Stay ConnectedWARDROBE CRISIS is a fashion podcast about sustainability, ethical fashion and making a difference in the world. Your host is author and journalist Clare Press, who was the first ever Vogue sustainability editor. Each week, we bring you insightful interviews from the global fashion change makers, industry insiders, activists, artists, designers and scientists who are shaping fashion’s future.
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Copyright: © 2022 Clare Press
It’s fashion month again and the big brands with the big budgets dominate our feeds. But amidst the commercial noise of the contemporary fashion circus, independent gems still exist. There are true artists who go their own way, and often set the future trend agenda (although they tend not to get the credit). Our guest this week is one of them. He’s been shaking up the London underground scene since the ‘90s. Meet Dr NOKI, the original upcycler. Just don’t call him that…
NOKI does fashion on his own terms, including the language he prefers to describe his work. He “custom-builds” his “mashups” and “landfill drops”. It’s a practice that owes at debt to dadaism, and made sense of his dyslexia when he was young. The story reaches to back into the ‘90s club scene, through the culture jamming of the No Logo years to end up at the cutting edge where art and fashion collide today.
Now, a new generation that’s interested in sustainability is discovering him for the first time. Last year, Hypebeast heralded NOKI as “a tried and true member of the sustainability movement — arguably being a founder of the word before it even really became a thing.”
But does he relate to that? How does he see his work? What inspired it all back in ‘90s London’s rave scene? And how does he see the future for fashion’s young waste warrior disruptors? Part fashion history lesson, part provocation to challenge our consumerist culture, this one’s an adventure - enjoy!
Check out the shownotes on wardrobecrisis.com
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Thank you!
Find Clare on Instagram @mrspress
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Woolmark's new ambassador Taylor Zakhar Perez is a rising Hollywood star known for his leading man roles. You might recognise him from a certain rom com that we're not mentioning here (in respect of the actors' strike), or his role in a royal drama based on a cult book (again, not going there). Maybe you know his Paris fashion week looks - snaps of him emerging shirtless from his car outside the Prada’s menswear show went viral in June.
But whether you’re one of his 4.7 million Instagram followers, or discovering his work for the first time here, there's no denying Taylor's charm. He's smart, down-to-earth, generous with his time and endlessly curious, and we love that he was up for a conversation about how to use influence for good.
In this conversation, we discuss the risks and rewards of daring to talk about sustainability when you're known for something else, why more famous names don't get involved in climate activism or rewear their clothes, and how thisformer competitive swimmer became a supply chain nerd. For Taylor, if he’s going to work with a brand, he wants to see what goes on behind the scenes. More of that please!
Check out the shownotes on wardrobecrisis.com
Can you help us spread the word about Series 9?
Wardrobe Crisis is an independent production.
We don't believe in barriers to entry and are determined to keep this content free.
If you value it, please help by sharing your favourite Episodes, and rating and reviewing us in Apple.
Thank you!
Find Clare on Instagram @mrspress
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Series 9 has landed! Our first guest is Cyrill Gutsch, the fascinating founder of Parley for the Oceans.
With his partner Lea Stepken, this NY-based designer and branding expert started his global environmental organisation in 2012, after bumping into Pamela Anderson at an art fair. Pammy was wearing a Sea Shepherd T-shirt, and when Cyrill asked her why, she told him Sea Shepherd’s activist-in-chief Paul Watson was in trouble - he’d been arrested in Frankfurt on an international warrant. Cyrill, being German, thought he might be able to help, and went to visit Watson in his lawyer’s office. There, he learned that Watson’s strife was a drop in the proverbial compared with what's happening to the oceans. Plastic pollution! Climate change! Overfishing! Could creativity be the super power needed to turn it around?
The rest, as they say is history. Cyrill decided to ditch his regular clients, and donate his time to just one: OUR OCEANS. Specifically, “raising awareness for their beauty and fragility” and “collaborating on projects [to] end their destruction.”
Over the years, such projects have included: working with Adidas to phase out single-use plastics; partnering with big-name visual artists on everything from underwater sculptures to sustainable surfboards; funding research into new materials; and setting up programs in schools. On a practical level, Parley’s work is just as likely to play out as beach cleanups in the Maldives as it is to be a new Dior bag. It’s all in the mix, to beat what Cyrill calls “our addiction” to virgin plastic.
Next on his To-Do List? Just a total materials revolution. “We need to change the way we make stuff.”
Check out the shownotes on wardrobecrisis.com
Can you help us spread the word about Series 9?
Wardrobe Crisis is an independent production.
We don't believe in barriers to entry and are determined to keep this content free.
If you value it, please help by sharing your favourite Episodes, and rating and reviewing us in Apple.
Thank you!
