Bringing true environmental justice to the fashion industry — that is, prioritizing not only the protection of our planet but also the most marginalized and endangered people on it — requires more than changing the way clothing is made and consumed.
Changing the way fashion is taught is essential to pushing the industry to embrace a new approach, said Ugandan designer Bobby Kolade, who started a brand that reuses discarded secondhand clothing from the West that would otherwise have ended up in African landfills.
“I literally had to unlearn all that I had learned,” said Kolade, who worked for luxury fashion houses before starting his brand. “I had to open myself up to a new way of producing. We all need to unlearn and start from scratch and embrace the idea of reusing textiles.”
Traditional means of teaching fashion are heavily rooted in overconsumption of textiles. Like in most fashion design houses, fabrics and other materials used to teach drafting, cutting, draping, and sewing techniques are often bought in bulk or by the bolt. What isn’t used is thrown away. The focus is on the final garment design, not the waste that is created in the process.
Katherine Kloczkowski, a student at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, showed off a design created out of an old curtain during a class on sustainable fashion, Oct. 24. (Nathan Klima for The Boston Globe)
UNDERLAY: Naturally dyed yarn. (Adobe)
Even when the fashion design reality competition show “Project Runway” challenged contestants to design garments out of reused components — such as pet supplies or items salvaged from a trash dumpster — those challenges were deemed “unconventional.”
Reimagining how fashion is taught to center on environmental justice can mean going back to basics — all the way back.
“A woman from Angola who I worked with years ago said to me that she’d never heard of sustainability until she came to Custom Collaborative,” said Ngozi Okaro, executive director of Custom Collaborative, an organization that trains and supports women of diverse racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds as they embark on careers in sustainable fashion.
“She said, ‘This is what we do and what we have been doing at home all the time, we just don’t have a name for it,’ ” Okaro recalled.
Sustainability isn’t a new concept. Using organic, naturally biodegradable fabrics, employing dyeing techniques that require neither massive amounts of water nor harmful chemicals, and engaging in skilled craftsmanship that produces quality, longwearing textiles are things people in Indigenous communities around the world have been doing since the beginning of humankind.
“What is needed to recenter fashion in a place of sustainability doesn’t require anything special or new,” Okaro told me. “Indigenous people have been stewards of fashion sustainability for a long time. So one thing that would be good for the industry to do is bring those people in so that we can hear and learn from them.”
The fashion industry, like most institutions in 2020, reassessed racial justice within its ranks after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers refocused the issue worldwide. A recent report by McKinsey on the state of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the fashion industry found that an overwhelming majority of fashion professionals of color report that their employers value racial diversity in their workplaces and more than half have DEI programs.
Still, the report found that 50 percent of employees of color surveyed said the fashion industry is not equally accessible to all qualified candidates. The majority of Black and LGBTQ fashion professionals surveyed said there is greater inaccessibility to the industry.
Their perceptions match reality. According to the McKinsey data, only 16 percent of the fashion industry C-suite-level positions are held by people of color, though 32 percent of entry-level positions are. And while white men make up only 26 percent of entry-level positions in the apparel industry, they make up 54 percent of C-suite-level posts.
As Maison De Mode cofounder and CEO Hassan Pierre put it: “It’s impossible to talk about sustainability without mentioning the humans who are often BIPOC and overlooked and the living conditions of these workers who are in charge of producing many of our fashion garments.”
The industry needs to have greater representational diversity in positions where crucial operational decisions are made in order to ensure it has a better eye on who is most impacted by those decisions. That means greater diversity is needed throughout the fashion industry, from company C-suites to ateliers, and retail to manufacturing.
As in many industries, that diversity is hampered by gatekeeping that has long been entrenched in the fashion industry, beginning with fashion educational institutions. The world’s top fashion schools are not only competitive but pricey.
The racial wealth gap further expands the barrier to entry for young people, Okaro said. This is particularly true for those racially and socioeconomically marginalized people who cannot afford to go to fashion schools or take unpaid internships at design houses. That is one reason Custom Collaborative takes an innovative approach: It pays participants in its programs.
“One way to remove barriers to entry is we pay people a stipend while they are in a training program,” Okaro said. “Our program is free, but we recognize that we are working with people who are resource-challenged. We pay for them to be able to participate with a stipend and transportation costs. For this type of training to work, we have to be intentional about how we do it.”
While younger, more diverse designers increasingly place environmental justice at the core of their values, fashion schools and industry makers have been slow to catch up.
The lack of diverse leadership at the top has trickled down to the way fashion is not only manufactured but taught, said Whitney McGuire, cofounder of Sustainable Brooklyn, an organization created to refocus the sustainability movement on equity. It was started by McGuire and Dominique Drakeford out of their frustration about not only the industry’s “greenwashing,” or giving mere lip service to sustainability, but also whitewashing.
“I was becoming jaded with the lack of accessibility to information about equity and sustainability,” said McGuire, who at the time was working as a labor lawyer in the fashion space.
So she and Drakeford started holding their own workshops, open to people of diverse backgrounds with an interest in connecting, networking, and refocusing the conversation about fashion sustainability around communities of color. The events were designed to gauge whether there would be enough interest to expand into something more.
“When I first started teaching, there was very little information out there for the public about sustainability,” Varekamp said. “I had to coax students into the class.
