Inside Margaret Burton: Shifting mindsets and the importance of educating people on how clothes are made
Continuing on my circular fashion series, I’m taking a look at how an independent designer can drive change in the industry. In addition to building a system for remanufacturing of garments at larger companies like Eileen Fisher, education and grassroots efforts are an essential part of shifting the consumer mindset on clothing and creating a circular economy. There is only so much an apparel brand can do if consumers are unaware of the social cost of the fast fashion they are demanding. How do we educate people on the value of handmade goods?
I caught up with Margaret Burton, a Pratt graduate who created a collection of deconstructed clothing made into new garments. Her main goal of the collection was to show the human labor that goes into making the clothing we wear. Her passion for shifting the industry has led her to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she teaches inner city and underprivileged kids how to sew.
Read about her journey – which has taken her from wasteful high-end fashion brands in NYC to the textile recycling industry in India – and how she hopes to change the industry in the interview below.
How did you get involved in sustainable fashion?
It wasn’t until the end of my sophomore year at Pratt when I did an internship over the summer that I became interested in sustainability. It was a big company with a lot of money, but the people at the head of the company didn’t have any design experience or knowledge of the field. They wasted a lot of money on samples and back and forth between factories in China. My job was to go in the back and cut all of the samples.
In addition to the samples, they had a lot of clothes that were made and had never been sold. I had to go in the back and cut everything in half. It was a high-end company so they had a lot of nice details. I was just imagining a woman overseas that was making all this stuff, and I’m just cutting all her beautiful work, it horrified me. After that experience, I started looking into what was going on. I watched documentaries and read Overdressed and To Die For. I also had a good teacher that talked to us about sustainable fashion.
There was also a video I watched that was on the shoddy industry in India, where unwanted western clothes are sent to. They cut off tags and they turn garments into reusable thread. I had an opportunity to go and visit a shoddy factory in India like the one from the video. I saw the waste produced first hand in NYC and then see it come full circle in India where the garments were being recycled.
How do you incorporate sustainability into your own work?
My senior year is when I really approached how I could solve this problem with my own work. How can I communicate and make people understand what’s going on? My approach is that I take clothes that have already been made and then I seam rip it and get it into a flat form. My thought process behind that is to have people see how many pieces are inside their garments. Have them think about, how is this put together? How does this get sewn together? Looking at it in a different way than how they looked at it before. A lot of people think that machines are making clothes, that there are no humans behind it.
Do you think it’s truly possible to have a circular production model in the fashion industry?
I feel like that is the goal of what I’m trying to do. My ideal dream is to do that. Right now I’m just kind of creating whatever I want because I don’t have enough clientele. I’ve been doing some custom orders here and there. Ideally, one thing I’m working on now is a jacket from a woman who’s father passed away and she wants me to turn his jacket into a fashionable denim jacket for her to wear. I’ve done it for a couple people on a small scale, but, ideally, that is what I would love to do. Take things from your closet that you’re not using and make it into something that you might need.
How have you been active in educating consumers about the labor it takes to make clothing?
I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina to teach high school students how to sew. When I took on this opportunity, I thought it was great to be able to build a little army of people who can make their own clothes and are educated. Our parent’s generation all had home ec class, they understand what it takes to make a garment and how long it takes to make it. Unlike me growing up, I never thought about who made my clothes and how my clothes came together.
The children that I’m teaching are in poor communities. I talk to them about how these brands are feeding off of the mindset that “I need this to be popular” or “I need this to be cool”. It’s really crazy how fashion has an effect on these kids and how kids will literally start selling drugs so they can afford the next pair of Jordans.
How did you get started working with the at-risk youth?
I was in Los Angeles working for Jeremy Scott, and somebody from my high school messaged me. He was working for a non-profit in Charlotte that reaches out to the refugee and inner-city communities. They give free English classes, sewing classes, cooking classes, to adults. He was hired to reach out to the youth. As he was reaching out to them he was starting to see how much of an affect fashion had on the community.
They already had the sewing machines from when they teach women how to sew during the week. He thought, why not use those sewing machines to teach the youth to sew in the afternoons. He knew the basics of sewing but not how to pattern and construct a garment, so he asked me to come. I did that for a month, and it went really well. Eventually, they got a grant and then it became a program, and they asked me to come back.
How has it been to work with the kids? Has anything been surprising or challenging to explain this mind shift to them?
It has definitely been challenging to get them to believe me, or even get them to take action. I’ll have them watch The True Cost, and they’ll be so angry, but they still buy fast fashion. The stuff they buy their clothes off of nowadays is crazy. They have these apps on their phone where they can find t-shirts for five dollars and other really cheap stuff. They’re always looking at it.
I think it’s affecting their choices somewhat, they definitely think about it now, but I don’t think it’s changing their choice completely. I had a girl my class who kept buying fake Gucci and Givenchy bags and she finally stopped doing that. I kept telling her, you need to save this money and buy a car so that you can drive yourself to a job. The programs were twelve weeks at a time but now it’s changing, so I’ll be with students for a longer period of time. I think that will have a more lasting effect.
What do you think is necessary to have a more circular economy?
