Category Archives: Fashion and sustainability: general

Dhaka Rana Plaza: Our Collective Responsbility

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After weeks of feeling personally devastated about the factory collapse of the Dhaka Rana Plaza in Bangladesh; of witnessing the pain of the lives, families and communities lost and shattered (the death toll now exceeds 1100 and is still climbing); of feeling a deep sense of shame that I am part of an industry that seems to design for inhuman working conditions through economic priorities that chase low cost garments above all else; and of feeling building anger that the fashion retail sector has failed to take responsibility for its own role in this; it seems now that we are on the cusp of change. As an industry, our collective disgrace is that this has taken so long to come and so many people have died. And that the normal conversations and taken-for-granted beliefs that guide everyday business decisions in the fashion sector are so skewed, so hopelessly warped and broken, that this situation happened at all.

In an excellent piece by Andrew North for the BBC today, he reports on the retailers and governments now bowing to pressure to change things in the light of Rana Plaza disaster. He names the big brands who have a signed up to a legally-binding code requiring them not just to meet minimum fire and building safety standards but to pay for them, including Sweden’s H&M, the UK’s Primark and Tesco and the Netherlands’ C&A. According to the BBC, other brands have proved unwilling to sign the code, including unnamed British retailers and US brands Gap and Walmart, the latter’s products also being produced in a different supplier factory also in Bangladesh last November where 100 died.

So the wind of change is blowing. And workers must and will experience different conditions, the right to join a union and earn a living wage as they create super cheap clothes for the insatiable Western consumer. But this same Western consumer and the consumer culture he/she perpetuates and is dependent on, must also take responsibility for its part in this horrific disaster. Whether the wind of change can blow hard and long enough to change this culture and for us to recover a more meaningful sense of ourselves and our way of living in the world is unclear. But what we do see with crystal clarity at moments like this is that superficial solutions will do nothing to change the foundational structures of society. And it is in the foundations of a sector geared towards growth that the roots of the Rana Plaza disaster are found.

More information:
Campaigning organisation Labour Behind the Label
Online petition by Avaaz ‘Crushed to Make Our Clothes’
Ethical Fashion Forum’s ‘Call to Action‘

New Sustainable Design Film Release: ’50 Ways of Working Sustainably’

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In sustainability there is no such thing as a mass answer, but instead a mass of appropriately scaled, creative, dynamic, emerging and engaging answers. A new video from the Puma Sustainable Design Collective held earlier this year collates a series of evening talks (including one by me!) which shows this diversity. Called ’50 Ways of Working Sustainably’ the video aims to generate a deeper understanding of the relationships between the products and systems we design – their social, ecological and economic impacts. Hosted by Dr Jonathan Chapman (Reader in Sustainable Design at the University of Brighton), with key speakers including Dr Kate Fletcher (Reader in Sustainable Fashion, London College of Fashion), Fiona Bennie (Dragon Rouge) and Nick Gant (University of Brighton).

The 50 WAYS OF WORKING icons representing the creation of products, their processes and thinking. Progressive and inspiring, these talks acknowledge the enormity of the challenges surrounding sustainability with energy and positivity.

Click here to link to the video on vimeo. Use the password: md101

The Slow Revolution: lunchtime discussion at the RSA

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Royal Society of Arts, London
4th October 2012, 13:00.

The last ten years has seen a burgeoning of the Slow Movement in all aspects of life from management, travel and education to science and work.

The RSA brings together a group of thinkers and practitioners who have each been exploring ways to bring the principles of ‘slow’ to their life and work – whether in finance, culture or fashion. As well as sharing lessons from their own fields, they will discuss how more of us can deal with the addictive nature of speed, apply the brakes and improve our quality of life, creativity and well-being.

Speakers: Carl Honoré, author of In Praise of Slow; Kate Fletcher, Reader in Sustainable Fashion, London College of Fashion; Deepa Patel, co-director, Slow Down London; Gervais Williams, award-winning fund manager and author of Slow Finance.

