Celebrities including Rihanna and Madonna descended on New York City for Fashion Week, where venues from the Guggenheim Museum to basketball courts in Brooklyn served as backdrops for glittering parades of designer fashion.
Ayesha Barenblat was not impressed. “It’s boring, y’all,” pronounced Barenblat, founder of Remake, a San Francisco-nonprofit focused on conscious fashion. “It’s all about overproduction. It’s all about pump, pump, pump. Sell, sell, sell.”
Barenblat presided over a decidedly different kind of fashion show on Tuesday evening: Remake’s annual “Walk your Values” show, where the models were fair wage activists and indie designers styled in vintage, or “pre-loved,” and upcycled ensembles.
“For the last decade, we have been centering the voices of garment workers and artisans, the millions of women that bring our fashion to life,” said Barenblat, who worked with fashion brands on sustainability and ensuring safe working conditions before founding Remake. “We must not forget them. We must honor them. We must platform them. We must give them voice.”
The fashion industry is finally waking up to the harmful effects of fast fashion and overconsumption— forced labor and poverty wages, mountains of discarded garments and environmental degradation. That is spurring more designers and consumers to rethink how they make and buy clothes.
Remake’s sold out show on a Lower East Side rooftop was among a smattering of Fashion Week events that are pointing the way to a more sustainable, ethical and inclusive fashion industry, one based on circularity, worker empowerment and the fresh styles of underrepresented designers.
Indigenous design
The evening before, a hip crowd gathered on another downtown rooftop for the Decolonizing Wealth Project’s Celebrating Indigeneity party showcasing Native American designers. Decolonizing Wealth’s Edgar Villanueva started the gathering four years ago to provide a place for emerging Indigenous designers to meet amid the Fashion Week hubbub.
At the time, Native designers including Jantay Kahm, Bethany Yellowtail, and Naiomi Glasses were gaining recognition. Glasses, for example, was the inaugural artist in residence at Ralph Lauren and designed three collections for the brand. The first ever Native Fashion Week took place in May in Santa Fe, New Mexico earlier this year.
“I see this as a narrative change opportunity, but also a wealth building opportunity for Natives in this industry and also issues that we care about, like climate sustainability,” Villanueva, clad in a vegan leather outfit made from cactus, told ImpactAlpha at the event.
In attendance were designers Kayla Lookinghorse-Smith, Korina Emmerich and Hud Oberly, Indigenous model Phillip Bread, artist and art historian Povi Romero, Native American content creator Nikki Apostolou, and Cara Jade Myers, a Native actress and writer who starred in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
Decolonizing Wealth Project also supports Indigenous leaders and land stewards through funds such as its Indigenous Earth Fund, which makes grants to groups working on conservation and climate justice issues. (The deadline to apply is Sept. 17)
Policy push
Many of the ethical fashion leaders see an opening to push for new laws and campaigns that nudge the industry towards more sustainable and ethical practices.
Remake, for example, has helped secure wages for workers and pushed for enforcement of fair wage laws. It has also promoted grassroots campaigns, such as it’s #NoNewClothes Challenge, which asks people to pledge to buy no new clothes, or only secondhand, for 90 days.
“The state of fashion is still largely broken, but we’re starting to see real momentum towards change,” said Rachel Kibbe of Circular Services Group, which advises brands such as The RealReal and Burberry on circular strategies to reduce waste.
The EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan bans the commonplace practice of destroying unsold clothing and attempts to rein in harmful practices that contribute to deforestation and other environmental degradation.
In the US, the proposed The Americas Trade and Investment Act would allocate $14 billion in incentives for textile recycling and reuse to promote a circular economy.
Another bill, the Fashioning Accountability and Building Real Institutional Change, or FABRIC Act, would set minimum hourly wages for America’s nearly 100,000 garment workers and hold fashion brands and retailers accountable, alongside their manufacturing partners, for workplace wage violations.
The US government, said Kibbe, who advocated for the Americas Act as part of a trade group, American Circular Textiles, sees the economic and job opportunities in the fashion industry, as well as supply chain and environmental benefits.
“It’s a real shift toward a more sustainable, ethical, and inclusive fashion industry.”