I feel like it’s both education and better technology for textile recycling. It really blows my mind, I don’t know how companies like H&M do it if they’re really recycling the clothing, then that’s more work, so the prices should go up. That’s the hardest part with my work, is educating people on what goes into making the garment. People see something of mine and ask, why is it so expensive? It’s hard to convince people that they should be paying more for their clothes.
Before the seventies, people wouldn’t have more than twelve pieces of clothing in their closet. They would have to save up money to buy a new pair of pants, it’s not like they could just go out and buy a new pair of pants. In my ideal world, I wish we could go back to that. But now that this fast-paced life has been introduced, I don’t know how to get people out of that cycle. I definitely think that education is a big part of it. Even with me sharing my work, the friends who have followed me along my journey are started to change the way that they shop.
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Visit Margaret’s website to view her work, https://www.margaret-burton.com/
Inside Eileen Fisher: Their innovative Tiny Factory as a model for the circular fashion industry
Over the next few weeks, I’m taking a look at circular fashion and how people are starting to shift their design thinking, and the consumer mindset to adapt to this new model. The next step in sustainable fashion is hacking circularity, taking the traditional “take, make, waste” model and closing the loop. How do we reverse the damage we’ve done and create garments out of discarded garments?
I talked with Carmen Gama, Designer of Eileen Fisher Renew, to hear about how they are stepping up as leaders in the industry to create a circular production model at their Tiny Factory. Carmen established RESEWN, a remanufacturing model so solve the company’s challenge of repurposing damaged inventory that they had been collecting since 2009.
The Tiny Factory, located on the Hudson in Irvington, New York, is pioneering the way for the industry to redefine its product lifecycle and production models. They’ve faced challenges along the way and are still developing ways to grow and scale their model to tackle all the inventory they have in stock but are finding innovative ways to overcome setbacks. Read more about Carmen’s work with the RESEWN program and the Tiny Factory in the interview below.
How did you first start the Eileen Fisher RESEWN program?
I started working with Eileen Fisher three years ago when I was a recently graduated student from Parsons. The CFDA partnered up with Eileen Fisher, along with two other students from Parsons, to figure out what to do with their damaged inventory they had been collecting from their take back program since 2009. We were trying to figure out how to make something profitable, beautiful and scalable. By repurposing just one garment at a time, changing a sleeve or fixing a button, we would not have been able to tackle the challenge the company was facing. We really focused in on developing systems and processes that were able to produce these garments.
At the end of the year we had a collection made of 500 units, and after Eileen saw our collection and our process she was really excited about our proposal to resolve this challenge. She asked us to continue, and I decided to stay and work on the project.
How did the Tiny Factory come into being?
While I was working on creating the systems for the RESEWN program, the manager who was guiding the project, Cynthia Power from Eileen Fisher, also had an idea of Eileen Fisher having their own factory here in Irvington. The factory didn’t start with the idea of making garments out of garments, but out of the idea of owning some of our Eileen Fisher production. So they opened the factory and at the same time, we were trying to scale our process. When it opened it was supposed to be 75% Eileen Fisher main collection and 25% Eileen Fisher RESEWN collections, and it started that way. Very quickly, Eileen decided to do only RESEWN because it was too expensive to do the main production in the facility.
What does the production process look like at the Tiny Factory?
Making garments out of garments requires different steps from regular production. First, you have to source the inventory that you need. Second, you have to deconstruct that garment. Third, you have to prep the materials on a table. You have to lay it all out to be ready for cutting. This is what we call our pre-production steps. It’s kind of like when designers place their fabric orders, or the colors of their yarn, you forget what happens on the other side of the world, people spinning and creating textiles. That is what those three steps are for us, we are prepping the garment to become raw material.
After those steps then it’s just regular production. We cut them and then we sew them, we have three factory sewers. They were hired initially with a very simple skill set, which was sewing basic pants, one of our viscose pants. But when they started doing our production, the skill set for making garments out of garments was a lot higher. We ended up having to train them because sometimes we had garments made from silk and other details. In the beginning, I was very much involved in every step from the sorting to the deconstructing, so it was not very economically sustainable. To solve this we cross-trained all of the sewers to not only to sit down at the sewing machine constructing the garments but also doing the other pre-production steps.
Has there ever been inventory that you’ve been stumped on what to do with? And how did you work around it?
Yeah, there’s a lot of them, but we have one, in particular, it’s a silk jersey. It’s a bread and butter fabric that we use every season. That fabric tends to stain in the same way, it’s this oily stain that is pretty consistent, but they’re everywhere in the garment. Sometimes you don’t even see it, but when you’re pressing them more stains come up. We actually did a production of them, it’s a beautiful shell. But as we were finishing production and we were steaming them to be ready to be packed to the store, stains were surfacing.
Now we’re working with one of our vendors that is doing fiber recycling with textiles to solve this problem. We told them to take the silk and experiment with it, that we would like to use it if they can shred it and turn it into a new textile. They were so excited, within a month they came back with a sample. Now those garments will be part of a new textile that we will be using for Spring 2019.
