New podcast episode: The Techno Optimist – rethinking fashion through innovation
19.03.2026
In episode 05 of Sustainability by Design, Giff sits down with Ann Claes, co-founder of MASJIEN, a technology and sustainability agency working at the intersection of fashion, innovation and systems change. Ann describes herself as a techno optimist – someone who genuinely believes technology can help move the industry forward, and that sustainability has far more opportunity ahead of it than the doom-heavy conversation around it suggests.
The episode keeps coming back to a line Ann quotes from Vanessa Friedman, delivered at the Global Fashion Summit years ago: sustainability needs to be communicated in a more sexy way. The uncomfortable truth is that it’s still the most important unsolved problem in the space. Fashion sells dreams, identity and aspiration. Sustainability mostly sells guilt. Until that changes, all the data, reports and good intentions in the world won’t shift consumer behaviour fast enough.
Ann’s answer to that challenge is partly practical and partly philosophical. TURBO, MASJIEN’s experimental innovation sandbox, explores what happens when emerging technologies stop working in isolation and start working together. Take a single red leather jacket, give it a digital product passport, reimagine it in sustainable materials, let someone try it on virtually. Suddenly one product becomes a window into how the whole system could work in practice rather than theory. Blast worked with Ann on the visual identity and keynote for TURBO, helping translate an experimental idea into something concrete enough for people to believe in.
In this episode: why fashion’s obsession with warnings is making things worse, how to get innovation out of the silo and into the business, and why the most important brief in sustainability is still making it feel worth caring about.