Now, they get it. Students aren’t just open to it, they are thirsty for it.”
That should give us hope for the future of an industry that has been reluctant to change, because staying on the same path is not an option.
“Clothing is one of the basic necessities of life,” Varekamp said. “We’re always going to need it. This is something we all have to have. So we need to think about how to do this better.”
Maison De Mode cofounder and CEO Hassan Pierre, in sunglasses, attended a runway show in New York City in 2018. (Mike Vitelli/BFA.com)
Whitney McGuire and Dominique Drakeford cofounded Sustainable Brooklyn, an organization created to refocus the sustainability movement on equity. (Timothy Smith)
Jennifer Varekamp, chair of the fashion design department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, taught a class on sustainable fashion on Oct. 24. (Nathan Klima for The Boston Globe)
Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a columnist for the Globe. She may be reached at kimberly.atkinsstohr@globe.com. Follow her @KimberlyEAtkins.
Editors: Marjorie Pritchard and Amy MacKinnon
Designer/Photo Editor/Project Manager: Heather Hopp-Bruce
Digital Editor: Rami Abou-Sabe
Copy Editor: Jessie Tremmel
Developer: Andrew Nguyen
B
By Kimberly Atkins Stohr
Fashion students are focused on threats to the climate as well as racial and social justice. Schools need to catch up.
A new
sketchbook
PART 5
NOT SO FAST, FASHION
Read more about Bobby Kolade in Part 3: Rags
to runway
Read more about Bobby Kolade in Part 3: Rags
to runway
Designing woman
From wardrobe to waste
Rags to runway
Reduce, repair, respect
A new sketchbook
+ What you can do
Not so fast, fashion
Series
The first sustainability symposium hosted by Sustainable Brooklyn. (Sustainable Brooklyn)
“We can’t move toward the future until we understand the way the fashion industry mirrors our colonial past,” McGuire said. “The extractive habits, not just when it comes to the labor of [BIPOC people] but also the extraction of our ideas and braintrust — that is all inherently embedded in the way things are done.”
Part of that problem of extraction involves “hiding the ball,” McGuire said. “By that I mean not allowing agency for people who have been makers and invested in sustainability for generations to even acquire success and wealth or at least find opportunities for partnerships.”
Jennifer Varekamp, professor and chair of the fashion design department at Massachusetts College of Art and cofounder of the Sustainable Fashion Collaborative of Boston, said the next generation of students is far more focused on both threats to climate as well as racial and social justice.
Yoshiko Ogura, 73, washed an indigo-dyed handkerchief in front of her studio in Japan. Ogura uses dye produced from indigo plants. (Chisato Tanaka/AP)
Clothing designer Max Kingery sat as clothes dyed naturally using wild mustard hung on a rack in his shop in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
BELOW: Miguel Garcia pushed a wheelbarrow filled with nopales, or prickly pear cacti pads, into his family’s greenhouse east of Mexico City. Garcia’s family specializes in the production of red cochineal dye that comes from the crushed bodies of tiny female insects that contain carminic acid and feed on the pads of nopal cactus plants. (Eduardo Verdugo/AP)
Students design at the 2023 Medellin Fashion Week in Medellin, Colombia.
Models walked the runway wearing Parsons School of Design MFA student designs at a benefit in New York City in 2023.
Student designs at the Melbourne Fashion Week (left) and a benefit in New York City in 2023.
A student design at the 2023 Melbourne Fashion Week in Melbourne.
Click on a thumbnail
(FREDY BUILES/AFP via Getty Images)
(Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Parsons School of Design)
(WILLIAM WEST/AFP via Getty Images, Noam Galai/Getty Images for Parsons School of Design)
(William West/AFP via Getty Images)
+ What you can do
Rags to runway
Reduce, repair, respect
From wardrobe to waste
Designing woman
Not so fast, fashion
Designing woman
From wardrobe to waste
Rags to runway
Reduce, repair, respect
A new sketchbook
+ What you can do
Not so fast, fashion
Series
B
+ What you can do
A new sketchbook
Rags to runway
Reduce, repair, respect
Designing woman
From wardrobe to waste
Not so fast, fashion
Editors: Marjorie Pritchard
and Amy MacKinnon
Designer/Photo Editor/Project Manager: Heather Hopp-Bruce
Digital Editor: Rami Abou-Sabe
Copy Editor: Jessie Tremmel
Developer: Andrew Nguyen
Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a columnist for the Globe. She may be reached at kimberly.atkinsstohr@globe.com. Follow her @KimberlyEAtkins.
“We had standing room only,” McGuire said. “We saw how organic connections were being made, and we knew this could have an impact.”
The organization grew to hold workshops for fashion professionals, climate activists, young people, and even educators. The topics focused not just on modern sustainability efforts but an understanding of the impact that colonialism and racism still have on the fashion industry — including the way the push for profits has harmed the earth.
Join the conversation
Join the conversation
On Boston Globe Today
Kimberly Atkins Stohr and host Segun Oduolowu discuss the project.
On Say More
Kimberly Atkins Stohr and podcast host Shirley Leung talk in “Cute Top. It's killing the planet.”
On Boston Globe Today
Kimberly Atkins Stohr and host Segun Oduolowu discuss the project.
On Say More
Kimberly Atkins Stohr and podcast host Shirley Leung talk in “Cute Top. It's killing the planet.”