Fashion & Sustainability: Mike Barry & Kate Fletcher debate

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On 27th April 2012, Mike Barry, Head of Sustainable Business at M&S and Kate Fletcher, Reader in Sustainable Fashion at London College of Fashion discussed wide ranging themes associated with fashion and sustainability as part of the launch of M&S’s ‘Shwopping’ recycling initiative and the two week creative ‘Shwop Lab’ co-ordinated by the Centre for Sustainable Fashion in Dray Walk, London to explore shwopping design implications.

The conversation, described by one journalist as one of the most interesting and wide-ranging she’d ever heard on fashion and sustainability, has been edited into four podcasts available for download.

Podcast 1 covers broad themes in fashion and business:

  • Different ways to experience fashion – how are they influenced by business models? How does M&S’s shwopping initiative relate to this?
  • Statistics about global levels of consumption – and asks how they will be clothed.
  • Shwopping goes some way towards closing the loop – a pragmatic solution to clothing people in the future.
  • Consumption: requires a new balance between long and short-term objectives and involves hard choices: how can society be organised in a different way?
  • How can resources be maximised for the common good?
  • Many big businesses now recognise that they cannot go on as before. M&S engaged in a consumption model over the last 30 years – it needs new models and new collaborations. How should we talk about sustainability to the board?
  • The different challenges associated with different types of consumers.

Podcast 2 explores the themes of local manufacture:

  • Localism
  • Bringing manufacturing back to UK
  • Whether Shwopping could create a fibre resource in the UK
  • Human scale important to sustainability: connections to land, to community.
  • Different business models which include local: hyper efficient global; hyper local and the disruptive effect of environmental impact on ways of conducting commerce.

Podcast 3 covers brands and consumers:

  • The role of the big brands in fashion and sustainability
  • Brands are getting better at communicating sustainability. M&S good at functional discussion around sustainability. The challenge is the cultural and emotional discussion.
  • Shwopping is the beginning of this different discussion in M&S and leading change rather than reacting to it.
  • But it is still framing people as individual consumers – rather than drawing people together in a connected effort.
  • More clothes are bought than discarded every year… wardrobe obesity

Podcast 4 includes discussion of recycling and related issues:

  • The relationship between Shwopping and other clothing and textile recycling schemes – how can we gain access to unwanted fibre and facilitate the process of recycling?
  • Has the current model of recycling clothing reached a natural plateau? Is the inertia in recycling functional or emotions? Linked to our psyche?
  • Competition for resources means that materials have a greater value.
  • What is the role of design in take back schemes? What are the design for recycling criteria?
  • Design for recycling criteria. In order to extract maximum value build in a way of thinking that allows to plan for multiple future uses.
  • Does recycling justify the existing business model? Also have to promote intensive, joyful, ongoing use.

Scale, Fashion and Sustainability

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In the barn-conference space at the recent MEND*RS symposium nestled in the age-old Lake District hills and with families of swallows nesting overhead, I was struck by how important scale is to sustainability. Listening to Tom of Holland talk about his on-going mending project for which he darns, knits and overstitches to add physical robustness and aesthetic character to loved but failing clothes, I saw clearly how strikingly understandable – and beautiful – sustainability is at the micro scale.

Also at MEND*RS, I spoke about macro-scale ideas related to post-growth fashion which explore the potential and shape of a fashion system in a world that develops qualitatively rather than in quantitative size. Other similarly scaled ‘whole system’ ideas include new models for education that aim to shift how we think as well as what we know. These ideas – like those at the very small scale – unswervingly convey the essence of sustainability. They are liberating, resonant and inspiring.

In the zone of ‘no scale’, the compelling elegance of sustainability at the level of the very big and the very small is absent.

