What’s fashion got to do with finding yourself?

This week’s interview was recorded at the Dark + Dangerous Thoughts symposium at Dark Mofo in Hobart. It’s with brilliant writer and transwoman, Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan - author of She’s Not There, A Life in Two Genders.

Jenny is a New York Times columnist, author and activist. She serves on the Board of Trustees of PEN America, the writer’s association. She is a former co-chair of GLAAD’s board of directors and member of the Board of Trustees of the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. On TV, she advised on and appears in I Am Cait - the story of Caitlin Jenner’s transition. But that’s nothing! Jennifer Boylan’s first big TV moment was on Oprah, and you’re going to hear all about that.

Jeans genius

Think of a jeans brand. I bet it’s Levi’s. There of course hundreds, maybe thousands of denim companies today. Denim has been thoroughly disrupted. But the original was Levi’s…

The company is also well-known for promoting progressive causes. They were one of the earliest private sector institutions to support LGBTQ advocacy, and spoke out against the presidency of Donald Trump by donating $1 million to support immigration and LGBTQ rights. In 2018, CEO Chip Bergh published an Op-ed in Fortune magazine endorsing gun control.

But how sustainable is Levi’s? This week, we hear from Levi’s Vice-President of Sustainability, MICHAEL KOBORI. He started out in human rights, and joined Levi’s in 1995. Over the years, he has seen the conversation move from sweatshops and corporate social responsibility (CSR) to sustainable materials, life cycle assessments and worker wellbeing.

At the end of the loadsa-money ‘80s, the Buddhist concept of right livelihood was hardly the thing inspiring most fashion designers. But that’s when our guest this week, at the height of her fame and fashion success while her Katharine Hamnett brand was stocked in 700 stores in 40 countries, decided to question the whole system.

You’re going to hear all about Katharine’s passion to change fashion, and to fight for the environment, her glitzy early years as a designer, and what motivates her to be change agent today. You get to hear her tell the story of how she ambushed Margaret Thatcher in 1984 with her anti-nuclear missiles T-shirt. That story is gold.

Journalist Bandana Tewari was formerly Vogue India’s fashion features director then the magazine’s Editor-at-Large. She now writes for Business of Fashion, and speaks globally on India’s rich fashion craft tradition. She spent many years in Mumbai at the epicentre of Indian fashion, where she presented Indian first pop culture fashion TV show. Recently, she moved to Bali. Bandana is a special adviser to Global Fashion Agenda, a judge for the H&M Foundation’s Global Change Award, and is an awesome human, we are sure you will agree.

From runway to reality. In 2011, super model Arizona Muse landed a Prada contract and a 14-page story in American Vogue, with Anna Wintour comparing her to Linda Evangelista and Natalia Vodianova. She's since become a familiar face on Vogue covers everywhere but these days Arizona has different priorities. Today she is using her platform for sustainable fashion.

Meet the millennial behind cult New Zealand label Maggie Marilyn. We hear a lot about how the Gens Y and Z are more woke, more into sustainability and of course more worried about climate change and the environment - why wouldn’t they be? These are the generations that are going to inherit the mess that’s been made. They are already inheriting it.

Find out why designer Maggie Hewitt is determined to do fashion differently, how she sold her very first collection to Net-A-Porter and gets most excited about seeing her clothes worn by women she doesn’t know in the street. Yep, even though Megan Markle, Kendall Jenner and Rose McGowan are fans.

The mainstream fashion production process is extremely wasteful. The whole system is built on over-ordering, taking a punt on how much will sell, and writing off over-production. This leads to shocking amounts of pre-consumer textiles and garments being landfilled or incinerated - according to some estimates, 1/3 of all the fashion ever produced it never sold.

Australian made-to-order T-shirt company Citizen Wolf is using big data and algorithmic power to disrupt this. And they plan to take on the world. Can it work? How did founders Zoltan Csaki and Eric Phu build it? This thought-provoking discussion looks into the fashion crystal ball to imagine a leaner, greener, more responsive manufacturing future.

She is author of How to be a Craftivist and the founder of Craftivist Collective. Sarah Corbett believes, “If we want a world that is beautiful, kind and fair, shouldn’t our activism be beautiful, kind and fair?”

This episode is a call to arms for fashion change-makers, a demonstration of the persuasive nature of gentle activism, and the wonderful idea that together we might stitch a rebellion, sweep out the status quo and usher in a fairer world in fashion and beyond.

Happy Earth Day!

As we gear up to Earth Day on April 22, we're thinking about living more lightly on the planet. This year’s theme is Protect Our Species, and one of the quotes that inspired it is from Rachel Carson, who said, “In nature nothing exists alone.”

Natalie Isaacs is proof of that. The super-inspiring Australian movement builder behind 1 Million Women went from being a one-woman powerhouse to harnessing the collective power of other women - heck, the whole of womankind! - to start a lifestyle revolution to fight climate change.

Who’s up for stopping our wasteful ways and reimagining trash as a resource? This week’s guest is proving fashion can be made entirely from recycled materials.

He is Javier Goyaneche, president and founder of Ecoalf, the Spanish clothing company that pioneers high-tech new materials made from waste.

If you’re a sustainability nerd, you’ve no doubt heard of Ecoalf. It was Spain’s first B-corp and Gwyneth Paltrow is a fan - a few years back she did a collab with them for Goop.