Ep 52, DO WE NEED SUSTAINABLE FASHION WEEKS?

Ep 52, DO WE NEED SUSTAINABLE FASHION WEEKS?

What is fashion week actually for? Is the old system tired & old-fashioned? Has it lost its purpose and reason for being? If so, what sorts events do we want to see take over? Do we need sustainable fashion weeks?

Meet Evelyn Mora, the 26-year-old photographer-turned-event-producer behind Helsinki Fashion Week. In its current incarnation, the event happened for the second time in July 2018, taking sustainability as its focus.

Evelyn's mission? To reinvent “traditional concepts of fashion week venues and the ways they present collections to buyers and press” while simultaneously “questioning the way we consume.” Evelyn says her vision is all about “circularity, sustainability and beauty” but it’s also about getting rid of what’s gone before. She’s a change agent who likes to shake things up. She wants fashion weeks to be super-inclusive, zero-waste, diverse, open to anyone who's interested, showcasing only ethically produced and environmentally-aware collections; in short, totally different to how they used to be.

Ep 50, SIMONE CIPRIANI, THE UN's ETHICAL FASHION INITIATIVE

Ep 50, SIMONE CIPRIANI, THE UN's ETHICAL FASHION INITIATIVE

Ciao Simone! Simone Cipriani is founder of the UN’s Ethical Fashion Initiative, a flagship programme of the International Trade Centre, a joint agency of the UN and World Trade Organization.

The EFI connects skilled artisans in places like Kenya, Mali, Burkina Faso, Haiti and now Afghanistan, to the international value chain of fashion, working with the likes of Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, Karen Walker, Adidas and the Australian accessories house MIMCO.

The work empowers informal manufacturers and craftspeople to enter the international value chain - providing an income for some of the poorest people in the world. This promotes the growth of sustainable business in place of aid dependency. It provides opportunity. This is not charity, this is work.

Ep 49, TIM JARVIS, ON CLIMATE CHANGE & THE POLAR EXPLORER'S WARDROBE

Ep 49, TIM JARVIS, ON CLIMATE CHANGE & THE POLAR EXPLORER'S WARDROBE

Talk about intrepid. What to pack for an expedition to Antarctica? Or to keep yourself alive on a remote mountainside? In extreme conditions, clothes move way beyond fashion to become tools for survival.

In this Episode, you get to hang out with environmental scientist, polar explorer, author and adventurer Tim Jarvis, a man for whom pushing himself to the limits of his physical endurance is all in a day's work. But Tim doesn't undertake his incredible expeditions just to prove he's tough; he does it for a higher purpose - to spread the word about climate change, and show us how some of the remotest regions on Earth are being impacted by global warming.

Ep 47, OCEAN PLASTIC WARRIOR TIM SILVERWOOD

Ep 47, OCEAN PLASTIC WARRIOR TIM SILVERWOOD

Australian oceans advocate Tim Silverwood is fighting plastic pollution. Why? Nearly one third of the plastic packaging we use escapes collection systems, which means that it ends up clogging our city streets and polluting our natural environment. Every year, up to 13 million tons of plastic leak into our oceans, where it smothers coral reefs and threatens vulnerable marine wildlife. The plastic that ends up in the oceans can circle the Earth four times in a single year, and it can persist for up to 1,000 years.

Ep 45, ROLAND MOURET, SEX, FASHION, SUSTAINABILITY

Ep 45, ROLAND MOURET, SEX, FASHION, SUSTAINABILITY

The first ever interview with designer Roland Mouret about sustainability. Mouret is famous for his elevated, elegant womenswear - but he has also considered sustainability deeply, and questioned everything around it, from how and why he makes things, and how that has evolved, to the impacts of over-consumption, the power of fashion to communicate a message and how we can make sustainability hot—and not just hot right now.

Ep 44, V&A CURATOR EDWINA ERHMAN ON 'FASHIONED FROM NATURE'

Ep 44, V&A CURATOR EDWINA ERHMAN ON 'FASHIONED FROM NATURE'

What can we learn from the past to design a better fashion industry for the future?

London's Victoria & Albert Museum (“perhaps the world's best dressing-up box” with an archive of more than 75,000 items of clothing) takes on sustainable fashion. The Fashioned From Nature exhibition includes amazing historical garments as well as contemporary fashion by the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Katherine Hamnett, Alexander McQueen, Christophers Kane and Raeburn, and Bruno Pieters. But most importantly, it looks at fashion's eco footprint, and the massive impacts of textile production on the planet, and asks: What can we learn from the past to design a better fashion industry for the future? Curator Edwina Erhman unpacks it all.