The problem with gratitude journalling is it’s insular; you’re just telling yourself what you appreciate. (Cats! Sunshine! That I didn’t shout at anyone yet today!) This is different.

Tell the person behind the product or experience you like. You’ll make their day.

I just read a trade press article about the polarisation that’s going on in retail right now, with ultra-fast online crap at one end, and luxury brands on the other. It’s a structural shift that’s hollowing out the centre, where high street retailers - but also, price-wise, many sustainable small businesses - sit. This feels globally relevant, no? How people are either saving up for a status thing, or dropping cash on plastic tat from online marketplaces, leaving scraps for more reasonable offerings.

Then I happened upon the sobering news that half of independent Australian bookshops are projected to close within a decade. HALF! Oh no!! To me this is tragic stuff. But if the default is to order on Amazon, what do we expect? Certainly there are complex factors at play (fewer readers, rising rents, staff and insurance costs etc) but don’t discount the shoppers’ role. That would be disingenuous. Every time you buy a book from Amazon, you are giving Jeff Bezos money that could have been better spent at Pages of Hackney or Glebe Books.

“Difficult times always bring the best creativity,” wrote on Pt. 1 of this series, the one where I wondered if fashion isn’t, well, over. Big fashion, I meant. Not the indies, the small stuff with soul, on which this missive is focused. But what Juanita wrote was so cute & on point, I put it on a post-it on my office wall: “There are too many talented artisans, designers and creatives for fashion to die. She’s just having a lie down and been replaced by generic trite.”

I love this image of Fashion (she/her) having a much-needed lie down while the despicable multi-national, patriarchal, greed-fulled nonsense has its moment.

This too shall pass.

Meanwhile, let’s turn our attention elsewhere.

In my dreams, the Four Graces - Fashion, Creativity, Artisans & Designers - are taking their well-deserved rest beneath this Tuscan rose organic cotton Rosette Quilt from Lazybones. I mean, hello! I feel revived already, don’t you? Lazybones is small ethical independent brand, based near Byron Bay. They work with a GOTS-certified small factory in India to make lovely things, and distribute to a bunch of indie boutiques. IDK about you, but I’d rather buy my sheets from them than some faceless Target brand.

While I was eviscerating Everlane recently, for selling out, I kept thinking about Nick Savaidis. Kept meaning to say: don’t waste your time lamenting the demise of a Silicon Valley fashion brand, or shopping their sale in the hope of snapping up that last non-tainted Tee before the Shein money floods in. Just shop from Nick’s People + Planet First verified social enterprise Etiko instead. Proudly based in Boronia, in Mebourne’s eastern burbs.

Nick’s been quietly plugging away at transparency for years. He started his fair trade “apparel alternative for the conscious consumer” back in 2005; to call him a pioneer is an understatement. I’ve known him for years and he’s always supported my work and never asked anything in return. He should! Because Nick, we appreciate you, and your integrity, you really walking the talk while others make more noise, probably get more credit but don’t do half of what you do. That’s all!

Theory, in practice

In Episode 274 of TWCP, I interview revolutionary thinker Helena Norberg-Hodge.

She is the founder of Local Futures, an international nonprofit set up to promote ideas around a new economy. They say it’s rooted in nature, community and the deeper meaning that makes life whole. This isn’t just philosophy; it’s practical stuff. A roadmap that people are already following.

On the pod she explains that rejecting the consumer monoculture means “going smaller, going slower. It’s about decentralising or localising.” But, and this is key, “to do that as effectively as possible, we need global collaboration and international exchange.”

Globalisation, she argues, is a corporatised sell-out, and we should resist it, and look locally to the diversity of brilliant solutions we have where we are. Yet we don’t have to hide away in our metaphorical villages refusing to see the wider world. This resonates so strongly with me.

Helena decodes how globalisation came about, how it came to shape the dominant narrative and who, ultimately, it benefits. Don’t believe the development myth. The spoils always go to the most powerful. Big business gets bigger, corporations lobby governments to win tax breaks and shape trade deals. Meanwhile, I pay more tax than Mark Zuckerberg.

I really do recommend you listen to this one in full - it’s so rich with ideas and advice on how to build a new system. Suffice to say here, Helena brings a powerful argument focusing on what is local to us.

I could be here all day listing brilliant small businesses around the world, but given our theme: I’ll pick a few more more from Australia.

Like upcomer Niamh Galea’s buzzing Sydney store/workroom on South Dowling St, where she sews, parties, & dresses edgy fashion girlies in frills and slogan tees. Niamh studied at Parsons but is going her own way without worrying what the fashion establishment thinks. Like Nicol & Ford on Australia St, Newtown, who pretty much wrote the book on that.

How about Kara Baker, who makes timeless silken things for Melbourne glamazons, in such impeccable quality it fairly dazzles. And it’s fun! I went to her 50th anniversary show in 2023, jampacked with her fashion friends, everybody whooping and dressed to the nines. Better than Paris fashion week! Although, in fact, comparison is beside the point. It is its own thing.

Or Sardine Supply, also in Melbourne, where husband & wife duo Gemma & Jim are making small batch denim pieces - equal parts personality and integrity.

Or Post Sole Studio (above). Oh my! Breeze Powell is a real shoemaker, handcrafting each pair in her Abbotsford studio. And they’re bloody marvellous things. How fantastic that artistic shoemakers are still plying their craft in this country! Talking of which, don’t forget the OG Preston Zly - classically trained, they make to order with a small team in Bali, but prototype their sculptural designs by hand in their Melbourne workroom. See here.

(Shall I just move to Melbourne, already?!)

I also love Tasmania. Try Spotted Quoll in Launceston. Here, Tamika Bannister employs a team of nine in a womenswear micro-factory down the road from her charismatic shop, which also stocks the work of local craftspeople (like these fab lichen earrings by Hulley Jewllery). Pattern-making and sewing is done in-house. She used to have a store in Hobart as well, but it got too much managing both.

I just saw that she’d re-posted a carousel (see here) on Insta about the challenges of small biz, so called her up on a whim to ask what keeps her going. And she took the time to answer, even though we’ve never actually met & she had people in the shop because that’s the thing with small biz, isn’t it? You multi-task.

“In 2010 I left the corporate word and wanted to do something in the sustainable, slow fashion space, in Tassie, to help promote small makers on the island, and also to capture the essence of our natural wild places,” she told me.

Spotted Quoll are known for their exclusive nature-inspired prints, which Tamika commissions from local artists. “They’re all printed onto certified organic fibres like cotton, linen and hemp,” she says. “And we have our own in-house clothing designer, Sally, focused on designing for real women, so it’s size inclusive, perfect for the capsule wardrobe.”

“Why does it matter? We’re genuinely invested in our community. We care about the local people because we are the local people. We’re always looking for ways to be better and do better, but it’s not really about the money. Let’s be honest, small business is never really about the money!” she says.

“We tick over, we’re alright, and we love what we do. If it was about the money I’d be back in sales and marketing earning 3 times what I do now! But I’m employing people, I’m giving back to my community and we’re creating this goodness down here at the ends of the Earth that we’re shipping all around the world, from Canada to Singapore. It’s local but it’s not insular.”

Just like Helena Norberg said.

“Plus I do believe we need businesses like ours, when you see how much the likes of Shein is pumping out, poisoning the planet,” she said, before she hung up.

Spotted Quoll is the antidote.

Use it or lose it

To conclude: You will each have your local treasures.

Small business is tough. There are a thousand reasons why these people who share their gifts with us might choose not to bother in future. If you want a flourishing abundance of locally unique, properly human goodness where you live, please support them.

If you value neighbourhoods anchored by small shops, craftspeople, indie cafes, florists, sandwich shops, antiques stores, then indeed you must support them.

The cost of living crisis is real. The stats are nuts. People are struggling to afford food, power, rent, travel. It goes without saying that not everyone can afford to splash cash on artisanal gorgeousness every week. Sometimes the cheapest option is a necessity. DO NOT FEEL GUILTY about that (but do vote to #taxbillionaires).

And friends, let us not kid ourselves. Many of us are still over-consuming unethical discretionary goods and future landfill, while giving our money & time to Claude and ChatGpt and Amazon Prime.

I don’t begrudge you that stuff, but I do want to encourage you, next time, you’re considering new sheets or T-shirts or shoes or a gift for your mamma, to shop local.

In the meantime, let’s all do that appreciation message thing. Tell me how you go.

Clare xx

P.S. As you know this Substack powers the pod, which is ad-free and earns me zero bucks. I picked the people featuredabove somewhat randomly from my personal connections, none of this is advertorial or any kind of partnership. Some of them are paid subscribers (if that’s you, THANKS!), most not. There are endless others I could’ve included, but I can’t do everything. That said, if you have a sustainable small biz you’d like to get the word out about, please please do use the Comments below. Share the love! I was also thinking, shall I do another one of those Listeners’ Choice podcast episodes - last done back in 2021 where I invited listeners to pitch me then invited some on the show. Listen back here and here. I’m a small business too I guess, though I see myself in different terms, truth be told. More like starving artist. Writer person. Talker. Anyway, I do love love, so send some my way - help share this letter :)

I kid you not.

Another day, another corporate sustainability hero hits the news for all the wrong reasons. Friends, you’d be forgiven for feeling a tad jaded.

I do want to point out that we’re talking large companies here, either publicly listed or private equity-backed for the most part. Patagonia is a special case; they say Earth is their only shareholder - see here. Nevertheless, it’s valued at $3 bn. The small players are a different class - I’ll get to why they are the future in Pt 3. But first…

Rewind

“I always wanted to make a difference,” says Michael Preysman.

It’s 2019, and the Everlane founder is telling me about growing up in Sunnyvale, California where he biked to school “and it was pretty idyllic. We had 13 different types of fruit trees in our backyard.”

Sunnyvale is where the gaming industry was born, with Atari back in 1972. Big tech followed. Preysman describes the “West Coast mentality … that being open and honest will get you further”, the history of Silicon Valley and the thrill of possibility he felt as a kid.

“Anything as possible, right?” says Presyman. “Because you went from cherry and apricot orchards and picking berries to all of a sudden Apple popping up, and Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Sun Microsystems. Some of the largest companies in the technology world, Facebook, Instagram, and you see it all happen and you say, hey, I can do anything.”

When we meet, Everlane is valued at US $200 million and occupies 21,000 square feet of prime San Fran office space, where the standing avocado order for the staff kitchens runs to 100 a week. Pretty idyllic.

Everybody loves Everlane, and their disruptive vision for a new kind of fashion company built around “radical transparency”. The idea was born out of Preysman’s own frustrations with apparel retail; how brands could sell a $50 T-shirt as premium, when it turns out it only cost $7 to produce.

He’d make his own, he decided, DTC, marked up only 2.5x and pushing that transparency to the limits. He’d tell his customers how much profit he made, the price of his materials and logistics, where his factories are and exactly how they operate. All this began in 2011, but after Rana Plaza the whole transparency thing felt even more relevant - and needed.

Does Preysman see Everlane as a tech company? No, he tells me. “We’re digitally enabled…it helps the information flow” but at the end of the day it’s a design company, he stresses. “We think about: how do we design stories to customers, how do we design product, how do we design everything so that it’s clear and more honest to the customer.”

He means it. I do believe that.

Listen back here:

Riding the wave

In those heady days of 2019, before the pandemic knocked us for six, I met with many founders and execs prioritising the hot new take on sustainability. I was riding a wave of prestigious corporate gloss as Vogue’s sustainability editor and the Ellen McArthur Foundation’s first Make Fashion Circular ambassador, working with the UN and going to fancy #sustfash dinners in Milan hosted by Amber Valletta.

On a trip to San Fran, I visited the Allbirds co-founders and dropped in to see David Breslauer and his team at Bolt Threads. In Paris, I met with Veja. I did a bunch of stuff with EcoAlf’s Javier Goyaneche (one of the greats). Interviewed the heads of Camera della Moda and the CFDA on stage, and, for my podcast, talked with Levi’s then VP of Sustainability Michael Kobori; H&M’s Anna Gedda; and Helen Crowley, who came up with Kering’s industry-shaping Environmental Profit & Loss system.

Previously I’d interviewed TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie, and Patagonia’s Director of Philosophy Vincent Stanley. Indeed the podcast project was inspired by a phone interview I did with Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard, a two-hour-long romp through this extraordinary life, captured on a shitty little micro-cassette recorder and since taped over. I did this with Marianne Faithfull and Beyoncé interviews. I know! It was a different time.

In so many ways.

ICYMI: Shein is buying Everlane. Here’s an overview I shared with Life Matters on ABC National Radio last week. Then, in a weird turn, Preysman (who stepped down as CEO in 2024, after the company was sold to private equity firm L Catterton in 2020) just spilled plans to return with a sort of Everlane reboot he’s calling Still Radical. Guess he figured you couldn’t buy this level of global publicity and he may as well capitalise on it.

I also went on CBC (Canada’s national broadcaster) to record an episode of Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s Commotion show. Listen in full here, but here’s a snippet:

I reserve the right maintain my disappointment! It’s had time to deepen since the Allbirds news hit.

No Birds

Once gain, let’s rewind to 2019. In a converted warehouse in the the historic Jackson Square district of San Fran - or as the architects put it, “a clean, open-plan workspace, honoring the transparent and honest brand. The company’s signature whimsical doodles greet visitors and workers and welcome them into a minimalist palette of neutrals…” - I met with former NZ footballer Tim Brown and ex-Deloittes dude Joey Zwillinger.

Zwillinger had just been on CNBC to slap back at Amazon for selling Allbirds knockoffs. “The issue that we’ve had with some of these copycats is … they don’t follow the same practices that we do. We source wool from the most humanely treated sheep… everything is certified with the utmost care from our supply chain. We’re 100% carbon neutral as a company.” These imitations were produced by companies that were really not taking the same care for their impact, he said.

Nevertheless, the pair was upbeat. They’d seen encouraging pickup from “people in the entertainment community and creative class,” Zwillinger told me. Leonardo DiCaprio was rumoured to be an investor. Matthew McConaughey, Obama and Gwyneth wore Allbirds. Brown’s mum had called him early on, excited to report that New Zealand’s then PM Jacinda Arden was a fan. They were going to change the world.

They meant it. I do believe that.

Listen back here:

Random aside, I just noticed that today I’m wearing the very same slip-ons the boys gifted me. Still going strong 7 years later. Which is more than we can say for those gorgeous offices. And Allbirds’ Certified B Corp status.

So how did a brand valued at $4 billion in 2021 go from having 60-odd stores to just 2 at the start of this year? And selling in April for a (relatively) paltry $39 million?