Find Clare on Instagram @mrspress
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Danish designer Cecilie Bahnsen studied at RCA in London, and interned with John Galliano and Erdem before starting her own label in 2015. You’ve probably seen her voluminous dresses, or her recent sneaker collaboration with ASICs. Cecilie says she operates at the intersection of couture and ready-to-wear – it’s high craft, she creates her own textiles, and loves to use embroidery and smocking which lends her work a certain whimsey. But although expensive, it’s not untouchable, as you will hear. Cecilie wears hers’ on her bike! A very Danish approach.
We talk about the challenges of upcycling precious scraps which defy standardisation. The idea of timelessness in a novelty-obsessed world.
Building a creative business, and how Cecile approaches scale and growth. What it takes to make it - determination, for sure, but also a really clear sense of what you want, and how you treat others.
Ultimately, though, this Episode is about joy - the pleasure we can find in clothes, even down to the sound of fabric rustling. With all our worries about sustainability, we can easily forget why we came to fashion in the first place.
Thank you for listening to the show. This is the last Ep for Series 8. We'll be back in 4 weeks - Series 9 starts September 6!
Wardrobe Crisis is an independent creation and we need your help to keep going and grow our audience.
Please help by sharing your favourite Episodes. Thank you!
Find Clare on Instagram @mrspress
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Meet Danish creative Henrik Vibskov - fashion designer, costume designer, curator, musician and professor. He shows at Copenhagen Fashion Week (which is coming around again next week) but also Paris, and he has a store in New York. A supremely conceptual designer – his last collection, Long Fingers To Ma Toes, was inspired by the tomato in weird and wonderful ways.
In this interview Henrik shares his experience of living up to CPHFW's recently introduced 18 Minimum Sustainability Standards. What did find de-motivating about trying to implement sustainability initiatives, and what kept him going? But also, how did he get here? Why the vegetable obsession? Would anyone come to a 3-hour fashion show? (Spoiler alert: they did!) What is fashion actually for in 2023? And what do the next generation of artistic designers need to make it? It's all up for discussion in this charismatic convo.
Enjoy the show? Wardrobe Crisis is an independent creation and we need your help to keep going and grow our audience.
Please help by sharing your favourite Episodes. Thank you!
Find Clare on Instagram @mrspress
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ICYMI: fashion has a greenwashing problem. No wonder policy makers, consumer watchdogs and NGOs are taking an interest. According to the UN:“Misinformation and greenwashing are ubiquitous ... As sustainability has grown as a selling point, all manner of vague and inflated claims have appeared across advertising, marketing, media, packaging and beyond.”
Enter the UN's new Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook, an open-access guide that seeks to change that, while better aligning how the fashion industry talks with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement. This week, we're delighted to welcome the Playbook's lead author, Rachel Arthur, to the show to deep dive into its recommendations.
We're asking: What if marketers, PRs, fashion journalists and photographers used their creative powers to encourage us to live a 1.5 degree lifestyle, instead of endlessly update our consumer goods? (Curious about a “1.5 degree lifestyle”? Listen for the full explainer!) How could professional communicators use their talents to get behind a more sustainable future? Rachel calls them “architects of desire”, and says people who work in advertising, marketing and media play a vital role in persuading us what to want. Which comes with great responsibility…
Access the Playbook here for free.
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Hang on, what's the question? Why is everyone talking about regenerative farming, for starters. For fibre as well as food. #regenag is fashion's new favourite hashtag. What if we put back more than we took out? Stopped drenching the land with toxic chemicals? Worked in harmony with Nature? Could we feed and clothe the world if we produced less, and differently? Would we starve? Would prices skyrocket? How did we get to this place, where no one - not the land, not biodiversity, not the nutritional content of food, and not the farmers who are on the front lines - wins?
Oh, and have you heard the one about there being just 60 cycles of soil left on Planet Earth? That's no joke. While this oft-quoted stat has been disputed, there's no denying that intensive, so called "conventional" farming practices are depleting soil health the world over.
During WWI, food shortages had us in a panic. No wonder, in the 1950s and '60s, we were obsessed with maximising yields. Through a combination of hectic new pesticides and herbicides, cheap synthetic fertilisers, and tearing out trees and hedgerows to make managing monocrops easier, farmers produced so much, there was plenty to spare - and waste.
But the bonanza couldn't last forever...
Today, they are experiencing a backlash. Once celebrated for filling our plates, farmers now find themselves vilified for destroying our environment. That many are the very same people who remember when everyone loved and respected them, and are only doing what governments and consumers said they wanted, is not often discussed. Can regenerative farming save them, and our soils?
