welcome you to today's thursday lunchtime event  and so today we've gathered together a brilliant  

panel of fashion makers and thinkers from across  the uk and i'm from across the pond and really  

special thank you to lillian for joining us so  bright and early from new york this morning um  

so our clothing system has enormous impacts and  in the wake of prop 26 this conversation feels  

even more urgent and i can't wait to hear from our  expert panel today on how we can push fashion to  

be even more ambitious ambitious and achieve more  holistic goals so when we think about transforming  

fashion we often think about the sustainability  strategies of big brands and global supply chains  

but for today's conversation we're going to start  in a slightly different place and look at some  

very practical and locally based work which is  taking a regenerative approach to growing change  

in our landscape and in our communities before we  kind of zoom out and look at the wider change this  

might signal for the industry and so we're going  to hear a short kind of scene setting statements  

from each of our panelists um and in turn and  then we'll have a conversation together and so  

if you're interested in finding out more about the  rsa's work on regenerative design and fashion in  

particular then please check out the links in the  youtube chat and you can also get involved in the  

conversation on twitter using the hashtag join the  regeneration and we're really looking forward to  

hearing um any contributions you have to make  and we've got to get a lot to get through today  

so let's get started and and first up it's my real  pleasure to introduce justine olderz williams so  

justine is a creative activist our textile artisan  and educator specializing in botanical dyeing  

and she's director of the wild diary where she  devises rewilding rituals that reconnect people  

with natural fibres and colours they extend the  life of their clothing and she's also the founder  

of northwest fiber shed which is a collective  of professionals developing a decentralized  

regenerative textile system so justine thanks  so much for joining us today it's really great  

to have you and and i'm going to hand over to you  to introduce yourself a bit more about your work  

okay yeah well you mentioned i'm a natural  textile dyer and founder of fibre shed we are  

developing a regenerative textile  system in northwest england but  

i want to kind of go a little bit more  deeply into that term regenerative and  

what my understanding of that is um and  to kind of contextualize so to me it means  

restoring our life support system so that it can  restore us and right now this means giving back  

more than we take from the planet but  ultimately it means living in right relationship  

or symbiosis with our environment to make it more  understandable to myself one of my mentors claire  

dubois is the founder of the reforestation  charity tree sisters she says that humanity  

needs to evolve from being a consumer species to a  restorer species and how people interpret the term  

regenerative depends on where they currently  stand on this consumer restore a continuum  

for example the default extractor consumer mindset  will tend to reduce commodify and capitalize  

on the concept of regenerative fashion a term  which to my mind is a bit of an oxymoron anyway  

in order to keep business as usual and  perpetuate an economic system which has caused  

supply and prices by being degenerative at the  other end of this continuum we have the restorers  

who preserved their wildlife and soil  health i'm really struck by the statistic  

from national geographic that states that it's  indigenous cultures who make up just five percent  

of the global population who are preserving  80 percent of the world's biodiversity  

now organizations like fibre sheds that  i'm involved in honor this indigenous these  

indigenous origins of regenerative practice  and are implementing solutions that actively  

restore rather than merely sustaining or  worse destroying our planet and that ethos  

focuses on using local fibres local dyes and local  labor because massive amounts of environmental and  

social exploitation can be reduced or eliminated  by regionalizing or downsizing manufacturing  

so for example in relation to clothing  manufacturers working regeneratively might involve  

divesting from fossil fuel derived synthetic  materials that currently make up about 70 of  

all clothing produced to instead use renewable  natural fibers and dyes grown in ways that draw  

carbon out of our overheated atmosphere back into  our depleted soils and to do this we need textile  

props integrated into our food farming systems  um crucially using carbon farming techniques  

then when we have these textile crops we need  the processing equipment to bring it to market  

and make it viable now in my work with northwest  england fibre shed i'm collaborating with patrick  

grant from social enterprise community clothing  who you might know better as a judge on the bbc's  

