The project coincides with John Smedley’s renewed commitment to using British wool in its collections. As Mcguire Dudley was preparing to step into her role, she was reflecting on how to steer the business through its next chapter; Britishness and craft had long been part of the brand, and she wanted to make those values central to its future direction. John Smedley had been working with British wool since 2015, and Mcguire Dudley felt a growing responsibility to support its revival. Alongside increasing its own British wool use, John Smedley is now sponsor of the Great British Wool Revival, a project founded by think tank Fashion Roundtable in 2024 to support the industry through an open-access map of stakeholders across the supply chain.
The School Uniform Project may be a hyper-local project in its initial execution, but the implications could reach far wider. It highlights some of the structural shifts the broader fashion industry could make to meet key sustainability targets, from moving away from synthetic dependency to building more transparent supply chains that support local ecosystems, and designing products with circularity in mind. For brands, it also shows the need to rebuild closer relationships with farms, mills and manufacturers, to secure consistent quality and create the volume needed for wider natural fiber adoption.
It could also provide a blueprint for phasing out the use of toxic PFAS (or forever chemicals) in fashion, say Harriet Fletcher-Gilhuys, textiles researcher at Fashion Roundtable, and Meg Pirie, head of sustainability and regeneration policy, who are jointly leading the Great British Wool Revival project. The use of PFAS in children’s clothing has become a particular cause for concern; in July 2025, a proposed amendment to the UK’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill included banning PFAS in school uniforms and requiring a chemical digital product passport (DPP) for uniforms, but this is yet to become law.
“While school uniforms are currently cheap, they are largely synthetic, laden with fabric promises, such as ‘crease-free’ or ‘stain-resistant’, indicating that the fabric has likely been treated with a chemical finish,” say Pirie and Fletcher-Gilhuys. “Given the number of schools and the amount of school uniforms that are used each day across the UK, British wool uniforms would be a no-brainer.”
Influencing tomorrow’s consumers
John Smedley has run British wool projects with university students before, but for this project, McGuire Dudley wanted to test whether a younger cohort would care about fiber provenance, sustainability and British manufacturing — and could be empowered to change their own uniform. “The idea is to show them all of the possibilities and see what they do with it,” she says.
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