WARDROBE CRISIS with Clare Press

On February 24th, Russia invaded Ukraine. The news headlines filled with terrifying stories of missile strikes on residential areas, hitting apartment buildings and killing civilians; of nuclear power plants being attacked and 1 million people fleeing country. What has fashion to do with all this? The morning that Russian President Vladimir Putin declared war was also the first day of Milan Fashion Week. And as the violence continued, so too did the fashion shows, next in Paris. Fashion’s Instagram feeds were unsettling mix of commentary on Kim Kardashian’s outfits and blue-and-yellow street style looks inspired by the Ukrainian flag. Some brands used their platforms to take a stand for peace. But solidarity only goes so far.How should fashion respond to war? What is our moral obligation? Saying you care about something is not the same as doing something about it, so beyond a social media post, how can an industry like fashion contribute meaningfully? Should brands the retailers impose their own sanctions on Russia and halt business there? What support do Ukrainian designers need? Is it okay not to speak out? And when does this become simply, as guest today puts it, common sense, or an expression of our common humanity.In this week’s Episode, Clare sits down with Venya Brykalin, fashion director of Vogue Ukraine to ask these questions and more. Want to help Ukraine? Please visit this website: https://how-to-help-ukraine-now.super.site/Thank you for listening. As usual, find further links and details on the shownotes on thewardrobecrisis.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does it mean to leave - voluntarily - your homeland, to make a new creative life in another country? How might the place you left behind and the new one you chose collide in your work? Thirty-five years after he left Koyoto and enrolled in East Sydney Technical College, with a big dream and small bag full of kimonos nicked off his mum, Akira Isogawa is an Australian national treasure. He's been the subject of major museum retrospectives, designed costumes for the ballet, and seen his work worn by supermodels, and championed by Vogue editors and influential buyers. But Akira is still as humble as they come.Clare sits down with the iconic Japanese-Australian fashion designer to discuss home, roots and the future, and past, of fashion. It’s a delightful conversation touching on the artist's creative journey and his collaborators, his long fascination with Japanese textiles and his approach to sustainability - which considers minimalism, recycling, repurposing and mending.Let us know what you think. Follow Clare on Instagram @mrspress @thewardrobecrisiswww.thewardrobecrisis.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have you heard about New York’s proposed sustainable fashion law? It’s called the Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act, and if it is passes those behind it say: this groundbreaking piece of legislation that will make New York the global leader in accountability for the $2.5 trillion fashion industry. Supporters include the likes of Stella McCartney and Jane Fonda.So, why do we need it?If New York were a country, it would rank as the world’s 10th largest economy, bigger than Canada, Russia and Korea. You already know that the global fashion industry has major climate impacts. It is responsible for around 4% of carbon emissions (some say 10%). Meanwhile, supply chains remain stubbornly opaque, garment and textile workers continue to get a raw deal and fashion waste is a major polluter. And New York, as an iconic commercial rag trade hub, has the potential to play a powerful role in transforming things.This week, Clare sits down with Maxine Bedat, founder of New Standard Institute, one of the driving forces behind the Act. They discuss how it came about, what it hopes to achieve and whether it's likely to fly. Maxine is sustainable fashion pioneer, formerly one half of Zady and last year she published her first book - Unravelled, The Life & Death of Garment.Let us know what you think. Follow Clare on Instagram @mrspress @thewardrobecrisiswww.thewardrobecrisis.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we sit down with New Yorker Mara Hoffman to find out how she turned her namesake brand into a sustainable fashion leader, what makes her tick - from astrology and to the inspirational beauty of Mother Earth, and being a mamma thinking about the next generation.The MH brand does a bunch of cool stuff, like working with natural dyes and regenerative agriculture projects. There’s even a peer-to-peer preloved Mara Hoffman marketplace called Full Circle. They also work with a local social enterprise called Custom Collaborative that provides jobs and training for from low-income and immigrant communities.In this warm discussion, Mara and Clare discuss why we still need physical stores and spaces to connect is in ways that aren’t quite the same online. The burden of physical stuff,  the responsibility that comes being a designer today. And plants! And SATC legend Patricia Field. Enjoy! Mara is tops. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do we really believe that we can pursue infinite growth on a finite planet? Why would we even want to?This week's guest is Tim Jackson, the ecological economist who wrote Post Growth, Life After Capitalism.It's a very persuasive argument for a complete rethink of how we define success, and why we need a new type of economy, one that prioritises relationships and meaning, over profits and power. Tim sees this book as "both a manifesto for system change and an invitation to rekindle a deeper conversation about the nature of the human condition.” Sound good?What that might look like practically? How could we get there? On this Episode, Tim and Clare discuss all this and more, from how advertising fuels overconsumption and why big companies are banking on green growth, to the future of work, what a single universal income could do for us, and even a bit of fashion – by way of an 18th century philosopher.Head to our website for further reading and links.We hope you enjoy this thought-provoking conversation! Please consider rating and reviewing in Apple podcasts, and sharing the show with your friends.You can find us on Instagram here, and here, and Clare on Twitter, here.Don't forget to hit subscribe! New Eps every Wednesday. