Welcome to the last episode of Series 6. See you in Jan 2022 for Series 7!

EPISODE 149 FEATURES FOUNDING MEMBERS OF FASHION ACT NOW

Fashion Act Now (FAN) is an activist group born out of Extinction Rebellion, founded in 2020 by environmental activist Sara Arnold, former fashion editor Bel Jacobs and sustainable consultant Alice Wilby with the purpose of defining a crisis response to the climate and ecological emergency. They describe themselves as “activists demanding and enabling a radical defashion future”.

Fast Forward and December 2021 sees the introduction of new founding members from the worlds of fashion, design, art and education, and the announcement of a call to action - DEFASHION NOW!

They say: “Fashion Act Now believes that Fashion, the globalised dominant fashion system, is incompatible with justice as it is predicated on growth, oppression and planned obsolescence. Fashion Act Now calls for defashion, an urgent response to dismantle Fashion. Defashion is Fashion Act Now’s interpretation of the role fashion must play in degrowth, ‘a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.’ It is a transition to post-fashion clothing systems that are regenerative, local, fair, nurturing and sufficient for the needs of communities.

“Defashion is not the end of clothing culture and creativity. The end of Fashion, the monolithic globalised system, would lead the way to culturally diverse clothing systems. Fashion Act Now supports the development of clothing commons, clothing cultures that are developed and supported by their respective communities.” 

YOU ARE LISTENING TO…

On the podcast, in order of appearance, we hear from:

SARA ARNOLD Environmental activist and co-founder of Fashion Act Now, Sara (pictured above) is on a mission to stop fashion's contribution to climate and ecological breakdown. Previously, she was founder of sustainable fashion rental company, Higher Studio.

CLARE FARRELL (pictured below) is “an active citizen, devoting her creativity, her energy, and occasionally her personal liberty, to fight against climate collapse and the wider environmental crisis.” As one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion she helps coordinate a mass movement of people using non-violent civil disobedience. In her previous life, she worked as a fashion designer both on her own label and in the British high st sector.

BEL JACOBS is a former fashion editor turned writer and speaker for climate justice, animal rights and alternative systems in fashion. She is also founder of the Fashion in Schools project.

SHONAGH MARSHALL is a writer, curator and educator based in New York. She is the founder of newsletter Denier, where every month she interviews a different person about fashion’s relationship to people, the planet and profit. 

SANDRA NIESSEN is an anthropologist who has researched the clothing and textile tradition of the Batak people of Sumatra, Indonesia, for almost 40 years. Formerly an academic at Canadian universities, she now lives in The Netherlands where, influenced by her knowledge of indigenous clothing systems and environmental concerns, she writes decolonial fashion theory and explores fashion alternatives. 

SAM WEIR is a New York-based stylist who left her job in conventional fashion. She has worked in celebrity, editorial, and commercial styling. Her new project is Lotte.V1 - a personalised online styling service rekindling our relationship to clothing and lowering our consumption of it.

NOTES

THE PLEDGE begins: “I pledge to defashion now. The era of Fashion - of a dominant globalised system - must end. It is neither relevant, nor civilised.” Read the rest here.

DEGROWTH Bel Mentions the 1972 report Limits to Growth. “In the summer of 1970, an international team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began a study of the implications of continued worldwide growth. They examined the five basic factors that determine and, in their interactions, ultimately limit growth on this planet-population increase, agricultural production, nonrenewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution generation.” Via Club of Rome. More here (plus you can download a pdf of the book).

OVERPRODUCTION Here’s a handy infographic by Sharecloth.

THE COMMONS is a cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. In western Europe, the feudal system of the middle ages gave rise to a communal farming system, consisting mostly of arable in strip fields, and associated common or wasteland. There is evidence that unfenced or ‘open field’ farming was practiced in England during the Roman occupation. In the UK, the process of “enclosing” or privatising common land was a gradual one, but it accelerated in the Tudor times by Industrial revolution that had led to a hand sub-class of landless peasants who needed to work in order to survive.

In recent years more people have been drawn to the idea of new forms of commons. For example, Creative Commons, is “a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools, with affiliates all over the world who help ensure our licenses work internationally and raise awareness about our work.”

David Bollier is is an American activist and writer, and the co-founder of the Commons Strategies Group. Here’s his quote (as read out by Sara): “The common is a living process of ‘commoning’ that enables people to co-create a sense of purpose meaning and belonging while meeting important needs.”

Sounds nice but HOW DO WE GET TO A PLACE OF FASHION COMMONS? “This dismantling has to be a collaborative and iterative process and it needs to happen in solidarity with the global south,” says Sara. We need to move away from excess to sufficiency, but we also need to repair - not just our clothes to keep them in use for longer, but relationships based on exploitation.

FASHION RESISTANCE is not a new concept. Clare mentions the DIY punk movement in the 1980s.

SHOULD FASHION PAY REPARATIONS? “Reparations are broadly recognised as compensation given for an abuse or injury. Typically, they serve to acknowledge the obligation of a state, individual or group, in repairing the consequences of violations it has either directly committed or failed to prevent.” Via https://eachother.org.uk/ An increasingly familiar concept in conversations around slavery and colonialism, should we apply this thinking to fashion injustices?

SACRIFICE ZONES Sandra’s 2020 paper, Fashion, its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability, calls for “a radical re-writing of fashion history” and argues for: “a revision to the customary framework of sustainability that is being used by dress scholars, environmental activists and policy makers, so that it includes the putative “non-fashion” clothing traditions of the world. Why, until now, the traditions of the Other have been systematically undervalued and obscured is explained from a decolonial perspective. They constitute a “sacrifice zone” of fashion, the emergence of which is connected to the ethnocentrism embedded in the fashion system and fashion scholarship. This failing is a legacy of the colonial era that has been insufficiently addressed but rather obscured by layers of theory and practice. Only by recognizing and correcting systemic ethnic bias, and thereby eliminating the sacrifice zone of fashion, can the fashion industry achieve sustainability.” Access it here.

Read her interview with Shonagh on Denier here.

FASHION MYTHS “One of the most powerful moments during my undergrad in anthropology occurred when we were taught the definition of ‘ethnocentrism’ and learned that knowledge, and what seems self-evident and logical, may not be consistent with the facts. Culture is defined by what is passed down generation after generation. Myths are guardians of the status quo. Confrontation with the idea that the truths that I grew up with could, in fact, be myths was hard – but also exciting. Barriers in my thinking crumbled and I saw options for new directions. I believe that we are living in a time when we must explode myths if we are to construct a sustainable future. We cannot continue with the status quo; there must be radical cultural change to bring us within the carrying capacity of our planet.” Sandra Niessen blog post, 23rd September 2021, My career in a nutshell: an autobiographical piece focusing on the myths of fashion” Read the blog here.

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