Trying to own it: My journey in sustainable fashion
Transformation is my red thread, but how did I get to where I am and what do I actually do?
I love what I do. It's exhilarating and exhausting, laborious and refreshing. It can be slow and frustrating, but then feel meaningful and worthwhile. I'm hoping 'Owning it’ can dig into all of those feelings and experiences in more detail at some point.
So, hi, thank you to so many of you for being here already. I thought I'd start with a little about my own journey to answer some of the questions I always get asked...
My career most definitely hasn't followed a traditional path, nor has it been a straightforward trajectory to get to where I am, but in retrospect it does feel as though it sort of today makes sense.
I started as a journalist working across a handful of newspapers and magazines. After a postgraduate journalism degree I landed what I consider to be my first proper job in the news team at an online fashion trade title.
Over the course of eight years at the company, I carved out a niche for myself writing about change and transformation in the fashion industry through the lens of digital marketing, technology and innovation at a time when much of this was incredibly novel (and thus newsworthy). What was once about the digital revolution evolved over time to be about the sustainable revolution, and those latter points on innovation became about both material science on the one hand and traceability and transparency on the other. That was my entry point, but the work quickly became much wider - once you’re in this field, there’s no unseeing it from both an environmental and a social justice point of view (no need for me to reiterate impact stats at this point I feel) - and my focus pivoted entirely.
Between living in London and in New York (hence my musings on expat life in my introduction post), I was fortunate through my role to be exposed to working also as a consultant - sharing learnings on change and transformation directly with businesses in order to help them make sense of what was coming and proactively prepare for it.
All of that was nearly 10 years ago however, when I then transitioned into doing this instead for myself. I stepped out into the precarious world of self employment to work across all manner of organisations on these topics as a sustainability and business strategist, while also still writing about them as a freelance journalist alongside. I haven't really looked back.
What I realised along this journey however, was that an increasing amount of my work and indeed my income, started serving as a tick box exercise for many of the companies I was hired by. Or certainly it seemed to. While the projects were great, so few of them were driving anything in the way of true change. I had unintentionally entered into a world of "sustainability-as-usual", propped up by that very tiresome business-as-usual challenge and full of lots in the way of self-congratulating and back patting exercises.
That was coupled with a report that came out showing that all of today’s efforts in sustainability were being outpaced by the growth the industry was otherwise experiencing. In other words, none of the solutions we have been trying to implement are enough to counterbalance just how much product is being produced. And unchecked growth in a world of extraction and exploitation is quite literally the worst kind of recipe. This was a very existential moment for me, as I have written about in a lot of depth.
So about five years ago I made a new commitment to myself: I would say no to that sort of work from then on. That's easier said than done of course, but I wanted to make a concerted effort to focus as much as I could on opportunities that I believed would contribute to systems change. Projects I accepted needed to really shift the needle, not just serve as incremental efforts or those that merely helped "rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic", as the phrase goes.
Essentially I had decided I wanted to be more purposeful in all this, and I was in a privileged enough position to be able to be.
My first move was to spend several years leading strategy on a project with Google to develop a first-of-its-kind environmental data platform focused on the raw materials stage of the textile value chain utilising geospatial (and other) data. Today that is owned by Textile Exchange and is called the Materials Impact Explorer.
Then, in 2020, I landed my role at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) leading their advocacy work on sustainable fashion. This work has been about shaping UNEP’s strategy on sustainable and circular textiles as a priority sector in the fight against the triple planetary crisis, and overseeing all outputs focused on narrative shift as a primary lever for reducing overconsumption. This includes exploring greenwashing, redirecting aspiration and the power of citizen action, and was the basis for the Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook I authored in 2023. (You can hear me talking about all of this in a lot more detail with Clare Press on her Wardrobe Crisis podcast last year).
I have also worked with the likes of Textile Exchange directly on reimagining growth and value creation for the sector, as well as with other organisations including the British Fashion Council's Institute of Positive Fashion and the UNFCCC's Fashion Industry Charter on Climate Action.
I continue to operate as a consultant balancing my UNEP work with other contracts alongside. Some of my favourite experiences have included sitting on advisory boards behind the scenes with brands that I'm not able to name, but that give me the license to be truly provocative at a systems change level. This is where I'm hoping to do more ahead.
I work remotely on all, living just outside London where I’m otherwise kept super busy as a mum of two young kids.
My red thread as hopefully you'll see throughout my nearly 20 years in this industry has been about change and transformation. It's just the 'what' of this that has evolved, which it should of course by its very nature. But so too has the importance of it shifted. It's more urgent than it's ever been before, meaning the stakes as to how we approach and operate in this space have never been higher. Frankly, there isn't time for incremental anymore.
So there you have it. It's been a constant evolution, and I still don't think I could write you a 10-year plan, but I'm feeling more driven today than I've ever been in this work, as well as genuinely purposeful in my endeavours, so that tells me something is working.
Anything else you want to know? Ask me in the comments.
Excellent article and can relate completely.