Fashion life after shopping

By 2030, we keep going as we are, the fashion industry will manufacture 102 million tons of clothes and shoes. For comparison, that's the weight equivalent of half million blue whales!

Growth is not something we like to question in the fashion industry (or indeed any industry). In our capitalist system, commercial success is measured by growth. But, how can we support infinite growth on a finite planet?

Words and pictures

Twenty-five-old British poet, filmmaker and activist Wilson Oryema describes himself as “a semi-retired model”. He was scouted on his lunch break when he was working a London office job, and walked his first Paris show for Margiela in 2015. He went on to appear in ads for Calvin Klein Underwear and Hugo Boss .

His first book of poetry, titled Wait, explores consumerism, contemporary culture and waste. It sprang from an art show he held in a London gallery, after he interned for his photographer friend Harley Weir.

What’s your favourite Global Goal? Have you even heard of them, otherwise known as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Don’t feel bad if you haven’t because while these 17 goals, created by the United Nations as a roadmap for a sustainable future, are super important - they are not as well-known as they should be. Some countries are doing great work in advancing them. Others, including Australia, have a pretty ordinary record on progress so far. In this interview with Togetherband founder Cameron Saul, we discuss why these goals are for all of us, and how we can work together to make them a reality.

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.