60,000 years of sustainability. In this Episode Aboriginal journalist, speaker and advocate for the Indigenous fashion sector YATU WIDDERS HUNT interviews SHONAE HOBSON - a Southern Kaantju woman from Coen, Cape York Peninsula in Far North Queensland. She is the inaugural First Nations Curator at Bendigo Art Gallery. She catches up with first nations fashion designers JULIE SHAW and TEAGAN COWLISHAW. And explores the vibrant contemporary Indigenous fashion scene happening in Australia right now.

Why does so much fashion still cling to strict men's and womenswear codes? Is the industry finally ready to shake off these tired old binaries and embrace the trans and gender-nonconforming community? Or is Harry Styles' Vogue cover about as far as it goes?

For this week's #sharethepodcastmic episode, sustainable fashion journalist Aditi Mayer interviews Alok Vaid-Menon about their new book, Beyond the Gender Binary. Alok is a gender-nonconforming poet, author, performance artist and designer.

Up for discussion: everything from gender neutral fashion, to the limitations of representation to what it means to truly redefine beauty. Also, fashion has been largely silent on the rising wave of transphobia, says Alok, yet continues to draw inspiration from gender-nonconforming people.

This episode is a powerful call to designers "take it as an ethical imperative to de-gender their lines" and to "everyone, regardless of your gender, to make this an issue."

Kalkidan Legesse is the founder of Sancho’s - a pioneering Black-owned sustainable fashion store in Exeter in the UK. Sancho's sells ethical and fair trade clothing, gifts and accessories from sustainable fashion brands like People Tree, Armedangels, Lefrik and Just Trade. They also really innovate with their pricing accessibility - and you'll hear all about that in this interview.

What else gets unpacked in this important conversation? Kalkidan's Ethiopian roots and how returning to Addis Ababa as an adult sparked the idea for Sancho's. The million racist micro-aggressions people of colour face in the fashion industry (and everywhere else), who gets the power, and how to be an ethical leader.

Functional, accessible fashion please! For all the talk of inclusivity finally being taken seriously by fashion, the industry is way behind on many fronts. It basically ignores entire sections of the market, which makes no sense from a business perspective, let alone a social one.

Adaptive fashion is both an opportunity and a necessity - as this week's brilliant guest, author Keah Brown says, disabled people love clothes too. And they're tired of having to alter things that don't work for them. Accessible, adaptive design is the future, and forward-looking brands are taking note.

Our chat covers everything from Keah's New York Fashion Week debut and how her hashtag #disabledandcute went viral to writing her first screen play and the finding joy in the everyday. This is an enlightening, bright interview full of inspiration.

What is fashion actually for? Philosophy! The Internet of Things! Irvin Penn! From not being Mozart to designing outfits for The Muppets, as a kid... It's all up for discussion in this week's ep with Levi's Vice President of Global Product Innovation, Paul Dillinger.

Paul drove Levi's Jacquard collaboration with Google, so of course we talk about that, and the future of tech innovation in fashion particularly around wearables. So of course we talk about that. But fundamentally, this is a conversation about why we wear what we wear, what fashion means and how we've used it across time to craft our identities. Oh, and sustainability.

"You can't farm spiders!" says this week's guest, scientist David Breslauer.

You can keep more them in serious numbers spinning webs off hula-hoops suspended from your office ceiling though...

Enter Bolt Threads, the Californian biotech company behind Microsilk - a bioengineered sustainable fibre used by Stella McCartney. Find out how they did it, where the science is headed, and what’s next (hint, it's involves mushrooms). Just don’t call David Spider Man.

What do you know about how chemicals re used to manufacture our clothes? How fashion is cleaning up its act? Chemistry in fashion is still not a mainstream topic, and most people have no idea about chemical use in clothing production. But the fashion industry has made headway.

The Greenpeace campaign succeeded in making fashion take action. Initially 6 brands got behind the formation of the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) programme, with the aim of removing hazardous chemicals from apparel and footwear supply chains by 2020. It’s called Roadmap to Zero.

Discover how it works, learn about the wins and find out what’s left to be done.

Meet UNCHR’s Designer in Residence. In 2015, in the run up to the COP15, Helen Storey turned a decommissioned refugee tent, that had once housed a family in Za'atari refugee camp in Jordan, into a travelling fashion statement on climate change. She called it Dress For Our Time, and debuted it in a London railway station. That dress has since travelled to the UN in Geneva, the climate strikes, and even been on stage at Glastonbury. But it is Helen who has travelled the farthest.

Today she is the UN Refugee Agency's first ever designer-in-residence. Hear how she works in Za'atari, which is home to more than 75,000 displaced people.