great british selling bee and also super slow way  who are an arts commissioning organization that  

run the british textile biennial and we've been  working this year on a project called homegrown  

homespun to start developing a regenerative soil  to soil textile system here in the heartland of  

british textiles in northwest england um we've  started but from the ground up by planting two  

of the uk's forgotten vibrant dye crops flax  and woad on urban land in blackburn and the main  

challenge has been um to bring these textile crops  back to uk is a loss of skills and there are no  

linen processing facilities in the entire country  anymore you can't process it and you can't spin it  

in this country so in our prototype year  we did everything by hand the way our  

pre-industrial ancestors did it um and really  this this kind of begs the question to me of  

why have generations for thousands of  years been empowered with the skills of  

self-sufficiency and survivalism to make their  own clothing one are so clever civilization  

in this culture can't do that it's incredibly  difficult to work sustainably and ethically  

in on the british isles right now because we just  don't have those facilities to to do so or the  

um the crops um which are no longer grown here  so we added to our challenge by trying to grow  

regeneratively and we've had advice from soil  scientists who are monitoring the effects  

on the soil health and biodiversity and we managed  to get from seed to cloth in less than six months  

and the cloth is now being exhibited in  blackburn museum until december the 18th  

and we happily have got funding to upscale  and reach our kind of second phase which  

is to bring the line of jeans to market through  patrick's um social enterprise community clothing  

in time for the next biennial in 2023 so  we're we're inspired by um sort of mid-scale  

production models like the harris tweed model we  envisage a linen industry in in the northwest and  

yeah that's where we're up to i mean i can i  can delve way more deeply into the huge amount  

of challenges um i think what's interesting  to me is this holds a massive potential the  

clothing industry has a massive potential to heal  the climate crisis if we listen very carefully to  

those who are most impacted by the climate  crisis and it's not just about the loss of  

manufacturing infrastructure there are actual  deeper ramifications to working regeneratively  

there is an emotional element to our mass  consumption that we need to tackle we can set up  

all these lovely systems but if people are still  driven to buy and waste because it's fulfilling  

some kind of emotional need that is set up by  our economic system that is going to perpetuate  

um in the long term the same sort of wastage  albeit um with better renewable materials so  

yeah it's it's a really intersectional interesting  discussion and i feel like i'm overrunning on  

time so i'm gonna round up and perhaps delve more  deeply during the questions thank you thank you so  

much and it was so there was so much in there that  we can pull out in the conversation and so we're  

looking forward to doing that and linking it up  with um others work too so next up um i'm going  

to introduce dr francesco mozarella francesco is  a senior lecturer in fashion and design for social  

change at the london college of fashion where  he works for the center for sustainable fashion  

exploring the ways in which design activism can  be used to create counter narratives towards  

sustainability in fashion and previously francesco  was ahrc design leadership fellow research  

associate at lancaster university with the aim to  support design research for change so it's really  

great to have you here today francesco and i'll  hand over you to talk a bit more about your work  

and perspectives on this topic yes uh thanks  rosie and hi everyone um as rosie said i and  

my work is in fashion and design for social change  and i use a design activism approach to design for  

sustainability at center for sustainable fashion  since the inception of the center we our ambition  

was to build a transformed fashion system towards  psychological social cultural and environmental  

um and economic sustainability but my approach  to uh design for sustainability it's to start  

from culture as an entry point to develop  a more personal authentic and perhaps even  

spiritual approach to design for sustainability  sustainability is a journey and mind starts from  

revitalizing cultural heritage but also tackling  social equalities and fostering social engagement  

but also to make local economies flourish and  enhance environmental stewardship i often work  

with marginalized and isolated communities and in  order to enable people to move from the feeling of  

hopelessness and feeling overwhelmed  in response to the climate emergency  

to instead gain voice and agency and become  agents of their own alternatives i also believe  

