At the first Legacy Responsible Fashion Summit in Sydney, panelists and keynote speakers addressed the sustainability issues facing fashion today.
“We can no longer relegate change to a small number of committed brands and business leaders who are carrying the burden of progress,” says Melinda Tually, who runs Fashion Revolution in Australia and New Zealand.
Three years ago, she started thinking about staging a sustainable fashion conference in Sydney. “I didn’t go ahead for various reasons,” she explains; timing was one. “The appetite for change and pressure from the public wasn’t there like it is now. You need everyone to have their ears cocked in the same direction.”
The first Legacy Summit happened in Sydney last week, opened by Vogue Australia’s editor-in-chief, Edwina McCann, and presented by the Australian Fashion Council. Speakers included Bianca Spender, Kit Willow, Spell’s Elizabeth Abegg, Bassike’s Mary Lou Ryan, Gosia Piatek from Kowtow, and indigenous fashion advocate Yatu Widders Hunt.
Interest in sustainable fashion is growing, both here and abroad. It was a key theme during fashion month. The London shows were dominated by calls for climate action—both on and off the runway.
In Paris, Stella McCartney dedicated her autumn/winter ’19/’20 show to forest protectors Canopy Planet. At VAMFF last week, the Australian Fashion Summit featured sessions on fashion waste and circularity. And on March 14, the United Nation’s Alliance for Sustainable Fashion launched in Nairobi.
Tually says she designed Legacy to be both a practical tool box for change, and “one big call to action” for the Australian industry. The issues addressed were broad, from modern slavery to water stewardship, ethical sourcing to retail.
Here are our top takeaways.
Access over ownership is part of fashion’s future
People aren’t just renting dresses to go to weddings and the races anymore. Dean Jones, CEO and co-founder of Glamcorner, told the audience that while their first forays into office-appropriate jackets and more casual pieces fell flat, their new subscription service is proving very popular. “The market is evolving,” he said.
According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, between 2000 and 2015, clothing utilisation (how long we keep garments in use) fell by 36% globally. In China, it was 70%. We’re buying more clothes and wearing them less. The rentable shared wardrobe is an attractive solution. The global fashion rental market is projected to exceed $2.5 billion by 2023. Still, when I asked the audience for a show of hands on who’d actually tried it, only a few early adopters responded yes. Asked who was wearing pre-loved, more than half the room waved.
It’s official: second-hand is no longer second-best
Legacy speaker Fanny Moizant, co-founder of Vestiaire Collective, said the luxury resale market would soon outpace the new luxury goods market. “There’s a move away from ownership,” she said, and it’s driven by rising interest in the share economy and sustainability in general.
Patrick Duffy, founder of Global Fashion Exchange (GFX), pointed to success of The RealReal and Thread Up in the US. He added that clothing swaps are increasingly popular everywhere—GFX just held a big one at VAMFF. “People love the social interaction and the opportunity to get hold of unique pieces,” he said. “There’s no stigma about pre-loved anymore.”
In a breakout session on textile waste, The Salvation Army’s Aife O’Loughlin said charities were starting to work more closely with fashion brands. She encouraged them to create take-back schemes and run content around extending the life of garments. “Customers want to be part of the solution,” she said.
Circular fashion design still has a way to go
“It’s relatively easy to use recycled fibres, but are they recyclable?” asked Country Road menswear designer Stella Smith-Stevens on a panel on Responsible Materials Sourcing. The answer is usually no. Less than one per cent of old clothing is currently recycled into new clothing.
Country Road is pioneering Refibra, a yarn partly made from recycled cotton waste. But despite the emergence of new material-to-material options—Osomtex and Evrnu turn old clothes into new yarns and have worked with Stella McCartney and Levi’s, respectively—blended fabrics remain notoriously difficult to recycle.
What’s more, “Australia has its own unique set of challenges in the circular textiles space,” said fash-ademic Clara Vuletich. “We have had no federal government level engagement with the clothing/textile waste issue (we have no official data, for example) and no national investment in textile recycling technologies or systems.”
Gosia Piatek of New Zealand brand Kowtow said she’s not giving up. While she’s waiting for a solution for recycling her new swimwear line, which is made from regenerated nylon Econyl yarn, she’s introduced a take-back program. “In the meantime, we’ll just be weird hoarder people,” she said.
Many brands don’t really know where their fibres come from
With the exception of fully certified and traceable fibres (such as GOTS organic cotton or Traceable Merino), provenance remains tricky. Cotton fibres, for example, are usually milled far away from where they’re grown, and get mixed up in the processing stages. Your cotton T-shirt might include fibre from different areas grown under very different conditions.
We know that food is often mislabelled—estimates vary depending which sector you’re looking at—but what about fashion? When it comes to country of origin, most garment labelling refers only to make (where it’s cut and sewn). Block chain remains the most buzzed about future-solution, but those systems are only in their infancy. New Zealand company Oritain is using forensic science to trace fibres. Their clients include Kering and Marks & Spencer. “99% of people don’t do what’s expected; they do what’s inspected,” said Oritain’s Sandon Adams, in an intriguing keynote. Until regulators get serious about labelling, transparency remains elusive for most fashion fans.
The Meghan Markle Effect is real
When the Duchess of Sussex wore a pair of Outland Denim’s black skinny jeans on her Australian tour in October, the brand’s founder James Bartle didn’t know who she was. He does now. On a panel about combating modern slavery, Bartle said the increased interest in their online store had allowed him to hire 46 more people in Outland Denim’s Cambodian garment factory. He pays a living wage and hires and trains marginalised women, many of whom are survivors of the forced labour in the sex trade. Outland Denim was just named one of Common Objective’s 10 Leaders for 2019 (along with Bottletop, Stella McCartney and Raeburn).
#MeToo has yet to deliver justice for garment workers
The movement burst to the fore in Hollywood in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Then US farm workers published an open letter in solidarity: “We do not work under bright stage lights or on the big screen. We work in the shadows of society…we share a common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to hire, fire, blacklist or otherwise threaten our economic, physical and emotional security.” Sisters, mothers, daughters everywhere started speaking out. It was—indeed is—a reckoning. But what about the world’s 60 million garment workers? Most are young women. Is anyone listening to them? Is #MeToo delivering justice for the women who get harassed, intimidated, assaulted or worse when they’re sewing our clothes?
Dr Anu Mundkur, head of gender equality at Care Australia, says not. Of more than a thousand female Cambodian garment workers surveyed by the humanitarian aid organisation last year, nearly one in three said they’d experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. Care is calling for brands to sign up to their Stop Sexual Harassment project.
Climate change is fashion’s next big topic
At the time of writing this, 150,000 Australian students are striking from school to demand climate action now—inspired by 16-year-old Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who’s just been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
At Legacy, Kit X’s Kit Willow spoke not just of urgency but of emergency, delivering an impassioned speech about her hopes and fears for climate action. On a family visit to the Great Barrier Reef, she told us she’d seen first-hand the effects of coral bleaching caused by global warming. “It was a graveyard,” she said. “Is this what we want to leave for our children?”
Dr Martin Rice, head of research at the Climate Council, described the new UN Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action as “important”. While fashion is a considerable polluter, he said, noting that the industry emits more CO2 pollution than the whole of aviation and maritime combined, it has the capacity to make considerable change—and shout about it. “Fashion has a powerful voice,” he said. “It’s a great communicator.”
Clare Press is Vogue Australia’s sustainability editor at large and the presenter of the Wardrobe Crisis podcast. Listen here.