Do you work with the design team from the Eileen Fisher main line to talk about what fabrics are used designs are done in the main line?
I’m part of the circular by design team at Eileen Fisher, which is a team of people trying to make sense of circularity, how it works and what does it look like for Eileen Fisher. We have been thinking a lot about design for takeback. Eileen has essentially been doing this since day one since her designs have been so simple, so they actually provide a lot of material to work with.
Are you working with other brands to share what you’ve learned?
We opened our doors and share the story with anyone who is interested. It’s not only up to us to change this industry it’s up to everybody else. We were talking about sustainability, and now we’re talking about circularity and I think transparency is the next big thing that people are going to jump on board for. If these companies really want to see change in this industry, companies will have to be transparent in order to see change and we have to share how we’re doing it. We’re working on some collaborations with designers and companies like H&M have come to tour the facility. We open our doors to anybody. It doesn’t have to be the same model for everybody, but it’s about taking what we’re doing and applying it to your own needs.
How do you see this programming growing? What do you see for the future of the Tiny Factory?
Right now because of manpower there is a limit. I feel like our processes are there. We have processes that can replicate what we’re doing by the hundreds. The number of people who are working here is just not enough to do that. So far, every store would love to have our product. And I’d love to have more online, our product actually sells well online, our story is told better there.
My ideal shoot for the moon goal for the factory is that we can produce as fast as we are getting garments in. We will need a lot more people. I think our designs are there. Right now we’re at a bottleneck, we’re really drowning in garments. I would like to produce as fast as clothing is coming in.
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Click here to shop Eileen Fisher RESEWN products
#SummerMending – It’s Time for a Refresh
For me, summer is a time to refresh and recenter. Maybe it’s from my school days of summer vacation, or the lightness I feel with the warmer weather, or maybe it’s just because I’m a summer baby, I love to dust off old projects, mend clothes, reevaluate my goals and priorities and get ready for the colder months. Part of this process is picking apart my closet and fixing what needs mending, donating what I no longer need, or updating pieces that need a simple refresh.
This summer I’ll bring you along as I go through my closet and give some pieces some love and care. In this age of consumerism and fast fashion, I truly believe that mending is a radical act and it would be wonderful to see your updates and stories over the summer as well.
I already started with a vintage dress I picked up in Montreal during my spring break. You may have seen it on my Instagram story, if you missed it you can check it out in my FASHION highlights. It only needed some simple updates, removing the shoulder pads and detaching the slip, and now it’s the perfect summer dress. It’s amazing what a little tweak can do for the wearability of a garment. I enter a thrift store knowing that every piece could have potential, it’s just a matter of how much work I want to put into it. I try to find those pieces that just require a few easy tweaks, when it’s a bigger undertaking I tend to get a bit carried away.
From sneakers to fall jackets, I have a few more projects to work on this summer, including some where I plan to get creative and do some upcycling. Something about working with your hands is therapeutic, and it’s an amazing feeling to bring new life to a garment that fell to the back of your closet or just needed a little fix to become a staple in your wardrobe again. I’ll tackle some annoying closet mishaps like moth-eaten sweaters and small rips and tears as well as garment care issues like getting out stubborn stains or cleaning up a pair of well-worn shoes. I’m so excited! If it weren’t for graduate school, I’d be doing this all year round. At the risk of sounding cliché, it soothes my soul 🙂
As an added bonus – prolonging the life of a garment keeps waste from entering landfills, so fixing your garments is not only personally rewarding, but also environmentally conscious. It’s hard sometimes to go against the grain and choose not to participate in consumerism, and the worship of having more “stuff”. But the more you do it, I swear it gets easier and more natural. I hope you’ll share some of your own #SummerMending projects with me this summer! I’d love to get inspired by your projects and find new ways to make a garment feel like new again.
Design Thinking: Changing approaches to creating fashion
The overconsumption model of fashion has driven designers to mass producing clothing at an alarming rate, eliminating processes for innovative thinking and human connection that are essential for successful sustainable design. The challenge of shifting the industry by way of design means breaking the cycle of create-make-waste and finding alternative pathways to provide consumers what they need, and maybe even assessing if the product needs to be made in the first place. Taking away the fashion element of a garment, clothing is a basic need for all human beings. How can we rethink the systems of design and creation to provide this basic need in a sustainable way, while also introducing elements of fashion and giving people the joy of being creative and expressing themselves? And further, what exactly are the tenets of sustainable design and the ways in which designers can support this movement?
To answer these questions, I turned to the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, which is a creative hub for understanding multifaceted disciplines such as sustainable fashion design. I spoke with Sally Yërin Oh, a graduate student at Gallatin, about her recent collection that debuted in the Gallatin Arts Festival, 100% This 1000% That, and her intention is to “utilize the intersection of art, design, activism, and entrepreneurship to create positive social change.”
Sally got her BFA in Apparel Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, after which she came to New York City to pursue a career in the fashion industry. While working for numerous fashion labels and notable designers, however, she was hit with the reality of the inner workings of the industry. The exploitation of unpaid interns and the Chinese immigrant labor behind the New York City garment industry, to name a few. These experiences made her step away from fashion and return to graduate school to look at ways to instill positive social change through design. Her recent showcase is the culmination of these efforts.