But at places other than at both ends of the ‘scale’, it seems that such feelings and understanding are all too rare. Between these scales there is confusion about what should happen. In the middle zone, so many projects, so much activity, fails to achieve either beauty or difference. Perhaps it is because such work occupies an indeterminate region, heavily influenced by prevailing fashion priorities, where scale is an unknown and yet-to-be-imagined shaping guide and tool. Here work is rarely individual or collective. It is not skills-based or conceptual. Neither is it supportive or provocative and its timeframe is not ‘now’ or ‘forever’. In this zone of ‘no scale’, the compelling elegance of sustainability at the level of the very big and the very small is absent. What we are missing is an appropriateness of ideas and actions to context, place, time, people and size.

Put simply, scale needs to be factored in.

With an attention to scale, fashion and sustainability activity can be schooled and shaped by a sense of appropriateness; by an honest awareness of what it is we are actually doing – and whether that is ‘good’.

With an attention to scale we can preside over the teasing apart of amorphous fashion and sustainability activity so as to make it more a more effective lever of change. With it, we can ‘pixelate’ our activities into thousands of interactions, thoughts, experiences, design opportunities, commercial exchanges and ideas about what is valuable.

As a process, building awareness of scale and appropriateness reveals our actions as part of a system of many connected and moving parts. It raises often-ignored ethical questions about the value of that system. It also shows it as moulded by an older context of history and a bigger story of inter-relationships in our sector. The linked ideas of appropriateness and scale help us to direct our efforts to the right place, at the right time, in the right way. They sinuously connect us to the integrity of big ideas and the practical wisdom of the individual, everyday experiences with our clothes. They are our allies. Big brands take note: scale will breed a new type of responsibility.

 

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Same, same, but different: how we have to change how we perceive fashion and sustainability

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Back in 1997 I started to write regular features on sustainability themes in fashion and textiles in a magazine called Eco Design, the journal of the now disbanded (and much missed) Ecological Design Association. Eco Design was first printed in the early 1990s and reflected the radical, grounded and alternative scope of early ideas of design and sustainability. It was a maverick publication and it contributed in no small way to the community and ideas that shape the way we understand the interplay between sustainability and design practice today.

Recently I dug out some old issues of Eco Design and scanned and uploaded the small contributions I’d made to it to the publications page of this website. Written between 10 and 15 years ago; they are quirky pieces, naïve maybe, but still useful and reflective of the sorts of issues and approaches that continue to be mainstays of our fashion and sustainability discussions today. They range from alternative materials to localism; and from the role of the designer to issues associated with laundering our clothes.

In those intervening years, so much has changed in the fashion and sustainability landscape (more people engaged with the ideas; more understanding; more cultural acceptability etc); and also, it appears, so little. For it seems that the themes we are grappling with today are also those of a decade and more ago. And in spite of our best efforts, it is still unclear whether as a society (and a sector within that society) we are moving towards greater ecological integrity, human empathy, interconnectedness with each other and the natural world (planetary indicators suggest that we are not (Rockström et al, 2009)). Can it be that we are expending our energies – our minds and bodies – on the wrong challenges? Or is it more that making fashion more resource and worker efficient is one helluva task which needs nothing short of continuous effort, over a very long time frame?

Perceptions have to change. Otherwise the problems we thought we’d fixed, prove to be enduring.

It’s probably a bit of both. But the former line of questioning is drowned out by the clamour around the latter: growing numbers of people are looking for opportunities to make today’s way of thinking about and doing fashion lower impact – to ‘green’ existing practices. But I think it is time that we throw our energies elsewhere. Of all the things I have learned over the last 15 years, perhaps the most important is that the realisation that crisis of ‘unsustainability’ is in Steven Sterling’s words, ‘a crisis of perception’ (2001).  Perceptions – our ways of thinking – have to change. If they don’t, then we inevitably build ‘old’ habits of mind into our ‘new’ solutions and little really changes. The problems we thought we’d fixed, prove to be enduring, and keep reasserting themselves in ever more confounding ways. Instead our task is different: to transform the faulty logic of a way of thinking that presumes ‘adding’ sustainability to today’s fashion sector will solve deep ethical and moral questions; and in its place practice the art of living in these questions. Those with this skill will begin to notice and cultivate alternative opportunities for fashion that helps us all bloom.

