In November, Cohort 4 BGFer Lu attended the first Festival of Sustainable Fashion in London. Here she reflects on her experience of the day:
The event was really good! I gained lots of insight into sustainable companies in and around London such as Juta Shoes, who make all their footwear by hand and from materials such as leather that is up-cycled from local factory offcuts!
I met and talked with the founder of the app Zwich, which allows you to swap clothes, hence reducing the amount of clothes going directly into landfill and giving the item a new home.
There was also an interesting presentation from a company called Off Set Textiles, who explore using natural resources to create fabrics. For example, they use bananas to make cotton and pineapple for silk!
I found lots of rather shocking stats about the impact of the fashion industry, for instance that textile production produces 1.2 billion tonnes of green house emissions annually. Finding even more about the negative impact clothing production has on the environment gives me even more drive to do as much as possible to reduce my individual impact on this issue and help others reduce theirs too.
Overall, a great event with lots of inspiring people who feel passionately about sustainability in the fashion industry.
