, they will not fail to comply with the usual goals, since fashion is not intended to satisfy only utilitarian needs: it brings added value and happiness to those who consume it.

Our goal, in the contribution to the Strategic Plan that we recently presented for the sector in 2030, is to fulfil a golden scenario, in which the textile sector retains its relevance, but substantially improves its qualitative performance. This necessarily involves intensive investments in biomaterials, a next step in the affirmation of the technological innovation that is already a hallmark of this sector on a global scale; through the automation and robotization of activities that are still very dependent on intensive labour, anticipating and filling their scarcity and accelerating the productivity of work; and by training human resources in the fields of design, marketing and communication, allowing to offer structured and integrated skills, so that the goal of generating and managing Portuguese brands is not limited to the usual “wishful thinking”.