Some said those sustainable materials just didn’t last. Others noted the brand’s growth accelerated too hard, that it had to be part hype - indeed, in 2023 a group of investors filed a class action claiming they’d been misled on the financials. Also what was with the expansion into weird product categories like mens’ undies? Vogue calling the end of the sneakers trend probably didn’t help.

I wish I didn’t think part of it was the punt on futuristic new materials, and the failure to scale that/ secure ROI. We’ve seen it time and again, from Bolt Threads to Natural Fibre Welding to Renewcell. The bubble does seem to have burst.

Whatever the reason, the fallout is clear.

Allbirds is dead as the dodo. Extinct as the Moa. V.I.s (Vulture Investors) fed on the carcass, then the Phoenix rose… or something (enough with the bird analogies). Whatever! It’s ludicrous: a rebrand, a “pivot” to cloud services, a 600% spike in the share price, and a Black Mirror press release that states:

American Exchange Group, which intends to continue to build on Allbirds’ legacy and deliver compelling products to Allbirds’ customers (the “Asset Sale”), Allbirds, Inc. (Nasdaq: BIRD) (the "Company") today announced the execution of a definitive agreement with an institutional investor for a $50 million convertible financing facility (the “Facility”). The Facility, which is expected to close during the second quarter of 2026, will enable the Company to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure, with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider. In connection with this pivot, the Company anticipates changing its name to “NewBird AI.”

RIP, dreams.

No wonder the hills are alive with the sound of sustainable fashion peoples’ lament, eh? I could fill this letter with noteworthy comments from our community. Let’s just say “disappointed” came up a lot.

“It always was a false promise. It’s an impossible contradiction.” (Eric Arnould, Emeritus Professor, Aalto University School of Business)

“Fashion spent years selling sustainability as a movement, only to treat it like a marketing strategy the second growth slowed down.”(Piotr Kamil Krzymowski, of resale platform Loop)

“It’s getting dark out there for those sustainability pioneer brands that once gave us hope and that as small brands we used to look up to,” wrote Jennifer Drogguett, founder of beautiful ethical womenswear brand, Anciela. “I suppose we don’t talk enough about financial sustainability and why these brands seemingly have to sacrifice the good intentions and values they started with.” Word, Jen.

“Yes there’s such a pressure to grow, but small and privately owned is beautiful ❤️. It’s disappointing to see these stories but not surprising,” said Stephanie Devine, the fab Aussie behind The Very Good Bra, who is pioneering a world-first national standard for textile composting.

“The ever apparent market economics trap. It’s all about the financial flows and we just cannot escape it,” said Lucie from curated sustainable fashion marketplace Comhla.

Several of you echoed Nadia Sews: “I don’t believe sustainably can exist in commercial clothing brands at all!”

What now?

How do we navigate this moment? I’ll close by repeating what I wrote in the Guardian:

Accept it: sustainability is not hot right now. OK! This was never meant to be a popularity contest. The movement needs to get back to basics. Circularity won’t save us – we must focus on workers’ rights and the just transition. Have hard conversations about overproduction. Dismantle consumerism as the dominant narrative and define a properly radical approach to system change. You can’t take the politics out of this, but why would you want to?

As the last few weeks have shown us, when sustainability becomes purely about the business case, it stops meaning anything at all.

Next up, Pt 3. A New Vision - Shift Your Gaze to the Alternatives! In the final part of this interconnected rant, I’ll be sharing some inspirational small indie brilliance to get behind.

Want to be part of it? Tell me why in Comments.

Clare xx

P.S. Big love to all the kind souls who support the Wardrobe Crisis project on Substack - you power the podcast and I am mega grateful. True fact. I’ve been slogging away at this stuff, mostly unpaid, for 9 years now, and without you I would not be able to keep going. Series 13 drops next week! THANK YOU FOR BELIEVING IN INDEPENDENT MEDIA VOICES in a world of billionaires.

I’m not so sure these days. There’s just something, IDK, off about it all. At least the big stuff. I mean, look at these people.

I don’t relate.

Now, Part 2, on sustainability is on its way - bear with my while I order my thoughts on the whole SHEIN HAS BOUGHT EVERLANE???!!! travesty - but let’s just stick on the category-formerly-known-as-luxury for a sec.

I keep finding myself harrumphing about how tacky so much of it is, how brazenly showy-offy and tasteless, and how jarring when we consider what’s going on in the world.

Hold on, what just happened with the crowds desperate for the new Swatch Watch/ Audemars Piguet collab? Sorry, did you say, SWATCH? Has the world gone entirely mad?

Perhaps I am a killjoy. We used to talk about the Lipstick Index, Leonard Lauder’s proposition that cosmetics sales rise when consumer confidence falls. In the downtimes, we crave little luxuries, whether it’s buying a new lippie or magazine, or scrolling viral outfits. Nothing wrong with a bit of fun.

Unless you’re a perimenopausal quasi-communist perchance?

This morning I was talking to an editor friend about all this.

“Do you think maybe I’m just too old for Fashion now?” I sighed, sliding the bookmark into my copy of Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis to ensure I didn’t lose my place. “That I’ve grown out of it?”

“I don't think you're old,” she said, “I think it is getting worse. The ludicrous ironic-but-not Gucci Times Square thing. The one-second hype cycles. I still love dressing up and seeing things that are beautifully made,” she said, “but fashion as an industry has lost its way.”

Talented graduates can’t get jobs, while nepo babies grab the creative director roles. SJP is advertising Primark while the major maisons are trolling their customers with joke designs that cost silly money. Chanel’s daft heel-only shoe. Thousand-dollar Prada knickers. It’s gotten so bonkers no one even knows if this (below) *Balenciaga cardboard box dress is real. Even if it is an AI joke, it hit because it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility.

In our age of stagflation, who’s buying fancy clothes anyway? Just bankers and Beckhams. Creativity is being sacrificed on the altar of greed. Meanwhile, the piles of dreary landfill fashion continue to amass. (P.S.A. - the excellent Tansy Hoskins has a new book out, see here.)

I started writing this on the first Monday in May (but got waylaid because we were just about to go on holiday for my birthday - I am turning officially ancient next next month) during the storm of commentary on how the Met Gala has jumped the shark by bedding Bezos. I lost track of where I read what, but one comment that struck me as getting to the kernel of the problem was along the lines of, if you’re a rich dude who loves football you might buy the team but you wouldn’t install yourself as a striker, would you? Because that would make you a massive bellend. But more importantly it would set the team up to fail.

To extend the analogy, your average experimental-theatre-loving billionaire (not a thing, but wouldn’t it be nice?) might quietly donate to a revival of this Melbourne fringe collective’s live action provocation, Fast Fashun (pictured below), but not insist on personally starring in it. Geddit? Support. Throw money. But don’t take over.

Zuckerberg front row at Prada. The return of Paris Hilton. This actual mob wife, with her Shein adjacent faux fur shrug, lording it over the Met Gala… No wonder Fashion feels uncool in 2026.

Tearing down other women? I expected better of you, Clare. Yet facts is facts, and I’ve never seen anyone butcher Dior like Lauren SB.

My overriding thought looking at this year’s Met Gala on socials was: oof, couldn’t think of anything worse.

You might counter, a) no one was inviting you anyway, and b) gala fundraisers have always been full of rich people flashing their cash; that’s the point! In fact Amazon sponsored the event in 2012. To which I would rejoinder: fair on both counts! Except, this year’s bash felt like a grand metaphor for our Marie Antoinette times. There was a Tax the Rich protest outside. Sarah Paulson’s Matières Fécales money mask said it all.

I wrote in Wear Next about the great trend forecaster Li Edelkoort’s take on the crassness of this party, which she’d “watched with growing unease” the day after the UN warned that climate change could wipe out 1 million species of animals and plants, back in 2019. The gala that year was themed Camp! and guests vied to outdo each other in the blingiest couture. One came as a winged god, carried aloft by six buff shirtless boys in gold trousers. Lady Gaga had changed outfits three times before she’d reached the end of the pink carpet. The spectacle gave Edelkoort last-days-of-Rome feels. She called it “a violent act of haughtiness, displaying a deep disdain for everybody else, for ordinary people”. She has long been warning that fashion has lost touch with society and become a parody of itself, “governed by greed and not by vision”.

Luxury was always about catering to elites. The gowns were never meant for the likes of you and me. We were left with the lipsticks and dreams. Only now, the dream doesn’t seem so aspirational.

Which brings me to TDWP2. Who’s seen it? I confess I do want to. I might be old but I am still human, ho ho. I love-hate it. When the first one came out, I was like, correction! The devil wears Country Road. Having been mercilessly bullied by one Aussie Vogue lady in the mid 2000s, I thought I knew better. The truth is that Fashion, in general, is flooded with minor devils in all kinds of outfits, bullying their underlings to make them feel powerful. Those coming up through the ranks are still expected to grin and bear it. A million girls would kill for this.

But as we hurtle towards the apex of our capitalist hellscape, the break point before it splinters and everything comes crashing down, I wonder who will step out & start to build the new world. For make no mistake, the old one is ailing.

Margiela hasn’t been seen for years. Dries van Noten is running an art museum. Westwood is dead. Stella McCartney is designing for H&M. Again. Hmm, that last one didn’t work. But don’t worry, there’s always Galliano. Mining the Zara archives.

It’s over, baby.

What shall we all do next? Tell me in Comments.

Clare xx

Guess the price of this one, for example, “made from an exceptionally fine stretch elastane fabric” (75% Polyamide, 25% Elastane).

That’ll be 1,940 of your Aussie dollars please.

How about this one? ASOS (81% Polyester, 19% Elastane). Pop $1,910 in a term deposit. It’s only 30 bucks,

One is made in Italy, one in China; one has a V neck, one round. Perhaps the Gucci one has nicer seams, hard to tell. But what I do know is this: the price tag mostly comes down to brand perception.

The bog-standard white cotton Dior tee below is the princely sum of $1,150. The one below that, which looks exactly the same to me but with no logo, is $59.95. Buy two, get $20 off.

IT MAKES NO EARTHLY SENSE!

We’ve known this for years, of course. Consider that Andrew Morgan’s The True Cost doco came out more than a decade ago. Fashion Revolution turns 12 this month.

I wrote about this bamboozling phenomenon in Wardrobe Crisis, the book (2016! How is that possible?). Here’s a recap:

The problem is we’re so disconnected from how our stuff is made, our frame of reference has shrunk. A few generations ago, when domestic manufacturing was thriving, factories and makers lived among us. We knew how shoes and jeans got made because oftentimes it was our friends/ families/ neighbours who were making them. At the very least we were taught to sew at school.

Today while we’re awash with info, we’ve got much less to go on.

A 2023 survey of 1000 American shoppers found 69% didn’t know that most clothing is made from fossil fuels. In the UK, sewing and knitting have been deemed “the most endangered” domestic skills. And even when we do know our true silks from our silky-feel poly crepes, we’re so flooded with misinformation from brands and industry interest groups, it’s no wonder we’re confused. Is cotton really universally “thirsty” - or was that just a marketing ploy by a textile printing company whose process only worked on polyester? Was the PET used for that recycled tee really “ocean-bound”? Is it more eco-friendly, or potentially just more unstable?

Then of course there’s the question of whether anyone actually cares. As Maggie Zhou writes in this excellent piece for Good on You, the algorithm has moved on. Sustainable fashion isn’t trending like it used to.

Time for a rethink

Have you ever stumbled across Maggie Weber’s highly amusing videos about the insane prices of certain fashion things? I’m addicted. Dear reader, THESE ARE REAL PRODUCTS not April fools. Like this Moschino “clutch bag”:

Fashioned from … paper. It’s AW‘24, sold out now, so you’ll have to make do with a common sandwich shop version and doodle “Moschino” on it with a red pen. But at least you’ll save $800.

The only possible conclusion to draw is that some luxury brands enjoy trolling their customers.

I think we’re ready for a change, no?

New approach

I recently had a conversation with visionary systems thinker and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs Indy Johar, touching on this problem of status nonsense and the perpetuation of pricing opacity.

I told him about this daft unit and his duck-yellow Louis Vuitton Speedy bag, which came with a diamond-encrusted padlock and a pair of Pharrell’s comedy bling sunnies. Yours for $1 million!

But Indy was keen to move on, and focus on the bigger ideas unleashed when we consider what it might really mean to price consumer goods according to their broader costs - to workers and the Earth.

WEAR NEXT?

Now, Indy says he’s not a fashion person. He trained as an architect and enjoys wearing the same outfit on repeat.

But happening upon some research that had a fair crack at calculating a more realistic cots for our aforementioned T-shirt, should all of all its externalities be considered, got him thinking seriously about the fashion system.

The result was his paper, “The Future of Fashion: Toward an Entangled Economy of Things.”

That $45 shirt? “It would be somewhere between $250 and $450,” he tells me on Episode 273.

Listen to the Episode on Apple:

Externalities? Try the costs of depleting soils with pesticides and synthetic fertilisers to grow the cotton, the cost of water, the GHG emissions through the entire supply chain, the social and inequality impacts.

In this scenario “my theory of clothes is largely a function of creating debt in the planet. I can’t actually afford it,” he says.

“Once you pay the [true] price, you start to realise the economy of fashion would be completely different,” he continues. “Because you have to internalise those costs, which means my clothes have to survive probably in the region of 10 to 20 years! And I’m taking functional use, not just wardrobe storage.”

Listen on Spotify:

In a future shaped by climate breakdown and extreme weather volatility, the current system will have to shift. “What becomes fascinating to me is when you start to see clothing as a critical part - a skin infrastructure - of preserving life support systems. You might then see a material industry which is no longer about ownership, but about stewardship, so: I have rights of a shirt I use, I am stewarding the materials on behalf of an open chain of materiality, to look after it.”

Could we do it? What would it take? A wholesale shift away from fashion’s dominant status driven, object-orientated, attention-seeking word view for starters.

Tell us your ideas in Comments! We’re eager to hear them.

Laters,

Clare x

Next week, just the end of globalisation. Ha! Who told you fashion wasn’t deep? And thank you, as always, to the generous souls who become paid subscribers - your contribution powers the podcast and I am grateful.

Turns out, people still do.

Anyway, to write is to try to make sense of the world. Right now, it’s bewildering.

From the daft - TikTok alight over Chinese actor Zhang Jingyi supposedly carrying the Demna-era Balenciaga trash bag from AW22, price $1790. Though if you ask me, I think hers is a regular grocery store plaggy bag. This red carpet snap isn’t even new, but such is virality. Here’s the actual Balenciaga nonsense, in case you fancy yelling at something.