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After two years of fashion weeks globally being more or less on pandemic pause, they're back. Last week the Paris couture shows drew crowds in the French capital. As we publish, Scandinavia is in the spotlight with Copenhagen's event. The big four are going ahead this month, albeit with a few big names missing and some format changes. London's will be a gender neutral digital-physical event, showing "menswear, womenswear and gender neutral collections" - after London Fashion Week Men's was cancelled in January. New York is planning with physical shows, despite Tom Ford having to cancel due to Omicron disruptions. And while the schedules for Milan and Paris womenswear have yet to be published, they are expected to include some heavy hitters, including Gucci in Milan. So, we ask – is this the start of everything going back to the way it used to be? Why shouldn’t it be? And what is the alternative? Do need fashion weeks at all? How can we reinvent them? What role could they play in sustainability? This week's guest is Cecilie Thorsmark, CEO of Copenhagen Fashion Week. Discover how she introduced pioneering new sustainability requirements as a condition of brands showing on the Danish runway, and what it takes to get the carbon footprint of an event like this down. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And you thought Zara was fast fashion! Buckle up because new trends are landing daily if not hourly, as a new breed of online disruptor throws out thousands of styles a week to see what sticks. Brands like Boohoo, Pretty Little Thing and Fashion Nova are part of a new ultra-fast fashion era, but Shein is by far the biggest player.Worth a reported $47 billion, the Chinese company is now the biggest selling fast fashion brand in the US. But how does it work? What's the secret to its giant reach? And just how many items does it drop in a week?In our first episode for Series 7, host Clare Press sits down with the American journalists Meaghan Tobin and Louise Matsakis who, along with Beijing-based Wency Chen, spent six months looking into this, from every possible angle. From speaking to garment workers and interviewing shoppers to tracking down one young TikTok user who saw her vintage vest morph into thousands of copies, taking her personal photo along for the ride - without her permission.Let us know what you think. Follow Clare on Instagram @mrspress @thewardrobecrisiswww.thewardrobecrisis.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You've probably heard about degrowth, which is: "a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being." (If this idea is new to you, have a listen to Episode 135 with economist Jason Hickel).Question: is it time to apply such thinking more specifically to the fashion industry? What would that look like?This week's podcast presents the ideas of a new fashion activist organisation called Fashion Act Now (FAN), born out of Extinction Rebellion. They are calling for "a radical defashion future" - their interpretation of: "the role fashion must play in degrowth. It is a transition to post-fashion clothing systems that are regenerative, local, fair, nurturing and sufficient for the needs of communities."They argue that the current system - which they call Fashion with a capital 'F' - is not only environmentally unsustainable because it's addicted to overproduction, but, in its current form, morally bankrupt being built on oppression."Defashion may sound negative," says FAN co-founder and former fashion journalist Bel Jacobs, "but we think of it as a movement of joy, possibility, liberation. It does not mean the end of beautiful clothing."On this podcast, you will hear from Jacobs, along with her fellow FAN co-founder, the activist Sara Arnold; Extinction Rebellion co-founder (a former fashion designer herself) Clare Farrell; anthropologist Sandra Niessen (who has researched the clothing and textile tradition of the Batak people of Sumatra, Indonesia, for almost 40 years); fashion museum curator and founder of Denier Shonagh Marshall; and New York-based stylist Samantha Weir.To take the Fashion Act Now pledge, see here.Follow them on Instagram here.Head over to https://thewardrobecrisis.com/podcast/2021/12/6/ep-152-fashion-act-now-is-time-to-defashion to read yours and #bethechangeThank you for listening to Wardrobe Crisis. Find the shownotes here.This is the final Episode of Series 6. See you in January 2022 for Series 7!Don't be a stranger - follow Clare on Instagram @mrspress @thewardrobecrisiswww.thewardrobecrisis.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

More than half of all the textiles use today are polyester. You will definitely have poly in your wardrobe, even if you prefer natural fibres. Synthetics are lurking everywhere, whether as polyester, nylon, or blends mixed with cotton. Poly is cheap, ubiquitous and it's not going away any time soon. It's also made from fossil fuels, doesn't biodegrade and most of it ends up as waste.Cyndi Rhoades believes recycled is the answer.A UK-based, US-raised activist turned entrepreneur, she founded Worn Again Technologies (originally called Worn Again) in 2005 - determined to make a difference and create a business out of solving the challenge of textiles ending up in landfill or incineration.Initially, she looked to upcycling. “It was really hard it make it work at scale, but also ultimately we weren’t solving the problem of textile waste," she says. "Once these second-life products were used, they would end up in landfill anyway. So we were only postponing textiles going to landfill. It made us realise that recycling at a molecular level was the solution.”From her formative days in London's early 2000s sustainable fashion scene, to living on a barge off-the-grid today, Cyndi has a long view on how this space has evolved and what's coming next.Ever wondered how virgin polyester is actually made? Did you know the recycled kind is almost always made from recycled plastic bottles, not textiles? How sustainable is it? How do we decide? It is greenwashing? Can we really make fashion circular? What would that look like? Why is it taking so damn long? This Episode is like a masterclass in material-to-material recycling.Head over to https://thewardrobecrisis.com/podcast/2021/10/16/ep-151-whats-the-story-with-recycled-polyester-cyndi-rhoades-from-worn-again-explains-all to read yours and #bethechange Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are you unwittingly contributing to waste colonialism via your wardrobe choices? What happens to our unwanted clothes when we donate them? Overproducing and underusing clothes has far-reaching consequences, as this week's guest Liz Ricketts of The Or Foundation explains.Each week, around 15 million pieces of secondhand clothing arrive in the Kantamanto second-hand clothing market in Accra, Ghana - and 40% goes to waste.This is the story of how your old shirt or dress or pants might end up clogging drains in Accra. Or form part of a heavy rope of textiles in the ocean, or lurking under the sand like some dystopian synthetic sea monster. Or smouldering on a waste mountain in an informal dump that’s been on fire months.It doesn’t have to be this way - maybe your old clothes will get fixed up and sold on to live another life. It’s complicated, as are the solutions.What do you think? Let us know! We're on Instagram @mrspress and @thewardrobecrisis, and on Twitter @mrspressHead over to https://thewardrobecrisis.com/podcast/2021/9/29/ep-150-liz-ricketts-waste-colonialism-dead-white-mans-clothes to read yours and #bethechange Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.