The show, held on April 12th, was inspired by cultural ties to food and deconstructing ideas of the design process. Growing up as a first-generation immigrant in Texas, Sally wanted to explore identities of culture that she faced in her bicultural upbringing. Using art as a medium, her goal was to break down boundaries and make these topics of culture more accessible and easily digestible to the audience. She was particularly interested in the way eating with someone and inviting them to your dinner table is an expression of trust and an act of intimately sharing your culture with someone else.
Sally saw Gallatin Arts Festival as an opportunity to spotlight femme and gender-nonconforming Asian Americans when choosing her model-performers. She carefully assembled her team of strictly East Asian Americans for 100% This 1000% That to stay true to her concept. These creatives include, Video and Sound Designer and Curatorial Assistant: Matte Chi, Performers: Indra Budiman, Sammy Kim, Cherry Kim, Bailey Skye, Michelle Phanh, Xin Xin Zhang, and Minzhi Liu. Her full show statement is also included below.
When it came to the design process for the collection, she decided to take a unique approach. Sally was inspired by designers like Rei Kawabubo who use objects and unconventional patternmaking to convey their aesthetic. Sally explains that if you’re paying attention to the fashion trends, it is easy to design a conventionally beautiful garment. It’s a lot harder to think outside of the box and find new ways to create an innovative design. For this reason, she made objects inspired by the collection, like dumplings, and then found a way to combine them together in a garment. By first creating objects and then finding ways to fit them together, this allowed for more expressive freedom and unique pieces for her collection.
This method is the basis of sustainable design thinking, finding new models to create clothing. Instead of going to the fabric store and picking out the colors that speak to you or the fabric that fits into your vision for the line, sustainable designers might start with the material and then make a concept out of that. For example, at the new Eileen Fisher Tiny Factory, they are tasked with designing new garments out of what they’ve collected back from their customers. What happens when designers are given worn or stained garments and asked to create something new? This Tiny Factory is an interesting experiment to see designers will respond when they are forced to think about the full lifecycle of a garment, to think of it as a piece that may come back to them in the future to be reworked into a new product.
Sally highlighted the sustainability of a quality made garment during our conversation, touting brands like Levi’s that create products that last through multiple generations and inspire consumers to mend and repurpose them. Hopeful for the future, she is inspired by the ways in which NYU has challenged her ideas on how she approaches the design process. While studying Political Art Theory at Steinhardt to better understand the social impact of art, she challenged herself to make representative, innovative work. After Gallatin, she hopes to start her own business, but insists that it never be a mass market operation and everyone involved would need to be paid fairly.
Even with all of this excitement though, there are some areas Sally pointed out where there are critical pieces keeping designers from fully embracing sustainable design practices. Firstly, education both at the design school level and having tools for designers to make better sourcing and technical design choices. Secondly, designers will have to change their mindset. If you’re starting with a design concept and then trying to apply sustainable choices to that, it can be frustrating as a designer to realize that they can’t use the materials or dyes that they’d like to use to accomplish their creative vision. Instead, sustainable design is about constraints. You’re starting with a problem that you want to solve, not necessarily a creative vision.
It’s inspiring to see a new generation of designers rise up who are focusing on solving these problems and are bringing the art form back to fashion design as well as creating new models for what design looks like. It will be great to see the impact on the industry as a whole as this movement continues to grow.
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Show Statement
100% This 1000% That
Sally 오 Yërin 예 Oh 린 was born in Seoul in palindromic 1991 with dual citizenship during her parents’ Christmas vacation who resided in Texas, where she was raised. Did you catch that? Me neither. Scrub me down with an exfoliating hydro towel, mom, I missed a spot. Scrub me, scrub my yellow skin, scrub it clean. After twenty-two years of choosing to swim in a sea of white hegemony, I realized Korean culture is beautiful. Seeking roots, I retraced my steps back to my “homeland” only to find “my home land” didn’t exist. The Korea I know is through my mother’s native tongue and the Korean food she cooks for us on Texas soil. I can neither claim heritage to Korea as an American nor can I pledge allegiance to America as a Korean, but they’re both mine. I stand on uneven ground, grounded. Hear me speak with a mouthful of dumplings, from here.
Grassroots Organizing: Student led initiatives
Playing off of the last post, this one will be zeroing in on building a grassroots coalition and army of supporters to move your cause forward. I’ll explore this through the efforts of an NYU student group eager to learn about and solve the issues of the sustainable fashion industry.
Wanting to learn more about student groups on campus passionate about sustainable fashion, I jumped on a Facebook invite I saw to Earth Matter’s clothing swap last week. Earth Matters is an undergraduate led environmental student club at NYU and thought I’d go check it out their event to see how students were talking about issues of sustainable fashion and what they were doing to fight back. Once I arrived at the event and put down the pieces I brought to contribute, I looked around the big conference room, people were casually pursuing the clothing, trying on pieces and chatting with friends. The selection was largely fast fashion but that’s to be expected in a college clothing swap. It was encouraging to know that these pieces would stay out of a landfill and the students were shifting their mindset about how to consume fashion.