Outrage culture is a sign of the times

To the ridiculous. My Insta feed presents a dizzying carousel of images that should never be juxtaposed: Zuck, or maybe his avatar, f’row at Prada, trying to look like a real boy in quiet lux shades of tiramisu. When the official press release arrives listing celeb show attendees, he isn’t mentioned. Did we dream it? Did he? And who goes all the way to Milan to eat at Maccas?

Scroll.

Jeff is co-chairing this year’s Met Gala! Let’s not know. Only, there they are, Mr Bozo & Monica, trussed up in too-tight tailoring at the Dior show. There’s no escape. A friend just asked me if I’d been to a climate dinner sponsored by Amazon. Excuse me? Are we living in a simulation?

I fucking hope so. Because if this shit is real…

Scroll.

To the downright sinister. Official White House social media posts mash up video games and Hollywood action movie scenes with real-life carpet bombing of civilians in Iran.

Scroll.

“I don’t know about it,” claims The Orange Despot when Tomahawks wipe out 165 people at Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab. Most of them are little girls, aged 7-12. Scroll. Here, their coffins at a mass funeral. Scroll. Trump says the Iranians did it to themselves. Scroll. Oops, the Pentagon find it was the Americans after all.

Is this what they meant by “lethalitymaxxing”?

Like I said, even noticing fashion at this point makes no sense. Yet sales of grey Nike tracksuits spiked after Maduro was kidnapped wearing one. Still trying to fathom how that’s a thing? Do keep up!

#cowgirlICEbarbie is trending, thanks to Kristi Noem’s $220 million ad campaign that got her fired. Though few wondered where she got her chaps from, Daily Beast has this handy review of her many hats.

It’s not just on social media. I just glanced at my phone, and the lead ABC story is: ‘Trump says US might hit Iran Oil Island “for fun”.’ You could not make this stuff up.

Apple News is a disorientating melange of multi-front war, genocide, refugees, climate breakdown, corruption, & a seemingly endless procession of creeps linked to Epstein, all whizzed up in the blender with: ‘5 Outfits with Jeans French It Girls are Wearing on Repeat’ and ‘24 Easy But Chic Dresses to Solve Your Workwear Dilemmas’. I used to write this type of candyfloss for Marie Claire. Probably ChatGPT does it now, but it still gets clicks. Because, life goes on. Until it doesn’t.

ChatGPT’s owners OpenAI have a contract with the Department of War to integrate their technology into US military systems. And you thought it was just helping you write better emails.

No wonder 2/3 of us avoid the news. I anticipate a some of you will hit unsubscribe reading this, but please don’t (my substack powers the podcast). I get the overwhelm, the urge to retreat. It’s a self-preservation thing. No one should have to look at Noem on that horse. But hear me out before you decide.

This emotional whiplash is upsetting and disorientating, by design. The algorithm rewards outrage. There’s an infuriating docu-series about the Murdoch empire on Netflix right now; you only need watch the first ep to see how he helped build the current paradigm. Meanwhile, Trump and his cronies talk openly about “flooding the zone” - they want you to feel so pummelled by news exhaustion that you opt out and look away, leaving them to wreck the planet, and gorge on the spoils.

WE MUST NOT LET THEM!

What’s the alternative?

We will each have our own ideas and strategies, and there’s no shame in needing time out, but I’d like to argue for a some combination of: open-hearted listening to perspectives other that our own; critical thinking; informed engagement; grassroots movement building and telling stories from fresh perspectives.

For the latter, try last week’s pod with Palestinian dress expert Wafa Ghnaim, where we look through the textiles lens to ask: who decides which stories get told, and from what angles? Where do colonial narratives lurk, how can we challenge them and why should we?

Wafa is fashion researcher, embroiderer, curator, and the founder of the Tatreez Institute, specialising in Palestinian embroidery, dress, and adornment. In this compassionate, nuanced conversation we start behind the scenes at the museum, and end on every woman’s right to tell her story, pass it down - and live in peace.

Listen on Apple here:

On Spotify here:

Let us know what you think.

More headline options

Told you I had a bunch. Maybe I should have just gone with this angle?

My 6 Point Plan For Holding it Together During Geopolitically Insane Times…

1. Hold those you love close, carve out some time to gaze at the bees and the trees, cook something, call your mum.

2. Don’t forget to laugh. Joy is a super power.

3. Stay informed. We need to keep our eyes on these bastards and hold them to account.

4. Set a timer on the wallowing though - maybe give yourself a specific block of time during the day/ week to read the news (from trusted sources) and catch up on what’s going on.

5. Be discerning and strategic. Anger is a rational response to all this, but the unchecked variety is dangerous. Avoid the urge to vent for its own sake. Ask yourself how it will land? Questioning who/ if it will help. Just as outrage feeds more outrage, compassion encourages more compassion. Choose your words carefully.

6. Find your people. Start where you are. Community matters more than ever. Resistance builds through the collective.

In solidarity,

Clare xx

P.S. Proudly human-made.

I wanted to make this clear after a friend told me lots of content people, even journalists, use AI to make their stuff. I was like, “No?? Not the pros, I get it if you’re not a writer and want to make your work clearer, it’s a tool, fine, but writers write, right?”

“You’d be surprised,” she said. “Increasingly people across disciplines make rough notes, or just voice notes, then get chatGPT to do the rest.”

“Well bugger that,” I said. “I’m not going to be complicit in sociopathic techbros stealing our IP and wiping art off the face of the planet while refusing to pay tax. Anyway, I wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t authentically my work. That’s just how I view the world.”

“You should tell people,” she said.

Ergo: I am a writer. I write columns, books, words, emails, Instagram captions, podcast interview questions, speeches, lectures, film treatments FROM MY ACTUAL BRAIN. No AI has been used in the making of this Substack.

Firstly, I want to say thank you, to Ayesha and the whole team, which grew to include ambassadors across 80 countries.

Ayesha was a guest host on Wardrobe Crisis Series 5 Pass the Mic, interviewing Bangladeshi union leader Nazma Akter. She reminded us that sustainable/ethical fashion is nonsense without garment workers at the table. Listen back on Apple below:

Or on Spotify here:

Thank you Remake for the important work you led, for bringing others along, for giving a shit and changing the fashion world in meaningful ways. I was proud to be part of your #payup campaign, which put pressure on global brands who’d failed to pay garment workers during the pandemic.

Secondly, I get it - nothing last forever; and ten years is major. There is strength in recognising when something has run its course.

As they say: “This isn't an ending we're mourning. It's a milestone we're honoring.”

But I’m also a bit sad and nostalgic about the closing of another important chapter in the sustainable fashion struggle. I felt the same when my dear friends, Orsola and Carry, co-founders of Fashion Revolution, stepped back a couple of years ago. FR continues - the 2026 theme is Collective Action; save the dates 22-28 April - but that was the end of an era. No denying it.

Finally, I want to re-iterate what I wrote in last week’s column, about the sustainability backslide. It can feel like momentum is stalling and the big boys are winning, but remember it really does depend where you look.

Since I proposed we turn our gaze more towards the small/indie/local, I wanted to share news from an ethical fashion pioneer on my own doorstep that puts workers first. They are worth celebrating.

The Social Outfit is a fashion social enterprise that exists to provide free training and paid work experience programs to kickstart careers for refugee women in Australia. Since 2014, they’ve employed more than 125 refugees and new migrants, paying more than $2 million in wages, many in their first Aussie job.

Over the years, I’ve volunteered my services to help them get the word out, hosting panels and joining fundraisers (once I even modelled in one of their ads). I wrote about TSO in Wear Next, interviewing some of the trainees and telling a beautiful story about an associated embroidery circle run by Afghan women. This was fashion for healing, fashion for women’s empowerment, fashion for belonging.

On Tuesday, I was invited to MC a little get-together in their Newtown, Sydney store.

I asked the questions for a panel chat with , who manages their Marrickville workroom, Sophie McConnell in comms and Kelly Elkin, who these days is the sustainability boss at luxury label Alemais, but who I first met, must be 15 years ago now, when she was one of the way-ahead-of-their-time-women behind Australia’s first ethical fashion association, Clean Cut.

I tell you this to demonstrate that the movement is a long game. Organisations may come and go, but the purpose-driven people powering them stick around.

The launch was for TSO’s new collection, Tessellate, a collab with stylist/designer Kirsty Barros (above) and her upcycling project Post Hunk, using donated print stike-offs from Alemais. The experience, she said, reminded her that fashion can be “tender and generous”.

“The word Tessellate means to fit individual shapes together perfectly, without gaps or overlaps, to form a whole. For The Social Outfit, tessellation speaks to something deeper: the coming together of stories, skills, cultures and hands.

“It was an opportunity to upskill as well as upcycle,” Kim told me, explaining the precision required to pattern-match the complex fabric jigsaw puzzle in the sewing room. “And that’s about confidence, and pride in your work, as well as about the end result.”

When I asked Kelly Elkin how come a brand like Alemais, known for its original prints, is happy to give them away to be used by another, she said it’s simple: “community.” Far from being wary of watered down IP, “we’re proud to support The Social Outfit.”

The work continues.

Clare xx

P.S. Heartfelt thanks to you, my beloved subscribers, and especially to the paid subscribers. Your contribution makes the podcast possible

For example, Sarah Brunnhuber, founder of Stem.

The brand name is a nod to system, as in system change. “Because that’s what we need, nothing less,” she told me.

Her presentation saw her ramp up the possibilities of her zero-waste weaving techniques, and collaborate with a female shepherd, Berit, who tends a flock of 800 local sheep. As the notes to Sarah’s show detail: Berit’s “yarn — spun domestically and rarely used in garments due to long-standing assumptions about Danish wool —became a point of departure.”

Meanwhile, Sarah has begun development on a long-held dream: to establish “a research-driven production site for local, low-impact textiles in Denmark” that she hopes “will act as both a material and pedagogical experiment: a blueprint for how the fashion system might be reimagined from the inside out.”

The new collection is titled To Wool because (like circularity legend Bill McDonough says at the start of every Wardrobe Crisis ep, “it’s to fashion”), she sees wool as a doing word. It’s to wool - wool in action, dynamic, coming to life through the weaving process.

Stem Mill will have no minimum orders. No one locked out by the failure to scale, because too often scale means overproduction which means waste. “As a designer, I don’t think you can ignore how much you’re making. We have enough stuff! That can be paralysing,” she said – but galvanising too.

Leading the charge for a total system reboot? Ambitious. Especially given it’s essentially just her plus a couple of interns doing most of this, mentors/industry supporters notwithstanding (she had an early champion in Ganni’s Ditte Reffstrup). But I have every confidence she can pull it off.

Sarah Brunnhuber’s not the only one pushing back on the dominant narrative around scale.

In a panel discussion at the Nikolaj Kunsthal, with his fellow Zalando Visionary Award finalists, Galib Gassanoff, who won the gong for his Institution label, was asked what success means to him.

“Well, what do we mean by commercial success?” he said. “If it means selling 500 dresses, maybe I’m not interested in that.” He talked about his discomfort at the relentless pressure to grow revenue. “I think if you are steady, and there’s a natural growth, you’re not pushing too much, and you feel comfortable with it, and you can express yourself fully, that is success to me.”

Based in Milan for the past decade, his sculptural work is rooted in high-craft inspired by his Georgian-Azerbaijani heritage. To make his bulrush pieces, for example, he collaborated with the last female khesir weaving community working with the plants in Azerbaijan. You won’t pick one of these up in Zara.

Elisabet Stamm won a previous iteration of this award (in 2023) for her rigorously produced oversized outerwear. It was an honour, she told me, but it perhaps came with too much attention, too fast. Not that Elisabet is green – she’d worked in big companies before. Still, wholesale can prove a tricky for indie players; hyped without the cashflow to keep up is a common story. Things came to a head when she split from her business partner last year. She’s in a better place now, having pulled back and restructured. The Stamm label is a cult one – worn by A$AP Rocky, M.I.A. (and me at Danish shows – thank you for the loan, my friend!). Demand was never the problem.

If Elisabet wanted to churn out cheaper versions of her oversized puffer coats and put profit over all, she could, but why? It must always come back to the why. True sustainability is about integrity, not marketing, hence (in my view) the big guys can’t only go so far. Their ‘why’ is always compromised, because their first responsibility is to shareholders.

We must create

Where to draw the line, as consumers/as makers? If we turned off the fashion tap tomorrow, we’d plunge 60 million+ garment workers (many already in precarious circumstances) into ruin. Simply stopping is not simple at all.

The urge to create is part of what it means to be human.

Yet, half the world’s pollution is caused by 100 giant companies. Some stuff should stop. If we’re serious about tackling the climate crisis, we might start by wiping out Amazon.

Nevertheless, I still believe in fashion.

If Stem and Stamm are the (relative) newbies, Henrik Vibskov is the old guard, but no less passionate about challenging accepted norms. This season he was inspired by frogs (of course he was). He likes their shapeshifting vibes (“from egg to tadpole to air breathing being” and their symbolism.

“To look at the frog is to look at ourselves — interdependent bodies in constant transition, navigating thresholds and the weight of what we carry. What began as an interest in frog colors, habitats and life cycles grew into a reflection on shared weight.”

Want more? Listen to Vibs on Episode 191.

Across the schedule, every designer had some sort of sustainability proposition. That’s by virtue of the event’s industry-leading Minimum Sustainability Standards, a set of 19 requirements participating brands must adhere to.

Where it’s Vibskov or reliable classicist Charlotte Eskildsen of The Garment, who both put their sustainability focus on fabrics. Or fresh upcycling collective Bonnetje using only what’s already in existence. Or one of the increasing roster of emerging names who visit from other lands to be part of it all – like London-based duo Paolina Russo, known for their neo-rave revelry rooted in natural dyes, or Swedish upcyclers Rave Review, who made a triumphant runway return this season. Or Irish B Corp Aoife McNamara, coming to the podcast soon. I could go on, but we’d be here day.

Small is (more) beautiful

Suffice to say, all is not lost on the sustainable fashion front, but I think it’s in the smaller events, brands and initiatives that we find succour. The big guys are letting us down.

What do you think? Tell me in comments!

Talk of the backlash is everywhere. Investors are jittery, it’s getting harder to find sponsors for sustainability events, while the total assets in ESG funds have declined. In fact the very idea of it is in existential crisis.

According to the Institute of Sustainability Studies, ESG “once seen as a shared roadmap for sustainable growth, is now contested ground”. I spy a problem right there. True sustainability needs to grapple with the growth obsession, not pretend it’s the magic bullet allowing us to keep being greedy without consequence.

London Business School’s Ioannis Ioannou blames its fall from grace on a failure to build broader legitimacy. “For years, the sustainability conversation took place among regulators, investors and executives,” he writes, largely sidelining workers, consumers, small business owners. “The conversation became technocratic, filled with acronyms and abstraction.”

