I believe we’re on the verge of great change in how we live and prosper into the future. While our oceans continue to fill with plastic, the uptake in living more consciously has grown exponentially and in Australia alone, the move to reusables over the past 12 months has seen demand out-strip supply for many eco-businesses.
At the heart of this shift in behaviour is awareness and awareness is spreading like wildfire. Each year we’re seeing the number of sustainable living campaigns, movements, conferences and festivals grow and people genuinely want to make positive changes to improve their health, to improve the lives of others and reduce their impact on our big, blue planet.
The global campaign, “Who made my clothes?”, sits at the heart of Fashion Revolution Week, (read our Journal feature here), and encourages us to ask our favourite fashion brands for transparency in their supply chain by connecting us with the people who make our clothes. Now it’s hit the mainstream, the campaign is shining a spotlight on the lives of garment workers and pushing for improvement in wages, working conditions, security and human rights. And, while there’s a hell of a lot of room for improvement, our voices as consumers are beginning to turn the tide on this systemic exploitation.
The Australian Broadcasting Commission’s (ABC) three-part television series, War On Waste, (which aired last year and you can read about here)—empowered us with some alarming facts. When we learn that 6000kg of textiles go to landfill every 10 minutes in Australia and two-thirds of new clothing is now made from synthetic fibres, shedding micro-plastic particles into our ecosystem, we can’t help but face our own responsibility in the life-cycle of fashion and ask ourselves, “What can we do differently to avoid all this unnecessary waste?”
One voice championing change in our approach to fashion is Australian social entrepreneur and sustainability consultant, Jane Milburn. The founder of Textile Beat has poured five years of action research into her first book, “Slow Clothing: Finding meaning in what we wear”, which looks at how we can transform our culture of excess into one that thrives on having less and living more.
While transparency in the garment production cycle is crucial in revolutionising the global fashion industry, we also need to find real meaning and connection with what we wear. Taking part in Fashion Revolution’s events and activities is one way of connecting. Another way is to learn how to make and repair our own clothes.
“Until we make something for ourselves to wear, we cannot appreciate the resources, time and skill that go into the clothes we buy.”—Jane Milburn
Our disconnection from our clothing is largely due to a lack of understanding. When we learn the complexities in garment making we can truly appreciate not only how much time and skill it takes, but why paying next to nothing for brand new clothing is ridiculous. Someone pays the price for ‘that’ $10 pair of jeans purchased at ‘that’ fast fashion chain store. The cotton has to be picked, washed, carded and spun into yarn. The yarn has to be dyed. The fabric woven. The garment cut and sewn, embellished and treated. Tagged, wrapped, packed and shipped. Ten dollars simply doesn’t cover all that. When fashion brands screw manufacturers down on price, the quality of life of garment workers, the quality of the garments and the health of the environment are affected. Checks and balances fall by the way side and the manufacturers’ desire to do the right thing wains, resulting in a culture of modern slavery and environmental degradation.
“Dressing is integral to life but what we wear is so often discussed in context of colour, shape and style. The broader view considers health and wellbeing aspects that respond to fashion waste, pollution, and exploitation issues.”—Jane Milburn
But, we can use this information to empower and motivate us to make a difference. Clothes not only protect us from the elements, but provide a vehicle for self-expression. We communicate so much of who we are through how we dress. And, by supporting ethical and environmentally sensitive brands, we can show others who we support and invite conversation around these humanitarian and environmental issues.
We connect deeply with our clothing. We might not be aware of it, but we do. We embody our clothes with memories and they become vessels for our life stories. Jane is passionate about the importance of connecting with our clothes. When we invest more than our money in the clothes we wear, when we invest our ethics, our humanity, our own skills and creativity, we treat our clothing with so much more respect and tend to hold onto those pieces much longer. This has a natural ripple effect. We end up sending less textile waste to landfill and we raise the standard within the fashion industry to support people and the environment.
Jane’s Slow Clothing Manifesto gives us tangible ways to get us thriving in a material world and create a new way of expressing ourselves through clothing by making informed choices, wearing natural fibres instead of synthetics, buying once and buying well, supporting local makers, living with less, taking better care of what we own, learning how to sew, shopping vintage and second-hand, repurposing through up-cycling and donating, recycling or passing on what we no longer wear.
Just as with all the ‘slow’ movements, slow fashion is about taking time to focus on the quality of our experiences, not the quantity of things we own. It’s about connecting with others and focusing on relationships. It’s about not taking anything for granted and caring deeply about people and the environment and living life with meaning and purpose.
Check out “Slow Clothing: Finding meaning in what we wear”. It’s an informative read with lots of useful tools to help us become more autonomous in a world which has become subservient to the global fashion industry, including a few basic patterns to get you started making your own clothes.
x KT
Image: Courtesy Textile Beat, taken at The Happenstore, Sydney
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