Although there seem to be some champions in colleges around the US, undergraduates are a difficult group to turn onto the sustainable fashion mindset. Having small budgets and wanting to stay on trend usually drives their clothing consumption habits, not curating a one of a kind style or buying pieces that will last. I spoke to Liv Chai, an executive board member of Earth Matters passionate about sustainable fashion, to get her perspective on how NYU students feel about these issues and what students can do to make a difference (pictured in the middle below promoting the Earth Matters Clothing Swap).
We sat down to chat in the student center last week, where she explained her motivation for starting the sustainable fashion campaign with Earth Matters and why she thinks that her generation has a responsibility to step up and take action. Having grown up in an environmentally conscious household, she’s always cared about sustainability but it wasn’t until her first year in college that she came to realize that fashion is a major perpetrator of environmental issues. Wanting to do more, she approached Earth Matters to start up her own sustainable fashion campaign, organizing sustainable fashion shows, panel discussions, and clothing swaps.
Liv explained her motivation for starting the campaign with me – “I wanted to educate myself and start a proactive dialogue, especially as a part of fast fashion’s main consumer base…they don’t think that young people are conscious of what’s going on behind the scenes, but the young people are the ones fighting for these causes.” She explains that younger generations are stepping up and taking action where others are falling short. Take the Parkland shooting, for example, students are the ones who were able to start a movement and push for actual change in the government, policymakers were listening in a way that they hadn’t before. This has encouraged students like Liv to step up and take action on issues that they care about, knowing that their voices are powerful and can truly make a difference.
I asked Liv about how she can help influence her classmates and their consumer behavior to become more sustainable. She tells me that “it’s all about showing, not telling…showing them that there’s value in second-hand clothing and helping them realize the value of that.” She goes on to say that she’s learned a lot from Youtube and social media and has seen a trend for people to talk about becoming a more mindful consumer and including thrifted items in their lookbooks. It is clear that as we become an ever more connected world, online platforms and social media are key to shifting behavior and mindsets around how we shop.
Oftentimes sustainable fashion brands ignore younger generations who cannot afford their clothing, but I think this is a huge oversight. Like Liv mentioned above, her generation is the generation that will grow up to be leaders in sustainability. Furthermore, this is the demographic that fast fashion companies predominantly market to, and they are not offered many alternatives to the fast fashion model. By giving college students outlets to buy sustainable and ethical fashion, at a price they can afford, you can bring major disruption to the industry. Even if this means introducing updated consumption models like clothing swaps, upcycled clothing, or systems for renting more expensive sustainable brands, it is imperative that we don’t assume this generation doesn’t care because they are largely shopping at Forever 21 and H&M. They are shopping at these stores because we are failing to provide an alternative accessible model.
Now that I am back in school and surrounded by undergraduate students at NYU, I love to hear how excited they are about getting involved in sustainable fashion and what they can achieve. They are dreaming big, and I can’t help but feel hopeful for the future of the industry.
Fashion Revolution Week 2018 – Student Ambassador Project
Happy Fashion Revolution Week! As some of you may know, Fashion Revolution was started in reaction to the human suffering in Bangladesh caused by the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in 2013. What started as a social media effort to ask brands #whomademyclothes, has grown into a worldwide movement to raise awareness about how clothing is made and push for more transparency in the industry.
This year I am joining the revolution as a student ambassador for NYU and am excited for the opportunity to raise these issues in the NYU community as well as celebrate what our community is already doing to create a more sustainable and ethical apparel industry. During this week I am using my blog as a platform to look at different ways in which the NYU community is working to drive positive change in this industry, from policy-making and design thinking to corporate strategies and social entrepreneurship, I look forward to sharing what I’ve found.
I’ll be posting a feature post on these different theories of change from Tuesday to Saturday this week, keep an eye out for them in the In Depth section of my blog. For more information on Fashion Revolution Week and how to get involved, check out their website. I’m also including some great events happening this week in NYC below.
MON, April 23 @ 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm
FASHION REVOLUTION LAUNCH NIGHT: OPEN STUDIOS!
630 FLUSHING AVE, BROOKLYN, NY 11206
TUE, April 24 @ 4:30 pm – 8:00 pm
FASHION REVOLUTION WEEK: TRACING THE JOURNEY CONFERENCE
227 W 27th St, New York, NY 10001
WED, April 25 @ 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
DIY INDIGO BANDHANI SCARF DYEING
56 West 22nd Street, Floor 9, New York, 10010
WED, April 25 @ 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm
BE SOCIAL CHANGE: NEW YORK SUSTAINABILITY CONNECTOR
424 W. 54th St, New York, 10019
THU, April 26 @ 6:30 pm
SUSTAINABLE FASHION: HOW BRAND STORYTELLING CAN HELP RESHAPE THE FUTURE OF SUSTAINABLE FASHION
45 South 3RD Street, Brooklyn, NY 11249
FRI, April 28 @ 11:00 am – 5:00pm
5344 ST RT 414, Hector, NY 14841
SAT, April 28 @ 11:00 am – 3:00 pm
16 Crosby Street, New York, NY 10013
SAT, April 28 @ 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Top-down Change – Building a Sustainable Fashion Industry in Vietnam
Thus far in my look at how to impact change in the ethical fashion industry I analyzed a grassroots middle school project to decrease overconsumption, and systematic change in Cambodia that caused waves globally. Now, I turn to look at a multi-stakeholder organization that aims to impact the garment industry from the top-down.