Now, I’m not 100% with him on this one, being myself so clearly from activism/public facing side, but he’s got a point about the acronyms and techy lingo - CSR, DEIB, Scope 1 & 2 emissions and all the rest of it. “These terms may be essential but they don’t inspire,” he notes. And when the responsibility is piled on the c-suite, who, let’s face, it are generally only keen when it suits them (sustainability as a marketing ploy, efficiency win etc), can we really be surprised when they pull back at the first sign of trouble? Remember when Nike fired their entire sustainability team? How about when all those companies were delisted from the Science Based Targets initiative for failing to make sufficient progress?

I’ve been thinking about the State of Fashion 2026 report, and how it’s the first in years not to platform sustainability-something-or-other among the 10 shaping factors predicted for the industry in the year ahead. In 2026, these are dominated by disruption - tariffs, AI, sales slowdown - plus a couple of fun ones thrown in for good measure. Try, retail as third space wellness havens (kill me now). Anyway, the only faintly sustainability-related theme was ‘Resale Sprint’, but even this was couched as a tech play cash grab as opposed to a circularity win.

“Executives are once again looking to sustainable practices as an opportunity to improve operations” apparently, which means making it pay. Or help them cost cut. This is sustainability 2.0 - as an efficiency driver (like, cut down on waste) or the resale opportunity (like, make more dosh). No one’s talking about workers’ rights here, or planetary boundaries.

I think the message here is: Get real! Brand budgets and consumer confidence are down. Sustainability isn’t so hyped these days, so we can let it slide back down the agenda. Back to a nice-to-have.

Hmmm.

There was some pushback from #sustfash circles when the report dropped in November (shout out to ). But is this state of affairs really surprising given who produces it - Business of Fashion and McKinsey. They are fashion’s accountants.

If sustainability suddenly seems like a loss leader, say if the Trump administration is incentivising fossil fuels, deforestation, ditching DEI etc – of course they’re going drop it like a hot potato. And if sustainability was mostly a marketing play, ditto.

*The last bit is for paid subs only. Paid subscriptions power the podcast.

Read more

Granted, it’s top of my list. Partly because I’ve worked in the space so long (Wardrobe Crisis, the book, turns 10 this year) but also because, well, look around you.

A friend just texted me that she feels like she’s trapped in the movie Don’t Look Up, with climate armageddon hurtling towards us, and everyone pretending it’s not a thing. Flash floods causing landslides on Sydney’s northern beaches? Just a normal day. A year since fire wiped out whole chunks of The Palisades? Stuff happens! And as for that pan-sticked maniac barging into Venezuela to liberate its oil, while claiming climate change is a hoax? Let’s acknowledge things feel dark.

But when I fell in love with secondhand clothes as a student, and really stepped up my vintage game in my early 20s, it wasn’t because I wanted to save the planet.

It was because those clothes were cool.

Charlie (above) is 19 and an aspiring musician. He bought his vintage blazer because he liked the slightly equestrian cut. Plus the fact that no one else would have one. Cost is an issue, so he opshops. His jeans came from a local designer consignment store that he says is cheaper than Grailed for preloved labels. He likes markets because they feel “more human and less corporate”.

But for Charlie it’s mostly about style. “Vintage is the first choice if I’m trying to achieve a look, or a certain fashion energy,” he tells me on Episode 265 of Wardrobe Crisis. Does he think about sustainability? “Of course.” He’s concerned about the “gross over-saturation of stuff,” so why not give clothes already in existence a second chance? “Those clothes are still there, they still work.”

Listen on Apple here:

I asked ’s Emily Stochl (pictured below, on a trip to the famed Brimfield flea in Massachusetts) what she thought about the boom. Because there most definitely one. The resale market is growing three times faster than the new market. It’s projected to hit US $360 billion globally by 2030. No wonder big fashion wants in.

Online marketplaces are making billionaires of some of their founders but there’s also a surge happening IRL, where small-scale, indie dealers hold the power. The more niche the better.

Value, quality and individuality still factor, says Emily. “Those were the things that excited me about secondhand shopping I first discovered going to the Goodwill. But I do think what’s changed is it’s become normalised, elevated even.”

Emily confirmed my suspicions that thrifting today is more about status than sustainability. (Read her 2026 Vintage & Secondhand Fashion Predictions for more). Maybe it’s also a reaction against the shiny fake vibez of AI.

She talked about the values-action gap, how secondhand and fast fashion often exist it the same wardrobes (something I wrote about in Wear Next). We both worry about the rise of the thrift haul - are we simply transferring our greed for new clothes into the preloved sector? Conclusion: the growth of the secondhand market is not a panacea.

Listen on Spotify:

Mary Walker started her upcycled label when one of her sons, then in his early 20s, asked her to sew him a shirt from an old tablecloth, inspired by an expensive designer piece he’d seen online but couldn’t afford. (Likely Bode - you can listen to Emily Bode on Episode 143).

Mary has always sewn, always thrifted, and has a long history of making new pieces out of storied old textiles. In a previous life, she was a high school textiles teacher. As a kid she relished receiving hand-me-downs from a stylish older cousin, and her mum volunteered in an opshop. For Mary, the appeal is emotional - it’s about the story.

Her eyes light up when she shows me some slightly wonky hand-embroidery on a cropped blouse she’s made from donated linen.

“The little imperfections tell the story, that’s what I love about what I do. That’s what people who buy my pieces love, that they’re continuing that story.”

What do you think is making more people shop secondhand these days? LMK in comments. Also, tell me your best thrifted thing.

Clare x

P.S. Don’t forget to heart this if you like it. Do consider sharing it. Thank you so very much for reading this, listening to the show and supporting Wardrobe Crisis.

I’m reading a lovely book, Turning to Birds, The Power & Beauty of Noticing by Lili Taylor, a NY-based theatre actor. Spotted it in my local library, knew I would relate, thought you might too.

It begins thus:

“We all know what a bird is. They live in our yards, in our cities, on our seas. They exist on every single continent. They are the subject of children’s books and books for grownups. They are depicted in visual art, in TV documentaries, in movies. They have been around for 145 million years. One of the earliest cave paintings was of a bird. We use them as symbols and metaphors. We even eat them. But most people don’t really know birds - or rather they aren’t aware of them. I used to be one of those people…”

Taylor notes that she’s not a bird expert, or a scientist, she’s just curious. She talks about how birders sometimes mention the idea of a “spark bird” - the one that got them into it, but how she doesn’t have one, she simply started listening to birdsong and never stopped. She recalls when during the pandemic more of us started to see the Nature in our cities, and they’d tell her, “I like birds too.” Soon there were more books and podcasts about birds, so many that the twitcher community was like, wow birds are really having a moment...

So in this limbo time after Christmas but before the new year really kicks in, I wanted to invite you to have a moment too - a moment of noticing the birds, how delightful and fascinating they are, how they live among us, yet often go unnoticed. Join us on Apple:

Lili is not my guest (should I invite her?) but she inspired me to share this lovely conversation I had up my sleeve, with the Australian theatre actor and playwright, Nathan Harrison, who’s latest play is Birdsong of Tomorrow.

It debuted at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre, which does much to support emerging writers. I got invited to opening night, not sure why, but it was terrific. And beforehand I got to join Nathan on a birdwatching walk in my local park, which is where this podcast was recorded. Listen on Spotify:

Hang on!

Isn’t Wardrobe Crisis a fashion podcast?

Don’t worry - birds are often brilliantly dressed with their wonderful plumage. Herewith, the CSIRO Insta pics we discuss on the pod.

Remember there is beauty, wit, humour, joy, connection and wildlife in the world.

See you on the other side.

Clare x

Have you heard of it?

Lefties is taking off in Europe, and expanding into new markets (Mexico, Egypt, Saudi, UAE). The brand’s IG bio reads “LEFTIES EVERYWHERE, ON EVERYONE™” and the site features influencers spruiking faux fur jackets for €30, satin midi skirts for €15. These prices aren’t as low as Temu’s, but they make Zara look luxury. Mind you, Amazon Haul puts all this in the shade.

Haul launched in Australia in August, with $1 flash deals and up to 80% off its already dirt-cheap future landfill. According to Retail Insight Network, there are now more than 1 million items on the global site priced under $10. And now Shein is copying itself, with a spinoff brand targeted at subcultures presumably turned off by the main line. Romwe - “your go-to for all things alt” - peddles plastic goth looks, fake grunge and punk without the DIY.

Some retail experts reckon the likes of H&M and Zara have become “legacy retailers” that can’t compete with the new super-cheapies, so their best option is to shift towards premium. Case in point: Uniqlo hiring Claire Waight Keller. Or Gap going Goop.

But I don’t think cheap is leaving any time soon; there’s just more space for the newbies.

Though clearly not in the Shein league in terms of scale - “with hundreds of styles dropping every week” vs. Shein’s 10k a week (YES, YOU READ THAT RIGHT 10,000) - the Australian brand White Fox is rising. Founder Georgia Contos hit the Sydney news this week for her spenny home reno. A few years ago she was flogging cheap bikinis on eBay. Today her brand has more IG followers than Lefties and is thought to be worth around $2 billion, built primarily on a fierce influencer marketing strategy. The site has links to join their student ambassador program but no word on sustainability.

There’s a certain inevitability about all this.

“We are [living] in fashion capitalism, and fashion capitalism is driven by a profit incentives,” says David on the new Wardrobe Crisis, Ep 251: Inside Shein. To varying degrees, Shein’s business model “obviously is being copied by other companies”.

So what does it mean for the workers in Guangzhou who make these clothes?

Lately, Shein has been spinning sustainability rhetoric, talking about “working hard to drive continued progress toward our sustainability and social commitments, and increase transparency”. They claim to be “a responsible corporate citizen that improves lives in the communities we reach”. Do we believe them? Or is unethical simply part of their business model?

Find out

What David told me was eye-opening, to say the least. And in an exclusive I’m still pinching myself over (remember, Wardrobe Crisis is proudly independent, i.e. a team of one, funded by Substack subscribers) I also got to interview one of the undercover researchers who’d secretly met with workers on the ground. We're calling them ‘R’ and their identity has been disguised.

Listen on Apple here:

Or Spotify here:

David Hachfeld is a fashion supply chains expert at Public Eye, a Swiss NGO founded in 1968 to hold big business to account. Public Eye has published two investigations on Shein’s Guangzhou supply chain, informing much of what we know today about how the company operates.

During covid, they set out to investigate how e-commerce was reshaping the fashion economy, explains David. They focused on China, “because Chinese e-commerce was 5 years ahead”. Shein emerged as the clear leader, although, he admits, at that time the name “didn’t ring a bell” for most. While Gen Z shoppers were all over it, Shein was barely on the NGO or policy radar back then.

“We found it really interesting how fast they were developing their business model and their tactics, also just catering to the global market, not to China, and we thought: let’s go deeper.”

Share

Public Eye’s first report, Toiling Away for Shein, was published in November 2021. It detailed the results of undercover interviews with garment and logistics workers, conducted by partners on the ground. It dug into who owns the company and its recipe for success, and revealed for the first time where and how the brand’s clothes are made, and a stark picture of worker exploitation.

“I work every day from 8 in the morning to 10.30 at night and take one day off each month. I can’t afford any more days off because it costs too much.” - Shein contractor, via Public Eye

After that, the deluge. Long term WCP listeners may remember the first time I covered Shein back in January 2022. Re-listen to Ep 153 here. My guests were Meaghan Tobin and Louise Matsakis, the American journos behind a viral investigative piece for Rest of World that delved into the Shein’s marketplace model & algorithim-based approach to design. If you can call it design. Essentially they scrape the internet for inspirations and churn out thousands of styles per day based on what celebrities and sometimes private individuals are wearing on social media. Or rip off small designers.

Then in 2022, a UK Chanel 4 doco filmed undercover at Chinese factories contracted by Shein. The headline allegation: 18-hour days, & piece rates of 3p an item.

Shein responded to all this, acknowledging some breaches and committing big bucks to fixing things. Details here.

“Shein came up saying the situation is not actually so bad… there have been improvements,” says David. “And we thought yeah, maybe. So let’s go back. Let’s go back to the same places, again to talk to workers, to ask them: are there any substantial improvements in your working conditions.” He points out that just because things are bad, doesn’t mean they have to be bad forever. “It’s a choice of companies how they behave, how they structure their production, and it can change …we wanted to give them a chance.” So what did they discover?

Workers are still paying the price for Shein’s success. To 75-hour working weeks, piece rates and no contracts, we can add secrecy, opaque financial operations and a general air of mystery around its billionaire founder and how the brand does business.

This is the story they don’t want told.

Listen to the new podcast & tell me your thoughts. I’d love to know what you make of it.

Clare xx

P.S. I love you

P.P.S. No Black Friday discounts here. An annual subscription to Wardrobe Crisis is fantastic value all year round! See below :)

Paid subscriptions power the podcast, helping to keep it ad-free and free for all to listen. To support the show, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

It may be getting dreich (cold, wet, gloomy) here in Scotland, but there is no doubt the world is heating up. Meanwhile, fashion’s climate impacts are only intensifying, despite it being a whole decade since the Paris Agreement. It’s enough to break a fashion girl’s heart. But the solutions to fashion’s role in the climate crisis might just be surprisingly simple...

COP30 is now in its second week, hosting more than 50,000 policymakers, activists, journalists, climate scientists, farmers, green entrepreneurs and yes, oil lobbyists, at the gateway to the Amazon in Brazil.

These UN climate summits are always fraught, but that tension is multiplied this year as climate impacts intensify, and those in power distract us from their failure to address these impacts by stirring up culture wars; encouraging us to turn against each other and not them. And of course, the world’s richest country, whose military alone is the world’s largest industrial polluter, has chosen to skip COP30 (guess who). Meanwhile Indigenous People have been protesting their lack of inclusion in—and violent exclusion from—the conference.

Nonetheless, we’re all hoping for clarity on how rich countries will deliver finance for adaptation and loss & damage, and clear time-bound roadmaps for fossil fuel phaseout and halting deforestation.

So what’s this got to do with fashion?

Well, according to Apparel Impact Institute, fashion’s footprint has reached an all-time high of 944 million tonnes of CO2e—2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. To stay within a 1.5°C trajectory, this needs to shrink by at least 45% in the next five years.

Have you heard of the UN’s Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action? This coalition of major brands and manufacturers launched 7 years ago at COP24 as an effort to shrink fashion’s carbon footprint. Despite those good intentions, emissions are still projected to reach over 1.24 billion tonnes of CO2e in 2030.

Clearly, brands are way off track.