Eco Design articles available on this website
Consumption: Why we need clothes
Design: Practice Imperfect; Fashion Reinvented; Textile Design: Local & Global Politics
Materials and processing: Why Hemp Has Yet to Reach a High; Cotton Tales; Alternative Materials; To dye or not to dye
Use: Clean and green
Recycling: The beginning of the end of life

References
Rockström, J., Steffen W., Noone K., Persson Å., Chapin III, F. S., Lambin, E., Lenton, T. M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schellnhuber, H., Nykvist, B., De Wit, C. A., Hughes, T., van der Leeuw, S. Rodhe, H., Sörlin, S., Snyder, P. K., Costanza, R., Svedin, U. Falkenmark, M., Karlberg, L., Corell, R. W., Fabry, V. J., Hansen, J., Walker, B., Liverman, D., Richardson, K., Crutzen, P. & Foley, J. (2009), ‘Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity’. Ecology and Society vol. 14, no. 2. [online] URL: http://www. ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/ (accessed 1 November 2011).

Sterling, S. (2001), Sustainable Education: Re-visioning Learning and Change, Totnes: Green Books.

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Just out… Fashion & Sustainability: Design for Change

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Hot of the press and available in English, Spanish and Portuguese Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change.

By Kate Fletcher and Lynda Grose. Published March 2012 by Laurence King (London).

Sustainability is arguably the defining theme of the twenty-first century and the issues it presents to the fashion industry are broad ranging, including labour abuses, toxic chemicals use and conspicuous consumption. This book examines how sustainability has the potential to transform both the fashion system and the innovators who work within it.

The first section transforming fashion products, sets out ways in which the impacts of garments can be reduced and their resourcefulness increased across the garment’s lifecycle, including innovation in materials, manufacture, distribution, use and re-use. The second part presents ideas that are transforming fashion systems at root, including emerging business models that find commercial opportunity in reduced material throughput. The third section is dedicated to transforming fashion design practice and explores new opportunities for designers, which extend beyond the traditional role of creator, to include working as communicator, activist or facilitator to bring about systemic change.

Reviews of the book:
On ‘Shirahime‘ website by Pamela Ravaiso
On the ‘Design Observer‘ website by John Thackara

Fashion and Sustainability FAQs

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Fashion and sustainability raises so many questions… here are a few of my responses to them, gathered over the last year covering everything from slow fashion to mainstream business, materials to education.

DEFINITIONS
Q: What is your definition of fashion sustainability?
KF: Fashion that fosters ecological integrity and social quality through products, practices of use and relationships.
KF: A more authentic, flexible and interconnected view of fashion, people and the world.
KF: fashion that helps us engage, connect and better understand ourselves, each other and our world.
KF: Fashion that engages with a process of flourishing of human and non-human species.

Q: It is said that a main factor that prevents successful communication of sustainability is the unclear definition, do you agree?
KF: I don’t really agree. A single definition is unlikely to be meaningful to everyone. I think what we need is multiple narratives that convey the complex and unbounded nature of sustainability in a host of different ways.

Q: What is the biggest myth/misconception about sustainable fashion?
KF: That it’s all about materials and technology. For It is also about behaviour, relationships and ways of thinking.

NICHE AND/OR MAINSTREAM?
Q: Do you think that eco-fashion is still a niche market? If so, why?
KF: Yes. It is anathema to the mass market. And will always remain somewhat anachronistic if the mass market remains unchanged.

Q: How do you feel it can move more into the mainstream, or if not why?
KF: Surely the question is about how the mainstream can transform?