Sarah Langford is the author of Rooted, How Regenerative Farming can Change the World. She’s also a farmer herself, although she didn’t start out that way. A must-listen Episode as a stand-alone, but for maximum inspo, listen back to the Eps on sustainable materials, animal cruelty, and leather supply chains when you're done!
Check out the shownotes for more links.
Don't forget to tell us what you think! Find us on Instagram @mrspress @thewardrobecrisis
Thank you for listening!
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There's much debate around the sustainability credentials of leather vs vegan alternatives (most of which are still PU - polyurethane). Is one natural and bio-degradable and the other simply plastic? Sorry, but it's not that simple, not least because today's global supply chains are so long and complex. Then there's all the toxic substances used in conventional tanning. And we haven't even talked about animal cruelty yet. But amidst the confusion, there are obviously better ways to do it than cutting down the Amazon to graze cattle, then drenching the hides in heavy metals.
Meet British accessories designer turned local leather supply chain builder, Alice Robinson. With her business partner Sarah Grady, Alice runs Grady & Robinson, a startup that’s trying to rebuild the local leather supply chain in the UK, in a totally traceable way, connecting regenerative farmers with processing and vegetable tanning in Britain.
Their goal is to offer a product that traceable to its farm source, made entirely in the UK, and biodegradable at end of life. That’s a big ask, because the industry has all but disappeared in Britain, so if you’re a emerging handbag designer – as Alice was when she was studying at the Royal College of Art a few years ago - and you want to buy single-origin leather locally, you pretty much can’t. This didn’t sit well with her, so as you will hear, Alice decided to do it herself - buying a sheep five miles away from her home in rural Shropshire, and documenting its entire journey from the field it lived in, through its slaughter, through to the tanning processes and accessories production.
If you're vegan and don't believe in using animal products, that works. But if you're still eating meat and wearing leather, you need to understand how it's made.
Today Grady & Robinson is working with Mulberry and the Institute for Creative Leather Technology at Northampton University, through the government supported R&D project, The Business of Fashion, Textiles and Technology to try to figure out a way to finish leather at a commercial scale in the UK, with ingredients that are known to be sustainable, natural and biodegradable.
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When it comes to the fabrics we make our clothes from, there’s much confusion. Many of us don’t have a clue what textiles we’re buying and wearing; we’re not really teaching it in schools and brands don’t tend to talk too much about it, not least because so many of the textiles they use are unsustainable synthetics.
But materials matter, and they are all around us. Getting back in touch with them can be really satisfying. And when it comes to creating a more sustainable fashion industry, their impact is enormous. What we choose, whether as designers or consumers, really makes a difference.
Amanda Johnston is an academic and former fashion designer who works on education projects for Sustainable Angle, which puts on the Future Fabrics Expos in London - the perfect person to take us through what’s happening in the world of sustainable textiles today.
Think of this as your Sustainable Textiles 101 go-to! We’re answering some of the popular questions we often get asked: How do you choose the most sustainable textiles? Why is the fashion industry still so dependent on polyester, and why is that a problem? What’s the story with MMCs (man-made cellulosics) and new gen feedstocks? Will biotech materials start to take over? And what do we think about the boom in vegan leather alternatives?
Check out the shownotes for more links.
Don't forget to tell us what you think! Find us on Instagram @mrspress @thewardrobecrisis
Thank you for listening!
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Why are animals so often left out of the conversation about sustainable and ethical fashion? We talk about people and planet, but less often about our fellow living creatures. This week's guest Emma Hakansson wants to change that. She challenges us to rethink the idea of animals as commodities - they are, she says, someone, not something.
Emma is the founder of Collective Fashion Justice, an organisation that puts animals as well as people and planet at the heart of an ethical fashion industry. A self-described “activist, passionate about anti-speciesism, autonomy and collective liberation,” Emma is also an author, her books include How Veganism Can Save Us (Survive the Modern World)and she was one of the producers of, and also appears in the documentary, Slay.
In this interview, we zero in on leather. “By the time it has been turned into a bag, a pair of shoes, a belt or a jacket, we tend to forget it, leather is skin,” says Emma. “Thanks to long supply chains, the power of the global leather industry and big luxury brands, plus the pretty language used to market fancy handbag materials, most of us never think about how leather is produced. As with supermarket meat and dairy products, we’ve totally disassociated from its origins." Emma believes cruelty should never be in style. She’d like us to check our morals, and ask ourselves how comfortable we really are treating animals as a commodity.
Whatever your view on that, the way that most leather is produced in such high volumes today is an environmental nightmare, she says, while its supply chains conceal as much social injustice as cut-and-sew does for the garment industry - it just gets less attention.
Check out the shownotes for more links.
Don't forget to tell us what you think! Find us on Instagram @mrspress @thewardrobecrisis
Thank you for listening!
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