The Fashion Charter recently shared an open letter calling for policymakers to accelerate a just, clean energy transition at COP30. The letter advocates for more support from governments to increase renewable energy access, strengthen reporting requirements, scale up climate finance, and advance climate adaptation in order to help signatories meet their targets to phase out coal and reduce emissions. They say that key barriers to progress have been the lack of mandatory reporting standards, accessible global financing mechanisms, and policy support for renewable energy and electrification solutions.

Share

At Action Speaks Louder, together with my fellow campaigners at Fashion Revolution and Stand.earth, we’ve published a response to this letter, which you can read in full here. In it, we commend the Fashion Charter’s support for an increased share of renewables in electricity grids and frameworks for corporate clean energy procurement and electrification. These are non-negotiables for decarbonising textile supply chains. It’s also hopeful to see an indication that the Fashion Charter recognises the importance of climate adaptation for worker wellbeing, which is crucial considering that rapidly rising temperatures are already impacting workers’ health, safety, and livelihoods. (Listen to Episode 251 of the Wardrobe Crisis Podcast for more on that.)

Our job is to hold those with the most power accountable for their impacts on those with the least. And the fashion industry, dominated by vast multinational conglomerates making well over $10 billion a year, is valued at $1.77 trillion - more than than the GDP of Australia.

Clearly, brands can afford to invest in protecting the people in their supply chain, whose work their profits depend upon. So what are they waiting for?

Leave a comment

TO DO LIST

Here are our key recommendations for fashion industry leaders to ramp up their climate ambition, at COP30 and beyond:

1. Targeted Policy Advocacy for Specific Geographies
   Beyond general global letters, Fashion Charter signatories have the influence to communicate directly with policymakers in specific countries in order to translate the asks of this letter into concrete policy decisions. This applies to major sourcing countries, such as China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, as well as consumer hubs like the EU and US. Transparent, disaggregated reporting on these policy advocacy efforts should be shared openly. This is because we know that strategic, location-specific advocacy by fashion brands can help deliver transformative change, such as H&M and Nikes’ recent advocacy for Vietnam’s recently enacted DPPA (direct power purchase agreement), which will enable manufacturers to directly source renewable energy to power their factories.
   

2. Strengthened Fashion Charter Commitments
   While stating an intention to share ‘updated language and guidance’, the letter falls short of explicitly committing signatories to increased ambition to meet the increased stakes of the climate crisis. The Fashion Charter should build on existing commitments, such as requiring brands to develop regionally-specific and finance-backed just transition plans alongside workers and civil society. Signatories should also further develop more specific fossil fuel phaseout targets, with the electrification of thermal processes as the clear alternative to coal, instead of false solutions like fossil gas and unsustainable biomass.

3. Brand Investment in Decarbonisation and Climate Adaptation
   Those with the deepest pockets must pay their fair share for climate action. Solutions for supply chain decarbonisation and climate adaptation are widely commercially available now, and any brand waiting for perfect policy conditions to start investing is doomed to fail. The Fashion Charter has an opportunity to mobilise brands to invest in best-practice proven solutions, such as industrial heat pumps.

Even as political headwinds challenge sustainability narratives, fashion brands must double down on meaningful policy advocacy efforts and invest in both climate mitigation and adaptation.

To find out more about fashion’s climate progress ,and the actions brands must take to safeguard the future of their business on planet Earth, by checking out Fashion Revolution’s 2025 What Fuels Fashion report and Stand.earth’s 2025 Fossil Free Fashion Scorecard.

I’ve been procrastinating over this letter, partly because I started writing a big think piece about global inequality inspired by Elon’s trillion dollar pay package (and that vid of him getting a standing ovation. Who are these people?)

Sorry for putting you through that.

There is another one, though, I’m afraid.

Courage!

Enough already

I’m still researching the inequality piece, looking at the issue through the fashion lens - LMK in Comments if you’d read that, or it’s just too galling. I do think it’s important to get across the scope of it, and consider what action we might take but will wait to see what you think.

Next, I got sidetracked wading through the COP30 headlines. Again, not the cheeriest. Again, I have a plan for useful coverage. The excellent Ruth MacGilp, ex Fash Rev, currently Action Speaks Louder, is going to write a guest post on fashion’s Climate To Do List. One to look forward to.

Then this afternoon, minutes before I finished work on the 2nd pod in the brand new series of Wardrobe Crisis, I saw some heartening news.

About time!

My guest, Ghanaian social entrepreneur and founder of The Revival Yayra Agbofah, has been named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders.

So well deserved. It made me smile, then reminded me that Omoyemi Akerele, also on the TIME list, just accepted the Earthshot Prize, in the Build a Waste Free World category, for Lagos Fashion Week (which she founded). Go Omoyemi!

She’s another person of great integrity, critiquing the current broken system but not stopping there - rather, proving in real time how fashion can be done differently. Here we are (below) in Copenhagen with Dilys Williams from Centre For Sustainable Fashion.

Dilys’s work offers more yet proof - people are literally being the change every day.

Like my guest on the first ep of Series 12, Samia Benchaou.

We should not give Musk all our attention. He’s an energy vampire. By tuning him out we make space for Samia, and…

This just in: Australia is producing so much solar power the government is going to start giving it to us for free during the day. Yet, what’s making headlines in Oz? Opposition leader Sussan Ley officially abandoning Net Zero. The only useful response? Put her on silent.

There’s always another side. That’s my point.

Good news is out there, we just need to amplify it. That is not to demean the vital importance of staying across the dark stuff, no no that won’t work all, but to balance it out so we can keep on keeping on.

Hope lives as long as we give it breath.

The TIME mag editors asked Yayra, What gives you hope about the future of the planet?

Here’s his answer:

“What gives me hope is the creativity and resilience of young people and communities on the frontlines. In Kantamanto, I see traders, artisans and youth turning waste into value every day with little support. Their ingenuity proves that solutions already exist, what’s missing is recognition and investment. If the climate movement can finally center these voices, the future will be more just and truly sustainable.”

On the pod, I ask him to describe his place of work. He tells me:

“It’s my favorite place on this planet. Amazing people, good energy. And it entails resilience. Dignity. It’s amazing how you see people working there with so much dignity, with so much love for what they do, even despite the fact that they have no idea where these clothes are coming from, or who [from] or why… I think the traders and everybody in Kantamanto are superheroes. They are the leaders of change. They are the practitioners of circularity. And for me, I always celebrate them. I always salute them, take off my hats for them - even though I hardly take my hats off!”

Listen on Apple here:

On Spotify here:

Look out, this week, for your own good news stories. I’d love to hear them.

Clare xx

Sometimes I wonder if championing secondhand as a solution to unsustainable fashion feels a bit activism-lite.

I worry…

1. about sidelining ethical small biz and indie makers with our #buynothingnew crusade

2. that we’re swapping fast fashion for secondhand hauls

3. we need revolutionary system change not just a shopping habit shift

4. but also (and can you believe this only just occurred to me?!) that the most powerful resale platforms are multinational corporate behemoths.

Take eBay, for example.

You could argue they’re in the business of circularity, but many ‘Buy It Now’ items are actually new. Search “bag charm” and you might as well be on Temu. And while I can personally vouch for the local fashion teams being genuinely passionate about sustainability (I worked with them on the Circular Fashion Fund, and they supported my Sydney book launch for Wear Next), as with so many big firms, the further up the hierarchy you get, the harder it is to pin down what they really stand for.

I spent yesterday researching who owns what in the increasingly valuable resale platform space. Here’s what I discovered:

Most of the lead players are listed companies, in the old school shareholder primacy mode, i.e. big business/ big profits rather than the individual-sellers-being-creative story that we prefer to tell.

eBay Inc.’s CEO/President Jamie Iannoco earned $20 mil in 2024, same year he cut 1000 full time jobs. Nothing unusual here. All the big corporates who can will slash humans to make way for AI, if they haven’t already. Did you see the Salesforce boss on this? “I need less heads!” Brutal.

At least eBay’s current top man has better ethics than the last one. Devin Wenig stepped down in 2019 after a US court ordered eBay to pay a $3m fine for harassing the duo behind a newsletter critical of the company. If Wenig’s crew were still in charge, I’d be bracing myself for a delivery of live spiders. Happy Hallow’een.

Show me the money

eBay’s largest shareholders are Vanguard and BlackRock.

Vanguard has more than $590 bn invested in fossil fuels. Net Zero is over. Want a side of weapons with that? BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset management firm, with more than $10 trillion to play with, is also the biggest investor in Lockheed Martin. And Boeing, and a bunch more military-industrial complex things. They’re the biggest investors in America’s private prisons, and in Rio Tinto. All the good stuff.

Oh but these funds aren’t the actual owners. They are mutual funds, which means it’s their investors’ money, not theirs.

“At its core, BlackRock is tasked with managing wealth on behalf of institutional investors, governments, and individuals. Despite the massive size of its balance sheet, direct equity investments made by BlackRock itself make up a relatively small portion of its operations. Instead, its funds hold significant stakes in large corporations, but these investments are tied to the clients who own the funds.” Thank you College Investor :)

That’s alright then!

Except…

Who runs the world

You think they don’t wield power in shareholder meetings? Did we believe Mr BlackRock Larry Fink when he told Harvard Business Review, ‘I don’t have leverage, I’m an asset manager.” Ickle me. May as well believe Vanguard respects ESG. Vanguard’s CEO Salim Ramji is ex BlackRock. Don’t underestimate these guys. They’re all in this together.

So why aren’t more of us asking: with what agenda? What are their values? And do we want trust them our money?

Vanguard and BlackRock join Bezos as the biggest Amazon shareholders. What’s Amazon got to do with second-hand? Thrifting has never been hotter. The fashion resale market is tipped to reach $367bn by 2029. Last year, it grew by 15%. Everyone wants in. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to see Shein launch preloved. Wait, what?

BTW, Shein counts Sequoia Capital’s Chinese arm as a major investor. You might have seen Sequoia in the news recently for failing to condemn partner Shaun Maguire’s Islamophobia.

Not second best

You can buy preloved luxury on Amazon, thanks to a partnership with UK startup Hardly Ever Worn It. Only maybe don’t, until you’ve read this BBC report on sellers failing to get paid. Looks like HEWI is currently offline. In fairness, this not Amazon’s fault; then again, they’re busy with Haul (that “casino of consumption” - I recommend this vid if you need SparkNotes).

Ethical Consumer mag reminds us that Amazon “is known for aggressive tax avoidance, exploitation of workers’ rights and massive emissions”. Is eBay any better? Their answer: while “eBay clearly outperforms Amazon when it comes to tackling emissions” both companies are tax avoiders, and both “receive the worst possible score in Ethical Consumer’s workers rights rating” - with eBay called out for union busting in the US.

How about Gen Z fave Depop? Depop is owned by Etsy, another PLC. Can you guess who their two biggest shareholders are? You get a car!

ThredUp? The US brand behind the much-quoted annual Resale Report - the one that predicts resale will eclipse fast fashion by the end of the decade in a win for sustainability. ThredUp’s top shareholders include… OH STOP IT!

Someone pls tell the marketing exec who did the Earth Day T-shirt collab.

The list goes on. Great Hill Partners, which poured money into The RealReal back in 2017, is backed by Blackstone, from which BlackRock was spun off in the ‘90s.

Is there nothing they don’t own?!

Wait, there’s Vinted! Lithuania’s first unicorn, reckoned to be worth a billion bucks. Alas, one of their major shareholders is Bailie Gifford. Vinted’s lead investor TPG had until recently flown somewhat under the radar, until this Bloomberg investigation. Hands up who’s surprised to hear it’s profits over patients’ needs when asset managers get into the private hospital racket?

Vestiaire remains privately held, and wins so far on the integrity front. Their lead investor, Eurazeo, is focused on the green transition and stands out for not investing in fossil fuels, although the platform’s second biggest funder, Softbank, is deep in bed with Open AI. How do you feel about that?

I’ll tell you how I feel. Like supporting the little guys.

ICYMI, I’m not a fan of the corporatisation of everything.

Greenpeace got me into with following dirty money trails (remember this?). As did research for my 2018 book, Rise & Resist, which asks the question: how can we take our power back and change the current system for the better?

Because we really need to change it.

This is tricky territory. Choice is a privilege. Whatever we do, we damage something. The very act of living in an extractive, capitalist economy means we can’t avoid it. And no one likes a holier-than-thou person carping on about how terrible business is, while benefiting from it. How not to be a hypocrite? I ditched X/ Twitter over Musk because it was easy, but you don’t see me leaving Instagram over Zuckerberg, do you? Or taking Wardrobe Crisis off Spotify. When the stakes are raised, it’s harder to act. Plus, as I’ve often said, brands are just places where people work. I used to work for Rupert Murdoch FFS.

And yet… I also think it’s a cop out to opt out, and that we can, collectively, challenge the system whatever way we can manage. It all adds up!

Looking at fashion in particular. We deserve a fashion system we can be proud of, one that centres joy for all, not at the expense of some. Regeneration over extraction. Community, craft, connection, and true beauty over the fast, exploitative garbage.

Next, we must build it. Take active steps to be part of the change, because when we sit back and accept what is delivered by others to us, without our input, without our say, we cannot help but be disappointed.

Tackling waste is a fair place to start.

Have you heard the one about there being enough clothing already in existence to dress the next 6 generations? No joke. The current fashion system is crazy wasteful. We’re overproducing & underusing our clothes. Australians are buying, on average, 53 new garments a year and churning through them at record rates. We try to do the right thing, resell, recycle, donate responsibly (don’t get me wrong, charities need your donations) but inevitably the excess ends up in landfill, or escapes into places we never could have imagined.

It wasn’t always like this

I just attended a conference for Charitable Reuse Australia, where Kirsten Junor, CEO of Reverse Garbage, said, “Do you know why they call it a dustbin? It’s where you’d tip out the contents of your dustpan & brush when you’d swept the floor.”

Back in the day, that was the sum total of your rubbish. You didn’t put food scraps in the bin; they were too valuable to feed livestock or compost. Stuff that couldn’t be repurposed was burned, but filling our bins with plastic and unwanted consumer goods is a modern invention.

This month (October 18) marked the first ever World Op Shop Day - an initiative from CRA to get more people celebrating secondhand. And 100 years of op shops in this country!

The phrase was coined, in 1925, by Lady Millie Tallis, when she proposed opening an “opportunity shop” selling secondhand goods in the old Melbourne Cyclorama building, to raise funds for a new wing of St Vincent’s Hospital. She was inspired French stores known as les magasins d’occasion - which meant bargain shops. Whether Tallis simply got the translation wrong, or saw the genius of her new phrase, “op shop” was born. We’ve used it ever since.