Q: Do you believe the ethical fashion industry is succeeding at present to radically change the fashion world or is it still a luxury niche?
KF: Neither is it radically changing the fashion world nor is it a luxury niche. Perhaps that’s part of the problem – neither fish nor fowl…

SUSTAINABILITY & BRANDS
Q: In your opinion, what are the top 3 things that brands should focus on with regards to promoting their sustainable practise.
KF: a) users b) social value c) integrity

Q: Do you think ethical clothing will ever out-compete the mainstream less ethical products (eg. H&M, Topshop) and dominate the fashion industry in the future? Why?
KF: Perhaps the future is for such pieces not to be as voluminous as less ethical ones – as mass consumption and production is part of the problem. Rather they should be different.

Q: Why do you think people are still buying from mainstream shops that sell unethical clothing?
KF: Because alternatives are squeezed out and made to appear culturally undesirable, impractical and expensive.

Q: How do you envisage the future of the UK fashion retail industry in terms of sustainability?
KF: Less = more. Lower volumes, higher prices. More variety.

Q: What advice would you give an individual looking to start-up a sustainable fashion retailer, particularly with the threat of a current ‘retail recession’?
KF: Develop a concept that is based on sustainability; not one based on fashion as it is today with green fibres or manufacturing. This will draw people to it.

Q: In your book you state ‘sustainable fashion is about creating a strong and nurturing relationship between consumer and producer’ – to what extent do you believe long supply chains & overseas production hinders this?
KF: I think what is important is trust – and this is something made possible by personal relationships. Long supply chains make such personal relationships difficult.

Q: Do you see sustainable fashion ever truly breaking through its nice into the mainstream?
KF: We should try to think of it as something different… not something encroaching on an inherently unsustainable system.

CHANGES WITHIN THE FIELD
Q: From when you published your book in 2008, “Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys,” where have you seen major positive or negative changes in fashion in the past 4 years? In your view is it working?
KF: Certainly over the last 4 years ideas of environmental responsibility have been rolled out across the industry more generally – whereas before it was stuck in very separate siloes. Today still it is separate to business in that it is an ‘add on’ rather than an essential part of business; here (with the exception of leading proponents of CSR) sustainability is pursued as a reactive device to deflect criticism. In other places by contrast it is being used to leverage social value which brings economic value. Though this is rare.

My big concern at the moment is that sustainability has been turned into a commodity by big brands – and traded like another commodity – because that’s what big brands do… absorb it into its business model. And then they think they have acted sufficiently. When of course this is an illusion.

Q: What causes do you see most supported among young designers today? Examples would be great.
KF: If by ’causes’ you mean ideas and themes they are motivated by and interested in, then there is strong interest in activism inspired by the Occupy movement and which is made manifest in design process by using more collaborative, participative approaches where makers and users influence the shape and purpose of design (see Antiform). There is also renewed interest in the UK (and a number of other sheep-rearing European and Nordic countries) in that old textile fibre wool and associated conservation programmes to protect rare breeds and reinvigorate our cultural and economic interest in it (see for example bellaobastian). And of course there is growing interest in UK production as way to revitalise communities, create jobs, foster skills development etc (e.g. denim brand Tender)

Q: How do you envision the sustainable fashion movement to look like in 2012? Where do you see it progressing towards?
KF: I hope it moves towards greater self-awareness and realisation that effort (even sustainability effort) expended in the wrong place won’t bring big results.

Q: Why hasn’t ethical fashion taken off in the way that it should – have we possibly been approaching the ideology in too literal a manner?
KF: I think a great deal of effort has been expended in trying to reduce the inefficiency of the fashion system we inherited from our forebears (let’s face it, a rather negative concept); rather than creating a positive vision of the present.

SLOW FASHION
Q: Your main concept I believe is slow fashion what is your definition of slow fashion?
KF: Fashion conceived of from a different starting point to growth, consumerist fashion.

Q: How would you define ‘Slow fashion’ compared to ‘Fast fashion’?
KF: It represents a changed point of departure for fashion with different values, goals and objectives.

Q: What is your opinion of slow fashion?
KF: It’s an opportunity for us to have our cake and eat it: to be nourished by fashion and nature.

Q: Do you think the fashion industry, in particular the high street will ever move away from the high volume, low pricing strategies it employs now?
KF: Yes. It’s likely that economics will drive this shift. The price of cotton has doubled in recent times and the cost of synthetic fibres is also going up… this will change the profitability of the high volume model.

