From the unveiling of of the heftiest and buzziest magazine issues of the year to the gathering of the most glamorous designers, models, and tastemakers around the newest collections of the season, September is a big time for Big Fashion. We’re experiencing the grandiosity right now, with a reinvigorated, largely in-person show calendar taking place in New York, London, Milan, and Paris after a touch-and-go hybrid of intimate shows and digital presentations over the past 18 months.
We talked to seven women pushing for major change in the fashion industry. Updating codes of green-centric marketing, demanding garment worker protections, and understanding the effects of overproduction—these are just a few of the critical actions they’re taking. Here, they share their advice, expertise, and best practices for becoming a conscientious consumer who still looks and feels fabulous.
What are your clothes saying about you? At Remake our slogan is ‘wear your values’ and the industry is saying ‘I don’t care about the climate crisis and I don’t care about women’s rights.’ This is really all about community. Doing this alone, individually is difficult. Being an advocate or an activist is lonely work. [That's] why at Remake we have our ambassador program through which we are linking changemakers to people in their zip code. In the context of the U.S., a lot of policy is going to come at a state level, at a city level before we’re ready for the federal level.
“It’s not so much about making a value call as to what’s good and what’s bad, but consumers need to know what is [out] there and what their options are about what to purchase. That segues into the Green Guides—guidance for [brands] to make environmental claims and marketing claims about their products. If you put out something deceptive or that’s not true, that doesn’t benefit the consumer and it certainly doesn’t benefit the environment.
In 2018, Stephanie Benedetto launched Queen of Raw, a marketplace for dead stock, or new but unused textiles available to individuals and corporations, modeled after her great-grandfather’s repurposed textile business in New York. As a 2020 Cartier Women’s Initiative grant recipient, she is growing the brand into a resource to manage the textile waste crisis.
We get asked all the time why we’re not a non-profit. And I like that question because people automatically assume that doing good and sustainability is just good for people and the planet. I’m very much for-profit with a strong social mission. There is a ton of good I can do while also building a massively powerful and successful business that hopefully one day will get acquired and go public.
All we’re trying to do is enforce the legal minimum wage. That’s not too much to ask for of any business, of any size. Making the brands responsible [rather than allowing them to pass it off to the factory owners] should also be a natural. Who's profiting from [the work] should be responsible for what those workers get paid. To get paid the minimum wage is asking the least. If a business cannot pay minimum wage, then maybe they shouldn’t be in business.