That research was done by Australian author Robyn Annear (I’ve invited her on the pod), for her excellent book, Nothing New, A History of Secondhand. In it, she writes: “For most of history people lived with scarcity. All things had long lives - used, reused, refashioned - that tapered into afterlives as constituents of other things.” She tells of 18th Century Britain, when clothing was seen as “an investment that could be liquidated in hard times”.

I’ve written myself about the dwindling proportion of household income required for clothing these days. You used to have to save up for it. The shift to offshore production in the 1990s and 2000s totally changed the game.

Here, was a new era of fast, affordable fashion. It was exciting, convenient, a source of instant gratification. No more begging the home-sewist in your life to copy a designer piece from a magazine. But I think we need to be wary of saying what this delivered was carte blanche “affordable” or “democratic”. At some point, “devalued” becomes the more accurate word.

Today the fashion industry produces something like 150 billion items of clothing a year, likely more. Meanwhile clothing utilisation—how much wear we get from all these clothes—is collapsing. Disposability is the trend; we have stopped treasuring what we buy. Partly, because we’ve lost that connection once so deep with how our clothes are made.

In the early 1960s, Australian producers were supplying 97.5 % of our apparel market. Today, it’s just 3%.

What we’re importing is, of course, varied. Absolutely, some of it is gorgeous! Some is truly luxurious, and some simply necessary. But I think it’s fair to say, some isn’t.

Future landfill

Needing a boost after all the VC research, I thought I’d do a spot of shopping. Here’s what I didn’t add to cart.

On Amazon Haul, a High Waist A-Line Pleated Mini Skirt, $8.10.

On Shein, a White *Vintage Off Shoulder Long Dress. 100% polyester. $23.96.

On Temu, “Fun Food Blanket. Contemporary Style, Machine Washable, All-Season Flannel Throw with Unique Food Design | Perfect for Couch, Bed.” Prints include Burrito. Pink donut. Poached egg. Meat pizza. Promotion! $8.60

Don’t forget Skims. Kim’s much-discussed faux hair micro string thong (82% Polyamide / 18% Elastane) has sold out.

Remember what I said about, we get the fashion system we design. The one we buy into.

We must not sit back and accept what is delivered without our input. The billionaires do not have our best interests at heart. They are getting even richer by spruiking us landfill fashion made from petrochemical materials, designed to last in the environment, but not in our wardrobes or hearts.

To resist Kim’s knickers, and Shein’s phony vintage dress, is one small step towards taking our power back. And to shop truly circular fashion from charity shops is to literally give back at the same time. Something that stayed with me from the CRA conference was when Aife O’Loughlin from Salvos Stores said: we don’t do a good enough job of sharing the social impact of op shopping.

Every purchase from Sacred Heart Mission Opshops in Melbourne, for example, directly funds their community programs including the Women’s House in St Kilda.

What would the future look like if we stop buying fast fashion and shopped here instead? That’s up to us. The future is what we make it. Ultimately, it’s an opportunity. Lady Millie Tallis would be proud.

*This is an extended version of a speech I gave at a Melbourne Fashion Week runway event for Sacred Heart Opshops - a fantastic event that reminded me of the mighty power of community.

SERIES 12 PODCAST IS INCOMING!

Samia Benchaou, Yayra Agbofah, marvellous moss embroiderer Amanda Cobbett and an essential mini series on workers’ rights. Oh, & I’m still trying to make that ep on 2nd-hand, after several false starts, so hit me up if you wanna be in it :)

Finally, to my beloved paid Substack subscribers - thank you for making the podcast possible. Your contribution funds the show (and keeps me from running cap in hand to BlackRock ha ha ha).

THANK YOU

Clare xx

“Fashion is in the sky, in the street; fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.” So said Gabrielle Chanel.

Do you agree? If so, what did fashion month tell us about the mad moment we find ourselves in today?

Herewith, some thought-starters.

Please do tell me what you think.

Leave a comment

1. AI is scaring the crap out of everyone.

Evidence: Thom Browne’s aliens. (Although they did carry signs saying ‘we come in peace’.)

2. We hunger for simpler times.

Work is changing. Craft is being devalued. Gen Z is looking at more precarious gig work, or no work at all thanks to AI (see above). No wonder we’re so nostalgic for jobs that involved making something.

Evidence: Miu Miu. What will Grandpa Grant make in that leather apron? Dinner? Horseshoes? Trouble? Or just a pocketful of happiness? We sure could use some.

3. Fast fashion is still in power. And fashion weeks, even those known for focusing on indie creativity (yes, you London) are onboard.

Evidence: Topshop took to Trafalgar Square in August. The celebrities in attendance were presumably well paid to pretend to be excited by the lacklustre polyester on display. Come September, H&M was opening LFW, with Lola Young singing and Romeo Beckham walking (below). And more polyester! Again, big budgets deployed to sell the dream. And did you notice that Inditex’s Pull&Bear became the lead sponsor for LFW’s New Gen program last year? This season, they too were on the runway, via a collab with emerging name Lueder. Meanwhile, Primark made its Milan FW debut (why??!), and Shein chose PFW to announce plans for a slew of physical store openings in France. The backlash has already begun.

4. We’re addicted to plastic. Fossil fuel derived synthetic fibres are projected to rise to 73% of textile production by 2030 (Changing Markets). But what’s with brands increasingly embracing the shiny plastic aesthetic too?

Evidence: Designers revived clear plastic footwear - see (above) Loewe’s sock-revealers. Glenn Martens built on his claustrophobic Artisanal offering from July to wrap yet more Margiela stuff in toxic PVC: “A top of clustered upcycled jewellery has been PLASTICISED. Silk jackets are entirely plasticised to become rainwear…” Since everyone adores Martens, the pushback was low-key to non-existent. For my part, I wonder why can’t these genuinely genius designers do something about sustainability? Opportunity lost.

5. Is it fascism yet? Sure looks that way in the US, with Trump sending troops into democratic cities on home soil, terrorising immigrants, jailing dissidents, persecuting universities… If you think I’m exaggerating, I recommend Jason Stanley’s book, How Fascism Works.

Resistance in all its forms matters, and the arts have a powerful voice.

Evidence: Pamela Anderson read out an emotive 1941 letter at Valentino, where Alessandro Michele aimed to “address the rise of fascism by dressing those who dream to dare”. It proved divisive - some show-goers were moved to tears, others noted big business is complicit. Ultimately, we all know a lace trimmed blouse won’t fix things though.

6. Luxury is getting more and more out of touch. Just like IRL, where the poor get poorer and the extreme-rich even richer, fashion’s polarities are increasingly exaggerated. Just who is supposed to relate to Gucci’s La Famiglia? When will people stop thinking that aspiring to own some luxury something or other they literally cannot afford is going to make them happy, and start questioning the effing tax system that lets the multinationals and their CEOs avoid contributing to society in meaningful ways? IDK, really I don’t.

Evidence: How long have you got?

7.If you did have money to burn, you’d probs spend it at the new Chanel

Evidence: Matthieu Blazy’s suits are so nice. See, I’m as susceptible as you are. Damn it.

8. For the rest of us, DIY rules.

Evidence: My bank balance. Also, this Angelica Hicks post has 80K likes. Jonathan Anderson’s Dior debut was v. clever, he is undoubtedly doing good and thoughtful work. But what Angelica can do with a pillow slip, some duct tape & 2 bags of corn chips! Chef’s kiss.

9. We should really stop buying stuff we don’t need - or else, doom!

Evidence: While we were busy watching models wear clothes, the Stockholm Resilience Centre published its latest briefing, warning that 7 out of 9 planetary boundaries have now been breached. “This means that several of Earth’s life-supporting systems risk crossing critical thresholds, with severe consequences for both ecosystems and societies.”

10. Permission to hide under the covers, or just hide full stop. For a bit anyway, but you will be required to dust yourself off and get back to restistence. We need you.

Evidence: Cocoon volumes at Comme des Garcons. Simone Rocha’s pillow accessories. This amusing obliterating star costume by Noir’s Kei Ninomiya.

Goodnight & good luck!

I’ll be back soon with important stuff on PFAS. I know, fun.

Clare x

It’s complicated.

Sometimes I think we’re just not up for the inconvenience. That we think, the status quo is not so bad, so let’s … coast a while.

Because let’s be clear - it’s a hassle to resist entrenched systems. It requires ongoing commitment.

Be honest, how up for that are you?

I just got home from my local park, an extraordinary regenerated urban wetland, on the site of an old rubbish tip in south Sydney. The story of its creation is heartening.

Pre-colonisation, this place was known as Kangaroo Ground, where the Gadigal and Wangal people came to hunt. (Repeat after me: sovereignty was never ceded.) From the early 1900s, the new city’s brick, pottery and tile manufacturers moved in, attracted by the clay soils.

The last brickmakers shuttered in 1970. But post WWII, the old brick-pits had morphed into a major municipal waste dump. (BTW, Sydney-siders, did you know Moore Park was also once a rubbish tip ? See below: then, circa 1937, now - wow!)

Garbage was piled here until 1976, including some weird stuff; rumour has it, even a dead elephant from the zoo.

Local 1980s kids remember playing in what was essentially a toxic wasteland.

In the early ‘90s, it was finally sealed with a new layer of clay and soil on top. People Environment and Community Efforts (PEACE) invited locals to tree-planting days on the site, although there was still so much methane leaching off it, many of those first seedlings failed, burned at the root.

In 2010 City of Sydney, as part of its Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy, launched a project with Environmental Partnership NSW and ecological designers Turf Design to landscape an ambitious architectural water catchment ‘wetland’ and recreational park on the site (which was still too contaminated for residential development).

This included a series of human-made lakes, featuring terracotta ‘Water Falls’ by artists Jennifer Turpin and Michaelie Crawford that release, reticulate and aerate the water via cascades. The artists also developed a series of “exhaust fans” that transfer water from the bioremediation “paddies” to the lagoons.

The plantings of trees, native plants and grasses are now well established, and the park captures, cleans and reuses 850 million litres of stormwater a year. Somehow, the whole thing manages to feel like an ecologically sensitive bird sanctuary, a vital third space, and like it’s always been here. All at the same time.

Periodically, methane leaks still occur. Yet…

I found this before-and-after pic on Facebook. We can fix stuff!

I always take a million pics here.

Marvel at the abundance of wildlife, water, trees - singing with the magic and resilience of Nature. And surely evidence of the fact that people do want sustainable solutions, and can mobilise to create them. For my money, this place is one of Sydney’s great achievements.

Feel good factor

The above vid was shot at the park’s community garden, Sydney City Farm, billed as “a place to learn about urban agriculture & sustainable food production” and tended by volunteers. They grow veggies, herbs, there’s even an mini orchard, and all the produce is donated to local charities that help feed people in need.

Meanwhile, Nature is back!

One time, we saw a shiny green frog basking on a leaf. Here’s an actual picture of it. I mean, look! You could be forgiven to thinking I nicked that off Australian Geographic. What could be more astonishing, delightful, hopeful? I love that frog. Seeing that frog is like one of my best connect-to-place moments in 25 years of living in this city.

Whenever I visit, I count the birds I spot by type, because it gives me a thrill, and encourages me to take notice. Hello Mr Magpie, look a kookaburra! Swooping swallows. White-faced herons, little black cormorants, dusky moorhens. This winter, I saw a spoon bill here. And once, the thrill of a Pacific Baza, aka crested hawk, glimpsed through the She-oaks.

This morning I passed a fig tree laden with pink-and-grey galas, which made me laugh out loud, and call, "You answered!"

Because one time when my husband and I were here, he asked, "How come there are never any galas?"

"I'll summons some," I joked. Seconds later, there they were.

But will they be here tomorrow?

As I headed back today, I noted this ominous sign:

Oh no! WeedPro is glyphosate.

As this peer-reviewed 2022 study from the Journal of Molecular Sciences notes: “[this] non-selective systemic biocide with broad-spectrum activity is the most widely used herbicide in the world. It can persist in the environment for days or months, and its intensive and large-scale use can constitute a major environmental and health problem.”

Not everyone agrees, as we shall see.

Back to my walk. Sure enough, around the bend: a ranger with his backpack of blue poison, blitzing the those unfortunate plants-out-of-place. We got talking. Turns out the weeds in question were “mostly grass and dandelions".

To borrow from Rachel Carson, “such plants are ‘weeds’ only to those who make a business of selling and applying chemicals”.

Now, City of Sydney landscapers are not allowed to spray glyphosate on windy days, or when rain is forecast (if glyphosate reaches surface water, it’s not broken down readily). Nor can they spray on the other side of the wire fence, he explained. Yonder, volunteer bush regenerators do their work. Over here though, well, unsightly broadleafs spoil the aesthetics for the joggers and dog walkers.

A Cockapoo approached, tail wagging, and sniffed deeply of the blue haze. A breeze rippled the plants beyond the divide. I wondered, did my frog I saw know about the fence division?

Dirty history

The OG maker of glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup), was proven corporate criminal Monsanto, who brought us Agent Orange. And effectively enslaved Indian cotton farmers.

Monsanto was embroiled in an ongoing US class action claiming links to cancer clusters when German chem-monster Bayer took it over in 2018. The outgoing Monstanto chief walked off with a $63 million payout.

According to the Guardian, “so far Bayer has paid out more than $US10bn to settle cases, while insisting the product is safe.” Don’t get me started on Bayer’s ethics track record.

Back in 2015, the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer deemed glyphosate “probably carcinogenic”, and there followed a flurry of promises to phase it out, particularly in Europe. The Big Chem lobby, however, is a mighty foe.

They’ve long argued that their poisons pose no real risk to anything but plants. Or insects. Whatever the enemy. Forgive me if I don’t believe them.

The Australian Pesticides & Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) rejects the cancer-in-humans risk but did recently reassess glyphosate’s safety and use guidelines, noting: the environmental risk is “predominantly related to birds, but also small mammals and sensitive aquatic species as a result of spray drift.”

Big Chem is at pains to tell us that our fears are unfounded, yet there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. One of the few studies on birds linked glyphosate with endocrine disruption. The EU defines Roundup as “very toxic to aquatic organisms”. The US’s EPA admits that soil and climate conditions affect glyphosate's persistence in soil.

A 2021 study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology found Roundup killed bees exposed to it, potentially due to other ingredients used in the formula.

I'll get onto fashion in a moment, suffice to say: glyphosate is still legal in Australia, and the ranger was doing nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, City of Sydney’s policy is pretty good compared to what happens elsewhere - they’ve reduced the amount of spraying, and encourage manual weeding, but the question remains: WFT are we doing spraying this shit in public parks, especially one created to reverse the toxic destruction of the past?

It's as if Rachel Carson never wrote Silent Spring.

