3 women in sustainable fashion to be inspired by
To kick off the new year, a throw back to three of the most insightful conversations I feel I have ever hosted on transforming fashion.
Several years ago, as part of an interview series I used to co-host under the FashMash moniker, I had the great honour of interviewing many inspirational leaders in the sustainable fashion space.
Today, I thought I’d share three of the interviews that particularly stood out - all women doing varied and intensely valuable work in this space. Forgive me for posting conversations that aren’t brand new, but there is so much rich insight in each of these that I wanted to resurface them to an audience that may not have been part of them first time around.
Between them they cover consumerism, activism, spirituality, colonialism, racism, nature and beyond, in each case linking these topics directly back to what is happening in the fashion industry and how we need to change it. They include Bandana Tewari, Aja Barber and Dr Helen Crowley.
Bandana Tewari on activism and interconnection
“Activism is a personal act of descent. We have a choice, when there is any policy or law against things we believe in, either you accept it, change it, or you can fight against it. As consumers and ordinary human beings and citizens, it is our moral duty now to become activists in our own rights. Being an activist is not a choice, it is a birthright.”
Aja Barber on consumerism and colonialism
“We cannot keep consuming at the rate that we have been in the last 20 years and expect our planet to go on. That is the problem. And that's what no one within big fashion really wants to address, is that the levels of consumption, which bring in the billions of dollars of profit, needs to stop…. Most of the consumer goods that we use in the Global North, whether it be the UK or the US, where I'm from, generally tend to originate from the Global South, and often it’s [these] countries that are resource rich, labour rich, economically poor, and I don't think that we've been questioning why it looks that way.”
Dr Helen Crowley on biodiversity
“Fashion is so inexplicably linked to nature and the services that nature provides. Up until now, we have been extracting those services and goods, but we haven’t been giving back or replenishing. If we want our business to continue, we need to start looking at how we support nature, by doing it in a restorative and regenerative way."
There are many other interviews where these three came from, including with further leading sustainable fashion names including Claire Bergkamp, Orsola de Castro, Baroness Lola Young, Ayesha Barenblat, Jane Shepherdson, Lucy Siegle and more. You can see them all here.
And happy 2025!