that there is a need to decolonize a fashion  and disenter sustainability which is very much  

grounded currently on anglo-saxon approaches to  sustainability but instead we need to also draw  

on indigenous knowledge and embed other sets  of values in the shaping of the regenerative  

fashion system to exemplify this i will try and  talk about a few projects i'm currently working  

on our centers for sustainable fashion i'm working  on the fashion values program in partnership with  

caring work business and ibm we are launching a  series of online free courses aimed at nurturing  

a regenerative mindset and also change making  capabilities within an international community of  

learners this year we launched a challenge asking  people how fashion can value nature and we have  

received a multi-simplicity of responses in terms  of fashion products services and systems that can  

contribute to the shifting to shifting from  an age of extraction to an age of regeneration  

and more central to my own work is the making for  change world and forest project on which i've been  

working on for the past years this project uses  fashion activism and reciprocal ways of making  

to create positive social change in an east london  borough and build long lasting legacies within the  

local community my approach in this is what i call  middle up down in fact to enable sustainability  

in communities sometimes governments or  ngos are adopting top-down strategies  

and delivering services but they often lack the  sensibility to address the specific needs and  

aspirations of communities and instead on  the other hand also bottom-up initiatives  

activating by communities often lack the resources  our infrastructure to become sustainable over time  

so my middle up down approach to this is to play  the role of a bridge between bottom up initiatives  

co-created with communities and services and  strategies delivered by top-down organizations  

such as local government in my project and in  this context i tend to activate change from within  

the system adopting a quiet or indirect form of  activism as a situated and embedded approach to  

co-design meaningful social change and from this  perspective i in response to what we need actually  

for social change to happen i need that i believe  that we need funding to support such initiatives  

but also moving beyond the well-recognized  role of the designer as a facilitator  

to also play the role of an activist that means  challenging the status quo and make things happen  

but we also need to work collaboratively across  different departments and not working in silos  

because we need holistic and systemic approaches  to tackle sustainability challenges and also  

create an infrastructure to sustain change and  support resilient communities thank you so much  

it's really exciting to hear about your  work and already seeing so many links um  

and with things that we're thinking about at the  rsa and things that justine has shared already  

and i'm sure that's going to continue and we  join um we're joined by alice robinson so um  

alice is a regenerative fashion designer whose  work has been shown at the london design festival  

the victorian albert museum and her collection  11458 was acquired by the v a in 2020 and she's  

a co-founder of gradient robinson where they're  developing an innovative and traceable new supply  

of vegetable-tanned leather made from the heights  of animals farmed on regenerative farms in the uk  

um and we were delighted to work with um alice  and also sarah her partner who took part in  

the rethink fashion program earlier this year  which was our learning journey that was held in  

partnership with the macarthur foundation so it's  really nice to see you again alice and over to you  

to share some more about your work thank you so  much for having me josie and thank you for the  

introduction so as jesus said um i'm co-founder  of a new venture called radio robinson to produce  

a new supply of leather um from the heights of  animals rage on a regenerative farms in the uk  

and really our goal is to forge a connection  between land stewardship and material culture  

um i have a design background an accessory  background and i felt uh the disconnection myself  

when i wanted to be able to sort of understand  the materials on this and the sources of them  

um when it came to creating my own work  um currently the leather industry is  

disconnected from farming in a way that there is  no opportunity for farmers to know or choose the  

destiny of the heights that the animals they've  raised go and there's no option for designers  

to know really anything about the life of the  animal that resulted in the leather they use  

um therefore my work explored ways in  which the leather industry intersects with  

farms and trading trying to investigate ways of  working more closely can strengthen these systems  

and even build new ones um we want to be able to  align design and therefore consumption with what a  

landscape is suited to produce and therefore  what raw materials it yields and therefore  

what the materials are that it offers and to  the extent in which um we have them at our hands  

um i really like the saying of kate fletcher says  that fiber follows food and i've really found that