Carson - who was hounded by Monsanto - died of cancer not long after writing her jaw-dropping expose on the chemical poisoning of American wildlife.

We make our excuses -

• the evidence is strong but not equivocal

• these chemicals (mostly) don't kill us

• they aren't banned (yet)

and carry on regardless, delegating responsibility.

Those who feel compelled to speak out for the frogs and galas are dismissed as alarmists, or crackpot hippies. I wonder, though, how future generations will judge us when the last frog has croaked?

I'm thinking of starting a campaign to ban Roundup in Australian parks. Been in touch with the Pesticides Action Network. LMK if you’d support. It's worked in London and Paris, why not here?

For those wondering, but isn’t this a fashion newsletter, thank you for your patience :)

Fashion link

Here’s another story of knowing we can do better but failing to bother. I was saddened to read in Jasmin Malik Chua’s latest Sourcing Journal piece of the final chapter of the Natural Fiber Welding (NFW) story. (Listen to Jasmin in Ep 252 of the pod - which is funded by paid subs to this newsletter - THANK YOU, I LOVE U!)

I interviewed NFW’s founder Luke Haverhals for Wear Next back in 2023. Haverhals is the analytical chemist/materials scientist who invented the plastic-free, animal leather alternative, Mirum - a mix of natural rubber, plant and mineral fillers, natural waxes and oils.

Last year, the company was an Earth Shot Prize finalist. They did collabs with Allbirds, Stella McCartney and Ralph Lauren, and also produced a strong, engineered recycled cotton billed as a poly alternative, Clarus. “Think: the utility of synthetics from 100 percent natural sources.”

NFW’s mission was to prove we could live without plastics and the dangerous petrochemicals sloshed all over so many other materials in common use.

“There are now papers written [about how] when car tyres wear down little bits get washed into streams, then the fish die,” he told me. “Why do the fish die? Because of the nasty petrochemicals put into the rubber to make it more durable. Then those things break down into toxins.” He shook his head sadly, as if to say, why do we keep doing this stuff? “The way we make everything manmade now comes from these long-dead fossil fuels, and they’re all toxic.”

Meanwhile, greenwashing abounds. “Right now Germany claims they recycle 60% of their plastic, but you know what they define as recycle?” More head shaking. “What if I told you my family and I *recycle* our trash, so we take it outside, set it on fire, toast marshmallows? That’s recycling?! It’s called ‘energy recovery’. No! Recycling won’t save us.”

He was confident in NFW’s approach - use natural nutrients, regeneratively sourced, then “build materials that are complex as the applications that require them”.

Take shoes, for example. “You can’t only do the upper. We’ve made now the only natural shoe sole, upper, foam and fabrics - we’ve proved it can be done. If you can make a shoe that way, you can make a bag, a car door panel.”

Next, he had to make these proven alternatives as cost-effective as the crappy plastic ones. Enter new materials’ much discussed scaling problem.

Brands talk big talk about sustainability - but every time fail to seriously back it. See Renewcell. See Bolt Threads.

“If I have my way NFW will be one of the top 10 biggest companies in the world!” Haverhals told me, back when his world seemed full of possibility. “Then we’re going to liberate the technology for regular people to use because it’s better and more healthy. Then my children will live better.”

Rest in Power, Natural Fiber Welding.

Next time, I’ll share what I learned at the Clean Clothes Campaign’s 35 Year celebrations in Thailand. Thank you for reading & supporting Wardrobe Crisis.

Clare x

While the mainstream media harps on about a lost generation, how checked out the current crop of students is across the board - addicted to their phones, numbed by shrinking opportunities and increasingly reliant on chatGPT to do their work for them - the reality, in my experience, is different.

I taught a storytelling masterclass at Sydney’s Fashion Design Studio. The idea was to help these emerging designers, the majority of whom dream of starting their own labels, with communications. Sustainability came into it, because that’s my thing (and overwhelmingly theirs, as it turns out), but with course leaders Andrea Cainero and Laura Washington, we decided to zero in on comms because it’s something not traditionally taught to design students. Yet like accounting, you can’t run a small business without it.

Maybe if you’ve got heaps of cash, you can pay a PR to dream up with this stuff for you, but that is not the reality for most.

Learning to tell your story effectively is useful, whether it’s in written form online or for a press release, or in person to customers, your team (when you finally get one), in a wholesale appointment, to a journalist, editor, potential investor. The list goes on. Most creatives have no idea where to begin, let alone end. (I can help with that - message me if you’re a teacher who wants to book a workshop. Also, I might share my worksheets on this for paid subscribers - LMK in Comments if you like the idea).

I was blown away by the depth and vision of this latest crop of emerging designer talent, how they clear they were on their values, many already working in ways that align with them.

Wait though … why be blown away? Of course they’ve seen the cracks in the broken system and come up with ideas to make fashion differently.

FUTURE COUNCIL

I mean, effing obviously we should listen to the next gen. That’s not news.

We should also be extremely careful about piling all the responsibility onto them. It’s not their mess to fix; older people made this mess.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fogiephobe. I do know that there are older people challenging the system - some of us get even more boundary-pushing with age. Katharine Hamnett is an obvious example but there are many more. You don’t have to be 21 to be a radical ratbag. I’m 104 myself, and reading more Noam Chomsky now more than I ever did at uni.

I’m also atypical.

The data reveals a tendency to grow more conservative as we age.

For myriad reasons (incomprehension, doggedness, hierarchy, resentment, cultural differences etc.), some in the deeply entrenched (it’s just the way it is!) older generations have long dismissed the concerns - and capacity - of younger ones, especially around ethics, economics and world-building. I wrote about this in my book on activism, Rise & Resist, using the myth of the narcissistic millennial as an example:

And the patent nonsense about the “public nuisance” that was rock n’ roll.

It was ever thus.

But another obvious thing is that was can’t generalise about a generation.

Teenagers are not some homogenous mass. Twenty-somethings aren’t primarily driven by their age anymore than 40-somethings are. Look at all the otherwise bright young men falling for Andrew Tate. Or all those young women dressing up as trad wives in America and vowing never to give their planned 12 babies the measles vaccine. Culture, peer-groups, income, geography, privilege all come into it. Sometimes manipulation too. Let’s acknowledge that it takes all sorts, whatever your age.

But while it’s nonsense to say, all young people think this or that… we can track general trends. And the general trend is: rising numbers of educated young people are increasingly concerned about about climate change and social justice. They are not buying corporate greenwashing. They want to build a genuinely sustainable alternative future, rather than just talk endlessly about slightly tweaking the status quo.

I just saw Future Council, the new doco from Aussie filmmaker/ activist/ all round excellent person Damon Gameau who directed 2040, about climate solutions. The basic premise is that Damon and a bunch of passionate eco kids pile onto an old bus and drive around Europe giving CEOs what for. Rousing stuff. Go see it if you can.

Which brings me to…

FUTURE FASHION

A new generation of fashion designers is rejecting the current system, so what are they building in its place?

In the first of our mini-series, Made in Melbourne, Isabelle Hellyer (above), the designer behind architecturally impeccable, ethical womenswear brand All Is Gentle Spring, discusses her vision for small-scale, skills-based fashion trade you can be proud of.

We discuss revelling in craft, attention to detail, and how to make the textile industry a future career and a rewarding way of life.

Listen on Apple here:

But there’s a caveat, she says:

“We’re making things [locally] because we it’s the way we enjoy working, but you do also have to think about the kind of world you want to live in. Realistically the production infrastructure in Australia has been totally decimated since the ‘90s, and so much has gone off shore,” she says, adding that if the trend continues, our capacity to make locally will be a distant memory in a decade or two.

“I think about this because of course I want to keep making clothing here, but look forward 20 or 30 years - new Australian design talent will really struggle to launch a line here. [We’re] setting [ourselves] up to export all the best talent overseas.”

Listen on Spotify here:

Listen to Young People - then throw your energies behind their vision…

CURRENT FASHION

Actually though, we don’t have to wait for a better fashion future to arrive. There are plenty of examples in the present.

The second pod in this series is with Jude Ng, who has a fantastic atelier/store in Fitzroy, where customers can see the clothes being cut and made. Jude started out selling in design markets - and six years into his business still does this. In fact he was at one this weekend.

Listen on Spotify here:

His loyal customers (“creatives, or corporates with a creative wild side”) love to see his work in progress, and Jude loves the dialogue he has built with them. This is what he told me:

“I spoke to another designer who did a design market with me and she said, ‘I don’t think I will do this anymore because I don’t want to be branded as a ‘market designer’. That was an interesting thought for me, because [markets were] such a big part of my label for such a long time. I said, ‘Well, it’s not about that. I think it’s the best training ground.’

“When you’re dealing with the general public you get all sorts of comments - the good, the bad, the ugly - but that’s how you learn what people really want. And that’s where you find your niche, because obviously you’re not catering to everyone. I just think it’s the best way to learn. It’s real, it’s connected. The customers we met from there have become our most loyal customers - they’ve come with us.”

Listen on Apple here:

FORGET PARIS

Jude’s advice, to newbies starting out with a dream, who might feel like the system locks them out:

“I feel it’s high time to go against that grain. The fashion world doesn’t only exist in the big fashion cities … I think that instead of aiming to eventually end up in those, grow your home base, make your own city rich and nourishing and connect with your local community - that to me is the more important thing.”

Until next time,

Clare x

Another month, another high-end fashion brand carrying on like it’s Marie Antoinette’s world and we’re just living in it. Selling insanely priced products when more and more of us can’t afford our energy bills, and are worried about AI stealing our jobs.

Can’t make your rent? Never mind!

Pop a pair of The Row’s USD $690 flip flops on your credit card. These genuinely bog-standard rubber thongs just topped Lyst’s quarterly most-searched list. They’re not even natural rubber.

For the love of god Mother Earth (and your bank balance) add a sustainable option from Sea Sense to cart instead. For every pair sold, this UK company pays people on ground to collect ocean-bound plastic.

Now that our sandal needs have been met, can we pls have a chat about value vs. true cost, and corporate skullduggery?

Shhh…. it’s oh so quiet

According to Antoine Arnault, CEO of Loro Piana: "Luxury products are sustainable by nature."

Hmmm. What do we think of that, then?

In case you are not across these names: Antoine is part of the Arnault French retail dynasty. His father, Bernard Arnault is LVMH's big boss, and one of the 10th richest people on the planet.

One moment, let me clarify that: 10 richest men. No women make this list. Mind you two of them are Musk and Zuckerberg, and they aren’t even human, so… 10 richest oligarchs. Anyway…

Loro Piana is a super-high-end Italian knitwear brand, the pin-up for Instagram's 'quiet luxury trend' on the back of Succession-chic. As in the TV show. Offering ready-to-wear for oligarchs of all genders, the brand is famed for its posh cashmere, but does also sell accessories, tailoring even women's swimwear - you can order your whole jet-set wardrobe from them, is you've got deep enough pockets and a high tolerance for beige. In 2013, it became part of the LVMH stable.

That stands for Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy.

It’s the parent company behind the likes of Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, Tiffany and Celine, and an impressive list of wine and spirits, watch and beauty brands. They own Sephora, Benefit, Rihanna's Fenty, even control Paris Match magazine (that’s one way to stop your scandals being plastered across its cover).

In 2023, the group became the first ever European company to surpass USD $500 billion in valuation.

That was also the year that Antoine Arnault made his questionable statement.

I was in Copenhagen to hear it, as was my guest on this week's pod Jasmin Malik Chua.

On stage, with JW Anderson, at 2023's Global Fashion Summit, AA explained that since luxury fashion is "made from the highest quality materials; they are durable; they are repairable. That is what separates us from the rest of the fashion industry.”

Hard truth: just because a fashion item is expensive does not guarantee that it’s been made responsibly.

In a newsletter last year (read it in the archive here), I wrote about the appalling revelation by investigative journos at Bloomberg that Loro Piana had been exploiting Indigenous Peruvian vicuña herders for the the past 30 years. While selling clobber made from this rare and precious fibre for €27,000 (whoaaaa! yes, you read that right). Turns out they’d been paying its producers ZERO euros. As in, no cash at all.

Not much that’s inherently sustainable about that.

Now the brand is back in trouble, this time over worker maltreatment in one of its partner factories in Italy.

Listen to my discussion with Jasmin, who is Sourcing Journal’s Environment and Labor Editor, for the details.

On Spotify:

On Apple:

Suffice to say here, that this is not a one off thing. Nor is it only a repeat stuff-up by LP.

When Dior pays suppliers just $57 to make its $2,800 handbags. When Armani has been similarly dragged through the courts for worker exploitation. When Max Mara was implicated in sweatshop conditions suffered by outworkers in Puglia… The list goes on.

Surely it’s time to support small businesses over these big guys who can’t seem to keep their houses in order, despite having ample resources to do so.

Sincerely,

Clare

Talking of support, a huge THANK YOU to everyone who’s become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. Your contribution helps keep the Wardrobe Crisis Podcast ad-free and free to all listeners.

Brrr…. July is peak complain-about-the-weather time in Sydney with temps dropping below 14 degrees on occasion. I know. How do we cope?! In fairness, reports that Aussies suffer much draughtier houses than their Northern Hemisphere counterparts are true. Double-glazing is rare here. Floorboards trump carpets, while many old places have tin roofs and no central heating or insulation.

Australia, the summer country. We’re in denial that winter exists.

Meanwhile as Europe swelters, with each heatwave more unprecedented than that last, it plays havoc with our holidays. Last week in Greece, visitors found the Acropolis closed as temps rose over 40. Fires raged in Crete, Cyprus, Türkiye. In southern France, authorities declared the public swimming pools of Marseilles temporarily free-of-charge to help locals beat the heat.

Still chances are that you, like me, have plenty of options to avoid the worst effects of all this, from deciding to delay that vacation, to ducking into the air-conditioned comfort of a cafe or boutique. Perhaps you, like me, live in a leafy city neighbourhood where there are many lovely trees to loll under when the mercury climbs. If things get intense, you can reasonably take a day off work, or pull your kids from school.

Many of us are feeling the existential dread of our changing climate, and the inertia of governments and big business to stem its tide, but day-to-day, we’re still pretty much okay.

To be climate privileged is “to have no personal experience of its negative effects,” writes Jeremy Williams, author of Climate Change is Racist: Race, Privilege and the Struggle for Climate Justice. It’s “the luxury of thinking of climate change as something that happens elsewhere, perhaps in the future. Those with climate privilege can file it as an environmental problem, associating it with coral reefs, rainforests or polar bears.”

In 2020 when Williams wrote this, he couldn’t find many others using the term ‘climate privilege’ in their work. That’s changed. It is now widely used in the discourse, used by everyone from academics and governments to NGOs.