Q: From working in the industry are you witnessing any innovative steps towards more sustainable and slow fashion processes?
KF: Lots of steps are being taken. What leads to big change is that these small steps are in the right place. This remains to be seen…

Q: Do you expect fast fashion to continue on into the future? Also if so why?
KF: Recent closure of Peacocks seems to suggest not… the end of the line for that business model

Q: Do you feel ‘Slow fashion’ could take over with increased awareness and pressure on the environment, also in this current economic crisis?
KF: Take over what? The business model that dominates at the moment? I don’t think that’s its purpose…

Q: How do you think the slow fashion concept can help biodiversity?
KF: Well it certainly contributes towards the notion of diversity of scale, location, possibility, opportunity and in as much this is an intrinsic part of biologically diverse ecosystems, slow fashion supports it…

Q: What does the slow fashion concept have in common with Haute Couture?
KF: Nothing unless you understand Haute Couture to be a revisioning of the purpose and rules of fashion around something based in responsibility, values etc and then there could be common ground…

CONSUMPTION
Q: Do you think Haute Couture could be a good solution for solving the consumption problems we face today?
KF: Well its extreme high price would rely on conventional market economics to price people out of consumption. But the issue we have now is the habit of mind of consumerism, not only the material dimensions of consumerism.

Q: Do you have any statistics about fashion consumers’ frequency of purchasing? Who buy’s the most, and what type of clothes do they buy?
KF: I am not sure what ‘difference’ is actually made by buying an organic cotton T-shirt (for example) from a retailer that is operating within the prevailing business model – when arguably it is the business model itself that is the root cause of unsustainability. It’s a sticking plaster on a scratch – when the system has another fatal wound… That said I do think it is worthwhile to explore more about what people buy and why – to qualitatively explore purchasing and to understand that within bigger structural, societal and cultural influences.

Q: I just completed a survey and I noticed that not many people knew how they could be sustainable when it came to fashion, without it being more expensive, What would be your best tip?
KF: Take 5 minutes to go through your existing wardrobe and write down why you bought a some of the things in there and what you liked about them… this often makes you remember why you chose them, almost makes them ‘new’ again and makes you want to wear them more…

ABOUT USERS
Q: Do you think people would care more about their garments if they understood the chain/process of production – where they came from? If so, why?
KF: Yes probably. Knowledge is an important people in enabling people take responsibility

Q: Do you think that understanding the chain of garments is associated with considering the true cost of the garment?
KF: Not always

Q: Do you think considering the true cost of the garment increases the personal value of the garment to the consumer?
KF: Not necessarily

Q: How and why would you encourage consumers to choose ethical/sustainable clothes over fast mass produced garments?
KF: How – through aesthetics. Why – because it enriches you.

Q: How long do you expect sustainable garments to last?
KF: It is largely in the hands of us all – the users of those pieces…

COSTS & PRICE
Q: Do you think price is an issue within the ethical industry?
KF: Yes. The extreme cheapness of most garments pushes standards down.

TRENDS & AESTHETICS
Q: What are your feelings towards the stigma towards sustainable fashion, from those who believe it impedes the aesthetics?
KF: I feel such a stigma is misplaced. However much we designers would want to dispute it, much of the aesthetic of today’s fashion is shaped not by us but by our predominant (consumerist) business model and set of manufacturing operations… Change these models and the aesthetic will change. So it seems to me that this stigma reveals resistance to change… perhaps from those who stand to lose the most from sustainability values…

Q: In your book you state that “Fashion trends themselves have confused sustainability issues and promoted misconceptions”. Do you agree that fast fashion trends and high consumer demand are the main reasons for fashion “undermining sustainability”? Please advise on any other reasons.
KF: What I was referring to in that quote was the tendency of trends to trivialise a concept like sustainability – and reduce it to a colour palette, fibre selection etc. I do agree however that the business model of consumerist fashion undermines sustainability. See my paper in Fashion Practice ‘Slow Fashion an Invitation for Systems Change‘ for more on this…

