Conscious Chatter is a podcast created by Kestrel Jenkins discussing sustainable fashion and 'where what we wear matters'. This podcast episode talks to Brittany Sierra who is the founder of The Sustainable Fashion Forum which is an annual event in Portland, America. The Sustainable Fashion Forum is a conference including speakers from brands and organisations such as Adidas, Nordstrom, Vogue as well sustainable certifications such as Fair Trade Certified. Brittany Sierra is a marketing and PR specialist and from working with many brands within the fashion industry she has a wide view of sustainable fashion from a brand and marketing point of view to a consumer.
The Sustainable Fashion Forum has now had 3 annual conferences. The event was originally part of the Design Week in Portland which was a local festival boosting events however due to the success of the first two years the conference event had grown significantly with guest such as Elle and Fashion Revolution.
Originally Brittany started the event to learn more about sustainable fashion after attending an sustainablity fashion show in Portland where designers where given a bag of left over fabric scraps and had to produce garments or a collection depending on what level they entered at. Brittany had always heard contradicting information about sustainable and ethical fashion and therefore wanted to create a community of other passionate individuals to create a learning community. Brittany prioritised building a community as an PR and marketing specialist- a main priority was creating a community between the brand and the consumer building a relationship.
‘Wanting to create a place where if your interested in this you can come and learn from people’ - Brittany on The Sustainable Fashion Forum
The podcast raised many questions including what Brittany had learnt from the event herself. A key point as mentioned earlier sustainable and ethical fashion is very contradicting. For example the use of certain materials such as using recycled plastic for garments may be seen as a sustainable and ethical alternative but others may not agree with the use of plastic at all due to the environmental consequences. Same for materials such as leather some may see leather as more sustainable then plastic alternatives which create cheaper faux leather but others may see leather as more sustainable due to it being a natural material and usually higher quality meaning it last longer which over all is one of the most important aspects of sustainable fashion : buying less but better quality to end the fast fashion cycle of over consumption. In 2018, around 350,000 tonnes of clothing was sent to landfill causing social issues as well as environmental issues.
Discussed in the podcast was the need for transparency among brands. Switching to more sustainable practices in the supply chain is a long and difficult process which is not always understood among the genral public. Many brands over the last few years have bought out capsule sustainable collections to test the products- there design possibility, quality, customer feed back and the sales etc however this is often perceived negatively as consumers just raise questions on why only one collection is sustainable but as Brittany discussed in the podcast the first individual sustainable collections are the first few steps into testing new materials, manufacturers ect and transparency can also lack along the supply chain meaning the origins of a fabric from the raw extraction may not be certain or the social equality in factories may not always be clear. The negative feedback perceived from sustainable collections may stop brands from carrying it further . This is why over all transparency is the most important aspect for brands to focus on sharing the process between each sustainable collection or garment to highlight the difficulties faced along the way and to educate the consumer to show how sustainability is not just a trend but a change in the whole supply chain.
Lastly Brittany discussed the small everyday changes we as consumers can make to become more sustainable and the key point mentioned was to start with you current wardrobe. By trying to wear each item more, practice re-styling items various different ways, looking what's missing in the wardrobe to build a staple wardrobe that can last through each fashion season. Garment care is also important as one of the biggest effects of over water consumption within in the fashion industry comes from garment care therefore efficiently washing your clothes aswell as keeping to schedules limits the number of washes which is really important.
I chose this source because it represents the importance of ethical and sustainable fashion for Textiles and Society. It shows how it is society's responsibility to help make the bigger changes over all. I have previously experimented with natural dying old fabric scraps to re-use and recycle and this is something that i can carry further - perhaps up-cycling clothes further of even studying designers that have bought out sustainable capsule collections to use as inspiration for outcomes.