Climate privilege is the other side of the climate injustice coin, whereby rich countries cause the pollution, while poorer ones bear its brunt. But it also holds true within those countries.

Sit with this: a person in the wealthiest 1% of the UK’s population is responsible for around 11 x times the carbon emissions of someone from the poorest half. No prizes for guessing who gets to dodge the consequences.

Yet when I googled ‘weather privilege’ this week, there was precious little online.

Is it not the same concept? I don’t think so. I like how NOAA puts it: “Though they are closely related, weather and climate aren’t the same thing. Climate is what you expect. Weather is what actually happens.”

I first heard the term in an edition of the global upcycling collective Trash Club's excellent Substack, Behind The Bins.

In this recent post, the editors write that “through emerging concepts like weather privilege, we learn that climate change is not a one-size-fits-all across the global north and global south.” They note that while Brits drone on about the weather, elsewhere, for example, in Madagascar, conversation tends more towards its effects - from water scarcity to blackouts.

We've all had tough days at work, right? But I'm going to bet your last one didn't involve multiple colleagues fainting from heat stress. Which brings us to this week’s podcast guest.

Berkley-based researcher and academic Cara Schulte is the author of an important new report, for Climate Rights International, that looks into the effects of the effects of extreme heat on garment workers in Bangladesh.

These don't stop at the physical. Workers describe feeling mentally unwell, anxious, hopeless even desperate as both temperatures and humidity climb. As the world edges further away from its 1.5 degrees target, we can only expect conditions to get gnarlier.

So what can fashion do about all this? Listen…

on Apple here:

on Spotify here:

… to find out about the role of education; the heat island effect; how pregnant women are impacted; how heat is linked to violence; why drinking fizzy pop won't help; how working hours, low wages, audits and PPE come into it; and practical action to improve things that would make a difference today.

Cara's ultimate message: "When we think about sustainability in fashion, it's not just about materials and recycling - it has to be about people."

BTW, for more supply chain insights, don’t miss next week’s ep. I’m sitting down with Jasmin Malik Chua to unpack why we’ve got to stop thinking about luxury as automatically more sustainable than fast fashion.

Thank you for reading, and especially to all my paid subscribers. Your contribution helps keep the podcast going, ad-free and free for everyone to listen.

Clare x

By now we’ve all digested the fact that Jane Birkin’s namesake Hermès bag fetched a mind-boggling price when auctioned by Sotheby’s.

It was quite knackered too. Those round marks are from stickers, since removed. I’m glad Jane got her wear out of it - I don’t believe in saving the fashion thrills only for best. Wear your good clothes! Enjoy them while you can. I’m all in favour of that.

What I’m not so keen on is silly money.

I won’t dwell on what the world could do with 10 mill. You already know my brain on this.

But what I do want to talk about is value. As in, what we deem valuable, and why.

Parking the smart investment POV (because that’s its own thing), consider the emotional side.

It’s surely personal, because add an ‘s’ to value and it comes down to values. I don’t mean to load a moral judgement on that; it’s not a competition. What I value and what you do will of course be different, but I reckon there’s a common denominator here - story.

There’s always a story attached.

Stories connect us. They enliven what would otherwise just be a thing.

Whoever bought Jane’s bag became part of its story (the origins of which I wrote about in Wardrobe Crisis, the book, page 61 if you fancy looking it up, as told to me by 6th generation family member, & exec VP of Hermès Guillaume de Seynes). The short version is that the actress was seated next to Giullaume’s uncle on a flight. She was shoving a bag into the overhead locker when its contents fell out, and he thought something along the lines of: This woman is chic, but her handbag game is mauvaise. I must help her, toute suite…

He designed her a bag, it became a fashion legend.

Later chapters of this now iconic tale are themed: rarity. It’s famously challenging to get hold of one. For the full skinny on this, try Michael Tonello’s fabulously bitchy memoir.

For the rest of us, though, it likely won’t be a Birkin that we rely on to lug our stuff around in. Personally, I’ve given up trying to find a formal handbag that’s both cavernous and light enough.

So I carry a small, slightly boring Oroton crossbody that I feel absolutely neutral about. If something happened to it, and I was able to rescue its contents, I wouldn’t care. Here live my phone, wallet, keys. The rest resides in a cloth tote.

I have many of these.

For years, the only one I was truly attached to was a MIMCO x Ethical Fashion Initiative number that I value highly because I travelled to Nairobi to see where they made them, plus I have life-long affection for the EFI’s current director Chloe, and founder Simone (with whom I made three seasons of the Ethical Fashion Podcast - try the episode with Virgil Abloh).

Until recently, when I bought the above from Latifa, the brilliant young woman who made it in Kantamanto, in Ghana’s capital Accra. She and her friends Rahama and Zuwera use secondhand textiles from the market to design everyday products under the banner Kuoro Earth. More here.

For my bag, she used old jeans for the base. The lettering is made from Tshirts. The best bit though is the surprise inside - the lining is upcycled from a men’s business shirt, and in a surreal twist, the collar stands proud on the internal pocket.

Latifa was in Copenhagen at the Global Fashion Summit, along with Liz Ricketts, co-founder of The Or Foundation, and Mary Sarkodie, a representative of Kantamanto Market retailers. They’d come to tell us, in the global north, about how they use their creative powers to turn our trash into treasure, but also about how completely insane it is that so much of our fashion garbage ends up there in the first place, and what toll it takes on their environment and community.

This wasn’t Latifa’s first trip to Europe. Recently, she visited Paris to show her designs to buyers, and she’s excited to bring her work to new audiences.

You can hear more of her story on Episode 249 of Wardrobe Crisis.

Listen on Apple here:

Okay, so Kantamanto is one of the world’s biggest for physical markets for secondhand clothing, receiving an estimated 15 million used garments from the global north, EVERY WEEK.

On the night of January 2nd, 2025, a huge fire ripped through 10 of the 13 sections in the market, affecting the majority of the estimated 30,000 people working there. It's a miracle more people weren't killed.

Six months later, the market structure has been rebuilt, but there's still work to do.

Find out how fundraising has been deployed, improvements have given all stallholders access to electricity and a new association of traders has been set up along with a unified security force trained in fire management.

However problems persist around waste, quality and the dangerous work of female porters...

Liz shares important news on the podcast, and you won’t be able to un-hear what Mary tells us about what she sometimes finds in her bales…

Listen in Spotify here:

Before I come back to my beautiful bag, I want to share this ICYMI. In June, Unearthed and Greenpeace Africa released a new report revealing that the clothing dumps you’ve no doubt seen, via The Or Foundation, contaminating Accra’s beaches, are spreading further.

“Unearthed reporters found garments from Next, George at Asda, and Marks & Spencer in the wetlands, home to three species of sea turtles.”

Depressing, right?

But I don’t want to end on that note. And this is really important: Chatting with Mary and Latifa, and also Neesha-Ann from The Or Foundation, we kept coming back to how we frame the narrative.

Yes, it’s shocking for us in consuming countries to hear these stories starring waste colonialism.

Yes, we should question how it is that our mostly unexamined acceptance of corporate greed, combined with our reliance on convenience and so-called affordability, has led to this nonsense.

Yes, we should also feel a bit guilty, but we can’t stop there. We need to use that to fuel our activism. Keep pushing for change. Dream up new sustainable systems and futures and work to build those. That’s our story.

It’s not The End though.

The story for Kantamanto is bigger and more beautiful than one that stops at the first chapter on waste.

The community’s stories are many and they are, of course, all different. They include stories of struggle and shero’s journeys; stories of conquering the Clothing Zombie; stories of resilience, entrepreneurialism, the joy of making; women’s business wins, creative design, skills, innovation, success, change, growth, and a whole new story for luxury in 2025, and what that means.

Clare x

P.S. A word on why I appreciate you

Thank you for subscribing to my Substack.

It means a lot. I’m going to go as far as to say it’s a lifeline for the podcast.

Certainly that’s the case for the paid subs. It means cash towards overheads, but it’s also a show of support - that’s what I call invaluable, since we’re on the subject :)

Recently I’ve been questioning if it’s all worth it, to be honest. I might write a full column about this. Maybe it will help other creators. Tell me in Comments if that’s of interest. Because you have to be so resilient in this space as an independent, & it can be effing exhausting.

I still love it though. I love the conversations I get to have with my incredible guests, and I love you, dear listeners.

I’ve been making TWCP for 8 years - it was our birthday on Sunday, the day after I published our 250th episode. I only just realised.

If you walked past me right now, I’d give you one of my strawberries. And maybe an awkward hug.

That’s all.

I could write a whole series on the meaning of clothes. Perhaps I will. LMK in comments if that’s appealing.

Let’s begin with the suit…

Not just any suit, but Volodymyr Zelensky’s contested ensemble, which has crypto betters all in a spin.

Now, I’m not a betting woman, so it was news to me that those keen on losing (or making? Hmm, eventually, the house always wins) some (bit)coin rush to online an gambling den called Polymarket.

Who knew?

People bet on all sorts of things: the gee-gees. The footy. The date of the last UK general election (fraudulently). The US stock market (also fraudulently). Cheese rolling. Wife Carrying.

Burberry execs are betting on the Oasis reunion tour - in spite of, or because, they lost 75 million quid last year? You be the judge.

Now, in the fashion adjacent plot-twist no one saw coming, gamblers have been waging on whether the Ukrainian President would rest his military fatigues in favour of a suit before July.

Spoiler alert: he did. For a NATO dinner on June 25.

Maybe.

Sparks Notes

According to Wired, Polymarket was founded in 2020, and rose to prominence during Trump’s first election, when punters betting on The Orange One winning scored big-time. This fostered the myth-among-the-bonkers that Polymarket was “a more efficient source of truth” than traditional polling. Okay then. I’m willing to bet this fiasco is hitting hard among the sorts of people who think Deep State cloud seeding caused the Texas floods.

A suit, or not a suit, that is the question

Back to Volodymyr. The etymology of the word suit is French, from suivre, which means “to follow.” As in: the pants - or the skirt - follow the jacket.

So is that really a suit? Or just a black version of the French worker’s jacket favoured by the late Bill Cunningham, followed by non-matching trousers?

Honestly, it’s hard to tell. Hence Polymarket losers kicking up a fuss. According to Forbes, by July 7, related bets amounted to USD $160 million. As I write, they await a final decision either way, along with various implications for the future of unregulated online crypto betting that I’m struggling to care about. Anyway.

Zelensky’s regular choice of wearing military fatigues to international meetings in solidarity with Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russia is deeply symbolic. In March, the Ukrainian fashion academic Zoya Zvynyatskivska told the Kyiv Independent newspaper that, in Trump’s mind at least, "If Zelensky takes off his military-style outfit and puts on a suit, what does that mean? It means he agrees that the war is over."

This is clothes as explicit messaging at the highest level. Pie in the face for anyone who argues that what we wear doesn’t matter.

From a broader fashion perspective, the suit is also loaded with meaning. As are its associated accessories. See the hilarious memes exaggerating Trump’s swinging d*ck ties.

In his 2016 book, The Suit, Form Function & Style, Christopher Breward calls it “one of the enduring symbols of modern civilisation” and “a prized symbol of distinction and power”.

Sociologist Tim Edwards goes further, and calls the suit “the very essence of men’s fashion and, indeed, of masculinity.”

Regardless, the idea of the suit as the pinnacle of power dressing (whatever gender the wearer) is entrenched. To don one is to say, sartorially speaking, that you mean business; that you’ve read the dress code, that you are smart, classy, polished, and ready to rule. Although some, like Ben Barry (now dean of fashion at Parsons) have rightly questioned its “most common representation in popular culture: a symbol of hegemonic masculinity”.

Who wears the pants?

Consider the bottom half of the traditional suit: trousers.

During WWII, the idea of western women in trousers was normalised - fair play, given they were doing so much of what had previously been considered men’s jobs, from acting as fire wardens to working in arms factories. Just 50 years earlier, refusing the traditional skirt, say, to ride your bicycle, was seen as alarmingly bold. But by the 1920s Chanel was in slacks, and by the ‘30s, fashion-forward glamazons had taken them up. Actually, left them long and slinky. Some brave babes even stepped out in jumpsuits, but women’s suiting was still generally skirt-follows-jacket. And Christian Dior’s hyper-femininity was on the horizon. He wanted women to “look like flowers”.

Though it beggars belief, for nearly 200 years French women officially had to get permission from the police in order to ‘dress like a man’. And while in later years (the technicality wasn’t finally obliterated until 2013), this was mostly forgotten as a blot on the legal copybook, as recently as the 1980s, women were denied entry into certain swish restaurants of wearing slacks.

My favourite story about the socialite fashion plate Nan Kempner is the one where she was turned away from Le Côte Basque in New York for wearing her Le Smoking pantsuit. She ducked into the loos, whipped off the bottom half, and returned to sit at her table in just the jacket. Take that, monsieur!

Now look again at that iconic 1975 Helmut Newton shot of Saint Laurent’s famed design. Still looks subversive, somehow, even today. But that’s Newton for you.

Power Dressing

The ‘80s, of course, was the era of the power suit - big shoulders to match big hair and even bigger greed. For the ladies, add miniskirts and stilettos. Or socks and sneakers for the subway.

It’s back!

Stella McCartney chose to show ‘Winter ‘25 ‘in a faux Stella Corp setting, albeit one with pole dancers in sparkling leotards. The office politics of that were about celebrating exotic dancing instead of using exotic skins.

She called the collection, Laptop to Lapdance - invoking “a study in masculine and feminine archetypes” via “a journey from the office to going out” (see below).

McCartney cast this season’s Stella woman as “educated, an entrepreneur, the boss. She a mother, a sister, a lover. She fights the good fight, for women, for animals, for everyone.”

Here, power dressing - which the designer acknowledged owes a debt to her classical training with her father’s favourite London tailor Edward Sexton - is based on the idea that “sexuality and sensuality, kindness and vulnerability are forms of strength and beauty.”

Podcast coming soon

While I was in London last month, I went to visit Edward Sexton’s current creative director Dominic Sebag Montefiore in Savile Row. I asked him what a good suit can do, and he told me, “people need something to make them feel special for certain situations” whether that’s “the power suit for the CEO to go into the boardroom, or a range of suits for Harry Styles to launch his solo career”. He said, “What we’re trying to do is work out what the clients needs are, understand them, and deliver a suit that will help them transcend [that].”

Ultimately, the suit is a power play. What sort of power - and how one wishes to deploy it - is up to the wearer.

Until next time,

Clare x

Thank you for reading Wardrobe Crisis on Substack. A paid subscription helps keep the podcast ad-free and free for all to access.