Changing business practices and altering people perceptions of how to succeed in the fashion industry is a big task. Organizations like the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) and Fashion Revolution have been taking on this task from the producer and consumer side respectively. The SAC in particular has been able to penetrate the market and build a standard around what sustainable and ethical fashion should look like, and more importantly, how companies and factories can achieve and prove these standards. They’ve been able to achieve this by establishing the Higg Index, an industry wide auditing tool to measure sustainability practices and labor standards. Even with the prevalence of this tool and the growing trend of sustainable fashion, the garment industry still struggles to raise standards.
One recent multi-stakeholder initiative that has caused waves in the industry is Vietnam’s Race to the Top program. A collaboration founded in 2015 and boasts big name brand participation, including Nike and Gap Inc., in large part due to its association with the SAC. Race to the Top was founded to answer the question: “What if, rather than a system characterized by a race to the bottom framed by tragedy there was a race to the top with a sustainable system of apparel characterized by measurable progress both in environmental performance and the well-being of workers.” To do this, they needed the help of all parties involved, brands, governments, NGOs, and nonprofits.
The program has effectively brought together all the pieces and put them together to work as one, from encouraging sector-wide use go the Higg Index, to working with Better Work to maximize their efforts in the industry. With the multi-stakeholder approach, large scale problems like climate change and human rights violations cannot be solved by one company alone nor the perfect government policy, there needs to be a collaboration between all stakeholders to converge on common goals for all organizations.
After a pilot program with three mills, the Race to the Top initiative was able to produce drastic cuts in electricity and water usage. This not only is beneficial to the environment but also saves money for bottom line driven corporate leaders and ultimately results in lower costs for fabrics. These systematic changes are tedious to implement, but in the long-run, lead to a more reliable and cheaper supply chain. It is important to consider the long-term benefits when forming these programs, and look beyond quarterly earnings.
Vietnam’s Race to the Top program has lofty goals such as streamlining assessments, lean manufacturing to facilitate worker-manager dialogue, incentivizing better buying patterns, and creating capital for improvement activities and sustainably operating factories. I’ll be keeping an eye on the group to see how these goals play out, for now, they have made some headway in raising sustainability standards in local mills. These top down approaches can take time to trickle down and make impact. Also, with so many factors at play, it’s near impossible to control for every factor, requiring flexibility and frequent readjustments to strategy. I look forward to following up on their progress in the following years.
As I continue my graduate studies I will be analyzing different approaches to shifting the fashion industry and identifying when each approach would be most impactful. Each situation is unique and requires different solutions. From small scale grassroots projects that grow into global movements to having the right policy lined up at the right moment in time, to shifting mindsets from the top down, it’s an energizing time to be a part of sustainable and ethical fashion. There are a growing number of opportunities for people to step in and drive change in the industry, as companies open up to the idea of sustainable fashion, consumers demand a better product, and tools are made available to help us achieve this. Regardless of which approach you gravitate to, there will always need to be some degree of top-down change in order to make drastic shifts within our corporate structures and government policies, it’s a continuous process.
Grassroots Change – A Middle School Robotics Team’s Efforts to Decrease Overconsumption
While visiting family outside Boston during the holidays, I got to catch up with my cousin about her robotics team project to reduce t-shirt consumption in Lincoln, Massachusetts. They had consulted me as an expert for their project back in October and I was anxious to hear if they were able to persuade their town to stop automatically handing out t-shirts for events.
After spending a semester researching large scale multi-stakeholder initiatives to drive change in the fashion industry, it was refreshing to hear about a successful grassroots campaign led by a 6th grade robotics team.
When I jumped on a call with the team back in October, I was excited to hear what kinds of questions they would ask about sustainable fashion. At 11 and 12 years old, I wondered what would resonate with them, and how they would think of solving the problem.
For their robotics competition they were tasked with conducting a research project to decrease water consumption. After doing some research, the team was startled by the 2,700 liters of water needed to produce a t-shirt, and decided to focus on how to reduce this waste. Understandably, a lot of their questions revolved around what I think we can do to reduce water consumption, as well as what I thought of their solution. They had come up with a plan to work with local organizations that give out a lot of t-shirts for events to instead encourage people to reuse their t-shirts and add appliques for subsequent years.
The team reached out to the principle of the local school, Lincoln Parks and Recreation Department, Parent Teacher Organization and the Lincoln School Foundation. Their pitch was well received at all groups, but the most impactful connections were with the Lincoln Parks and Recreation Department and the Lincoln School Foundation. Both groups committed include messaging to encourage people to reuse their t-shirts from previous years, and opt to add an applique. The concept reminded me a lot of earning badges in girl scouts or adding stickers on luggage for different cities visited.