Q: Do you think there is a ‘granola stereotype’ associated with eco designers which stops people buying them?
KF: This certainly used to be the case – though evidence would suggest this is changing…

Q: Is the trend for vintage clothing a sign that ethical fashion is already happening? Perhaps unconsciously?
KF: That’s not the most obvious sign

Q: Is it important that ethical fashion rely entirely on the style of the clothes selling themselves or on the ethical aspects of the clothing?
KF: Good design is paramount.

SUSTAINABILITY FUTURES
Q: Can you provide 2 opinions regarding the ‘future of fashion sustainability’ eg. will the fashion industry ever be 100% sustainable?
KF: a) it’s about behaviour b) it’s about relationships

FASHION EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABILITY
Q: Are the young fashion design graduates lacking a proper sustainable fashion education?
KF: Absolutely.

Q: Do you think these graduates see sustainable fashion as a trend? Would they understand the complexities of a change of paradigm?
KF: I don’t imagine they even see it as a trend. They see it as a ‘serious’ and optional set of choices to make within their current practice largely around materials and production. They fail to see that it is a different way of thinking.

Q: For young fashion fashion designers it seems that the only way to adapt to the market is to design for a traditional unsustainable fashion house or company. To start your own collection is not only very difficult but at the same time you may just be adding more products to an already overstocked industry. Is this a catch 22 for designers who want to change things?
KF: I think designers should see their skills differently. To look for opportunities to design by facilitating change or design by educating people rather than just using design skills to create more products. But if they do want to do that, then there are many challenges associated with working in a big company that you philosophically you don’t agree with… just like there are for designing a small collection.

Q: Can we close loop and make the fashion industry Cradle to Cradle instead of Cradle to Grave? Are we doing enough?
KF: I think Cradle to Cradle is a very useful concept – though it doesn’t acknowledge that we need to make sacrifices. We need to steer Cradle to Cradle projects, direct them into areas where they deliver the most benefit with tough moral questions.

Q: From your experience as a designer and educator, what tools do you think would work best for the Haute Couture industry in educating them on sustainable practices and biodiversity?
KF: Give them a direct experience of Nature and diverse ecosystems. Most change comes from personal values. Change these of key actors and the sector may change

MATERIALS
Q: Which fabric do you believe to be the most promising for the future, in terms of mass-market fashion as a replacement for cotton and synthetics?
KF: I don’t think you can deal with replacements for cotton and polyester together – they meet different functional requirements. To replace conventional cotton there are options like organic cotton, low chemical cotton (etc), hemp, linen (sometimes) and lyocell. For polyester things like recycled polyester, wool, Ingeo…

WASTE & RECYCLING
Q: Do you think most clothing retail companies take responsibility in decreasing the amount of textile waste produced through the production process to make their clothing?
KF: No

Q: Do you think that clothing retail companies should encourage consumer awareness about the importance of clothing recycling?
KF: Yes

Q: What barriers are restricting the successful integration of clothing recycling schemes into clothing retail businesses?
KF: Lack of knowledge about their potential; lack of commitment; lack of a business case; predominance of short-term thinking.

Q: Do you know of any clothing recycling schemes that are being used successfully at present?
KF: Klattermussen, Patagonia.

Q: In your opinion, what kind of textile recycling schemes would work well in clothing retail companies?
KF: I don’t think clothing companies present any particular structural difficulties to implementing recycling schemes compared to other sector. So the answer is that most schemes are probably appropriate; though some would be more efficacious than others.

Q: If an increase in profit was achievable through a clothing exchange scheme, like Marks & Spencer’s Oxfam exchange, do you believe more companies would make this option available for its consumers?
KF: Probably

Q: What factors, other than direct financial benefit, do you believe would contribute to the encouragement of consumer clothing recycling?
KF: Knowledge, positive pr, moral value

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