Presented by Bristol Natural History Consortium, in partnership with Arnolfini. Part of Festival of Nature 2018 – “The UK’s biggest free celebration of the natural world.”
Join us for a panel discussion exploring fashion and nature: how designers, brands, producers and everyone else involved in the supply chain can work with, not against nature.
This exciting event will bring together fashion industry leaders to discuss innovative products, processes and business models, and how these can be married with traditional techniques to build a more ethical, environmentally-friendly industry. We’ll hear about challenges and opportunities, and we’ll find out what a more sustainable fashion future would look like.
SPEAKERS
Chair – Dilys Williams
Professor Dilys Williams FRSA is Director of Centre for Sustainable Fashion, a University of the Arts Research Centre based at London College of Fashion. She has extensive experience as a womenswear designer, having headed up international collections for Katharine Hamnett, Liberty and Whistles alongside a teaching and research portfolio based on fashion for sustainability, in a number of locations around the world. Her place on the Evening Standard’s London’s Progress 1000 list in 2015 evidences the public and academic influence of her work in exploring sustainability as a way for us to live well through fashion. For the 2018 V&A Fashioned From Nature exhibition, Dilys was commissioned to conceive two installations, Fashion Now and Fashion Futures 2030.
– www.sustainable-fashion.com –
Hannah Cowie
Hannah Cowie is an anthropologist whose work has evolved through a friendship with Tamay from the North of Vietnam. The pair created the label TAMAY & ME in 2016 bringing together the traditional skills of artisans in Tamay’s region to create beautiful quality garments that have longevity, provide employment and encourage appreciation of their existing skills before they are lost. The cotton and indigo Tamay’s community uses are homegrown, without pesticides, in one village in North Vietnam.
– www.tamayandme.com – Twitter – Instagram –
Sophie Mather
Sophie Mather is Material Futurist at biov8tion, a company that works to inspire and transform the textile industry to a future where processes are eradicated and performance created by resource neutral innovation. Joining the voids between traditional parts of the industry, biov8tion engages at the innovative level bringing together raw materials suppliers, machine builders, fabric suppliers, brands, retailers, non-profits and end of life organisations to create pioneering yet sustainable product solutions.
– www.biov8tion.com – Twitter – Instagram – Linkedin –
Sven Segal
Sven is an award-winning entrepreneur and a sustainable shoe designer who founded Po-Zuin 2006 after a decade of designing shoes for mainstream brands. His passion for eliminating unnecessary harmful substances combined with outer-shoe box thinking led him to create a glueless shoe construction, Edible Shoe Cream and an adaptable Foot-Mattress™, among other sustainable products.
Sven’s commitment to promoting ethical and sustainable practices in the shoe industry led him to launch the Better Shoes Foundation in 2016.
– www.po-zu.com – Twitter – Instagram – www.bettershoes.org –
Curator – Zoë Robinson
Zoë is a reformed shopaholic turned eco fashion advocate and charity shop addict who would rather repair a garment than buy a new one. In 2012 Zoë founded The Good Wardrobe, an award-winning online community hub mixing the best ‘conscious’ fashion with services that prolong the life of clothes. Since her move to Bristol in 2016 she has crowdfunded to expand the website’s directory to cover Bristol, and has won the Best Fairtrade Advocate Award in the 2017 and 2018 South West Fairtrade Business Awards.
The Good Wardrobe is the antithesis of fast fashion. It’s a blog and online resource that aims to make it as easy as possible for people to dress ethically and stylishly. The platform connects consumers to conscious designers, makers and menders, providing editorial, tips, guides, services, forums and much more. It has been featured in numerous publications including the Guardian, the Observer, The Mail on Sunday, Metro, Time Out London and Vogue.com among others.
– www.thegoodwardrobe.com – @zoerobinson1 – @thegoodwardrobe –