The Lincoln Parks and Recreation Department gives out a lot of t-shirts for sports competitions and camps, and the Lincoln School Foundation runs the town spelling bee, which also generates a lot of new t-shirts. Not only was the idea to prolong the use of each t-shirt attractive to help make the town greener, buying less t-shirts meant saving money as well.
After describing their solution, questions on the call soon turned to how best to promote their idea and encourage people to choose the appliques over the new t-shirts. I laughed and said, “well now that’s a marketing problem.” The team is lucky that they are promoting their idea in a tight knit community that cares about environmental issues. Yet, even in a town like Lincoln there are barriers for a project like this to get off the ground. When people expect a t-shirt for every event, activity or competition they participate in, it could potentially be a turn off if they are pressured to then not accept the free t-shirt.
The key to promoting a sustainable fashion choice is a mix between offering good design and informing the customer. People are naturally going to gravitate to a free or cheap product, but if you show them the impact that even one t-shirt can have on the environment, they are likely to rethink their choices. As seen in Fashion Revolution’s 2 Euro t-shirt social experiment, once people know the harm they are creating with their fast fashion choices they are likely to shift their behavior.
I look forward to seeing how this project plays out in Lincoln and how people react to their idea. They have the first step of getting the big players on board. Now it’s all about how they tell their story with their community and grow the movement.
Reflections on the United Nations DPI/NGO Sustainable Fashion Briefing
I woke up on the morning of the UN DPI/NGO sustainable fashion briefing to this Business of Fashion article, 4 Anxieties Keeping Fashion CEOs Awake at Night. After reading through Tim Noaks’ four anxieties, which include the outdated business model, the rise of AI, human resources, and environmental sustainability, I thought to myself, but isn’t this all just a symptom of the outdated business model? This could easily be condensed into one overarching issue of an industry stuck in the past, with subheadings for technology, fair and safe workplaces, and sustainability.
Improving these standards and embracing a people-planet-profit triple bottom line seems to be the answer for the 4 anxieties, and I was excited to go to the United Nations to hear more about how we are working towards this as an industry. As I got ready to leave for the briefing, Marie-Claire Daveu’s words from the article stuck in my mind, “We cannot advance alone.”
The UN DPI/NGO Sustainable Fashion briefing has been buzzing around online between thought leaders and influencers in the fashion industry. With the weight of the UN behind it, the event garnered a lot of attention and (at least for me personally) high expectations for solutions and steps forward for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The panel comprised of leading actors in various arenas of the sustainable fashion industry, from transparency within artisan cooperatives, private public partnerships and socially conscious fashion brands, to nonprofits saving the world’s endangered forests. Patrick Duffy, the founder of the Global Fashion Exchange, served as the moderator and panelists included, Shivam Punjya (Founder and CEO of behno), Andrea Reyes (Fair Trade Advocate, Educator, and Small Business Owner), Amanda Carr (Director of Strategic Initiatives at Canopy), Ashia Dearwester (Chief strategy & Partnerships Officer at Nest), and Lilian Liu (Manager of Partnerships & UN Relation at the United Nations Global Compact).
After listening to the panelists and talking to students, business owners and advocates attending, I came away from the panel discussion with the following two conclusions: 1) Like Daveu stated in the BoF article, collaboration is how we’ll move forward in sustainable fashion, and 2) we have an information problem. Consumers are either unaware of how their clothes are made, or even if they are, they are overwhelmed about the idea of shopping sustainably.
Collaboration for Sustainability
All panelists highlighted collaboration as a way to accomplish the UN SDGs using fashion as a vehicle for change. From bringing together communities and working with garment workers to improve labor standards to leveraging corporate power for change.
Specifically, three panelists struck a chord for me on the impact of working with profit driven companies to drive social change. Amanda Carr from Canopy, Lillian Liu from the UN Global Compact and Ashia Dearwester from Nest all told stories of collaborating with major corporations from Patagonia to H&M in order to accomplish their organization’s missions.
Canopy has been particularly successful in working with big name brands to persuade them to change their policies and stop sourcing from endangered forests for their rayon and viscose fabrics. Starting in 2013 with no brands committed to eliminating endangered forests from their fabrics, Canopy has been able to garner the support of 105 brands in just 4 years to commit to the initiative. The UN Global Compact guides corporations on how to partner with the UN to accomplish specific SDGs. They have focused on eliminating competition between companies and creating a collaborative environment for corporations to solve the SDGs. Ashia Dearwester spoke of Nest collaborating with West Elm to create artisan made baskets in the Philippines, all while maintaining a transparent supply chain.
The bottom line is to get rid of barriers for solving the increasing sustainability problem in fashion. Although it’s slow going, this mentality is catching on throughout the fashion industry from large luxury conglomerates like Kering to fast fashion brands like H&M and American companies like PVH and Gap Inc. As these policies are put in place and organizations like Canopy unite brands for sustainable causes, I’m interested to see how the impacts are measured and in company environmental, social and governance (ESG) tracking and corporate social responsibility reporting.
Breaking Through the Noise
Reaching consumers and building a movement is challenging when people are over stimulated by smartphones and so far removed from the problem. They don’t see the on average 20 hands their clothes pass through to get to them and therefore don’t think about these people when they’re buying a $5 t-shirt. (This Fashion Revolution video is a great example of this) Or from an environmental perspective, there’s the fact that a t-shirt takes 2,700 liters of water to produce, enough water for one person to drink for 900 days. Another factor that is not a part of the average consumer’s buying decisions.
On top of that, there are a vast array of causes to get behind in the realm of “sustainability” and it can feel daunting the throw your weight behind the whole cause. The UN Global Compact has taken on this challenge as the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative and has identified 17 SDGs. But even with these defined areas and the trendiness of sustainability, people still don’t understand the scope of the problem and how they can be agents of change on a personal level.
I was surprised that at an event like this, where people are aware of sustainable fashion issues, the audience was shocked to realize that production of fabrics like rayon and viscose are made of wood pulp and are leading to deforestation of endangered forests. It also made me wonder how many issues like this are swept under the rug because people are not looking?
I didn’t come away with a strong sense of how to fix this issue, and it’s something I’ve struggled with since starting on my conscious fashion journey. You want to have everyone care about sustainability, but it tends to move in increments with topics that are trending. Right now there is the viral videos about plastic micro fibers being washed into our water streams as the result of washing our polyester athleasure wear, but there are so many issues that deserve their own viral videos.
I’m hopeful that every step helps, building a movement is by nature a slow build. We’re at a tipping point of making sustainable fashion top of mind for consumers as they walk into their favorite store, and maybe they’ll start moving to clothing swap memberships instead or deciding that they don’t need anymore clothes.
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The panel discussion was concluded with a fashion showcase of sustainable designs, which were a beautiful reminder of what is possible and a welcome departure from discussing the complex issues of low-income populations having access to sustainable fashion, deforestation in the amazon, and subcontracting issues in garment manufacturing. I look forward to strengthening this community in future events and allowing space for the teamwork that was championed during the panel.
Fashion Model Activism – The New Era of Woke Models
The fashion industry is known for it’s vapid obsession with clothing and image, especially with outward facing marketing like high fashion runway shows and major marketing campaigns. As the face of these campaigns, models often become scapegoats for the vanity of the industry. Movies and TV shows like Zoolander and America’s Next Top Model have only added to the perception that models are merely a canvas with no agency of their own. But, in the era of Instagram influencers, and social business, a wave of model-activists are changing the game.
With fame comes power and responsibility. Many may want to shy away from the pressure; but when done right, this can be a positive tool for making a difference. Cameron Russell is credited for starting this trend with her TEDtalk on how looks aren’t everything. Her movement has grown into more than just scrutinizing the modeling industry and has developed into a platform for the fashion industry to discuss global issues such as climate change, race inequality and women’s rights. In 2015 Cameron Russell represented Vogue at the United Nations summit on climate change (COP21) in Paris, where she covered the talks and deciphered the issues for their fashion audience. Her activism has led her to start her own platform, Model Mafia, which brings together models to fight for causes. As she says, “Models are uniquely poised to become fantastic activists because they are some of the few women who have very direct access to media.”
The trend of model activism and “woke” models comes at a time where fast fashion is growing dangerously out of control. There are more than 15 million tons of textile waste produced every year in the United States. If we were to extend the life of clothing by just three months, we could reduce water and carbon consumption by 5-10%. In addition to the waste created by the industry, the globalized manufacturing that makes these cheap fast fashion prices possible, is resulting in unfair working conditions, child labor, and hazardous working environments. All while industry professions from CEOs and designers, to models are profiting from these exploits of both environmental and human capital. This dirty industry needs ambassadors to fight for change, why not the models that have the platforms and the influence to reach an audience that care about clothing?
Consumer pressure is a strong driver for what kinds of products get developed. Imagine if young girls had role models to look up to for guidance on how to be conscious consumers, this could cause a dramatic shift in consumer behavior. Models with large followings can potentially help us lift the curtain on the industry and lead the charge in bringing some desperately needed transparency. With authenticity, and engaging story telling, model’s have the tools make real change.
Woke models like Leomie Anderson, who publishes articles by women and combines fashion with activism to make clothing with empowering phrases, are leading the pack in the model-activist phenomenon. One of Cameron Russell’s Model Mafia members, Renee Peters, advocates for ridding our oceans of plastic, and for a more transparent fashion industry, while another (Hawa Hassan) is fighting to solve the refugee crisis and battle climate change. The list goes on, and it’s amazing to see the projects these models have started. I look froward to seeing this trend grow, and can’t wait to see the impact. Marketing and influencer networks have such a big influence on public perception and I am excited to see that models are using their platform and engaged following to drive positive change.
I personally love filling my feed with powerful female role models, and the models highlighted in this post are perfect additions. Seeing what these women are doing makes me excited by what is possible and also how we are stronger when we work together. It would be amazing to see Model Mafia groups pop up around the country and the world. If you’re a model, I encourage you to get out there and use your platform to encourage others to do good. If you’re not, support them. Find those role models that are advocating for what you care about and help them spread their message.