Nina Gore thank you so much for joining the daily Oz thank you so much for having me this is incredibly exciting so it is currently Fashion Week and you were there last night how was that oh my gosh it was amazing it was just so amazing to see all the different styles and expressions of individuality and creativity and of course Trends and the.
Vibe was just electric so I I enjoyed it that sounds incredible it's such an amazing moment for the fashion IND indry and I'm interested in how we talk about sustainability in that conversation you know we seeing lots of these new trends that people will obviously be influenced to go by how do we line that up with a sustainable future fashion industry when.
These new trends are constantly emerging right so I coined this phrase called the fashion trendmls about how I'd probably say about a century or so we we've been influenced by fashion trends where we're told what to wear when and for how long and then as time went on the trends got shorter shorter shorter now we we had.
Fast fashion now we have Ultra fast fashion and pretty soon we're going to have suponic fast fashion right um because the trends just keep getting shorter and with mro Trends on Tik Tok and so on and it's just pushing us to buy byy buy spend spend spend and you and and to the point where we're not even using a lot of our stuff right and.
There's so much waste attributed to that When I Was preparing for this interview I was thinking maybe I should ask is there ever a World in which Trends don't exist and then I thought maybe that's too ambitious but it sounds like you don't think it's too ambitious it's it it is ambitious I'm not going to lie but it's not impossible right um I always.
Give the what I call the great example of like when we had the pandemic um back 2020 look how quickly the world changed like almost overnight you know and it created new new systems new careers and new ways of existing so we don't have to wait until there's like some kind of climate catastrophe or something happens in the world before we change behaviors.
That we know are not good for our culture that are not good for our systems so in terms of Trends I know that it's not just fashion it's everything electronics and Automobiles and stuff like that but if we want to be sustainable we're going to just going to have to find alternative ways of enjoying new designs and new things but.
In healthier ways and Trends unfortunately as we have them today don't serve that purpose yeah and and you talked before about the the fact that there you think that there are a few models that the fashion brands could go down in order to you know improve their sustainability can you explain more about that because like you said.
Obviously these brands are businesses and they need to turn a profit so what are the kind of solutions that they can take that still align with their need as a business okay um so some businesses have uh re they they produce with good quality so for example you know with fast fashion it has something called Planned obsolesence where they you wash.
It a few times and it it fades or it's just not you know or you wear it once and the quality is not there anymore after that so that's called Planned off when you say planned do you mean it's designed it's designed to fail so that you keep buying and buying and buying right which is why it's often made with cheap Fabrics so we want to encourage.
People to buy less fast fashion but also encourage Brands to produce durable clothing right clothes that lasts good quality clothing that lasts long periods of time so there's that but then with fashion particularly if you make good quality products you can encour you can as people are buying them you can say oh this has a resale value right in the.
Last decade as we have become more aware of the impacts of the fashion industry on global warming have we seen a shift in consumer Behavior I wish I could say Yes um I've been in this sustainable fashion industry since I was like 15 years old and to be honest with you unfortunately not we're we're consuming in Australia.
We're the second biggest consumer of fashion and textiles in the world after the US so if just wrap your head around that for a second um and and globally we're manufacturing between 100 to 150 billion garments a year that's billion with a b and that's in the whole world and we're on a planet of 8 billion people so it's not surprising that you.
Know I think it's about 84 87% of it ends up in landfill every year because we can't use the amount of clothes that we're we're manufacturing so the problem is actually getting worse in spite of the fact that we are a lot of us are beginning to use more secondhand but still we're still buying the ultra fast fact Russians the shens and the temos.
You know at the same time so I unfortunately it's actually getting worse so we need legislation to nip it in the bud I think I was going to say when I think about the fashion industry over the past decade I think about the rise of Sheen which just rips off these I mean even these um trends that we're seeing on the runway this week.
Unfortunately I'm sure that we'll see a lot of them ripped off by the cheaper fast fashion brands unfortunately Ely yes uh Sheen is expert a master at ripping off particularly small and medium-sized Brands creative Brands you know so I think we should be super Hy hyper Vigilant about protecting our makers our designers um the Australian.
Fashion industry as a whole hello I'm James and I produced the video you're watching if you're enjoying what you're watching we'd love it if you considered subscribing and checking us out on our other platforms it would really help in getting the word out about what we're doing here at TDA thanks very much and now back to the Deep dive and I think.
The other thing to talk about in this conversation is the cost of living crisis because I think a lot of younger people know what the right decision is and they want to make that you know Greener choice but they can't afford to what is the solution between that disconnect uh Shen and TAMU are not the answer to that um you know the first.
Thing people want to do is go off shopping and then the response to that is like oh off shops are so expensive now blah and that's true they are however there's an there's an alternative so I've been running clothes swaps for like 13 years right basically everyone brings a specified number of items let's say 5 to 10 items good your.
Best quality items not the stuff that's like horrible fast fashing you going get rid of good stuff that you just no longer need or use and um everyone brings those items and you just have like a a hall or a shop or it could be run throughout the day or several days where people come in and out and you just take what you need deposit what you.
Don't need take what you need you know and you can have a standard or quality of what people can and can't bring but run a clothes swap you get free clothes you give out stuff you don't need it doesn't cost anything um and that's what I encourage people to do you know in addition to things like OB shopping you know buying online and buying secondhand.
Online and so on if people did want to buy new clothes do you think it is realistic for a large majority of consumers to completely shift their perspective on buying something a bit more expensive that will last longer over the cheap thing that like you said is designed to fail yeah so I think yeah if you can afford it definitely go for.
Something that will last longer then you look at the environmental Factor um you know a lot of it is made of plastics and Plastics are bad for our health you're the person that wears it and you know we have the issue of microplastics polluting the oceans and and the soil so there's a lot of factors to consider in buying something that's cheap so you are.
Better off you can buy something that's well made made with good materials and made uh to last that's durable that's going to last you longer Unfortunately in Australia about uh we about 200 over 200,000 tons of clothing goes to landfill every year that's how much we're wasting so the average person buys about I think it's 56 items per.
Year and which is almost 15 kilos and yeah a lot of that goes to about 2/3 about a third sorry my last question going back to Fashion wake in an Ideal World what does a sustainable Fashion Week look like okay a sustainable Fashion Week so it could be you know materials that were either used for other clothing before or or what you.
Call dead stock materials so like leftover Fabrics that you usually gets thrown away or even brand new Fabrics that are made you know organically or or plant-based like tensil tensil is like bamboo used with those kind of sustainable materials uh for the most part organic cotton and uh no or little or no polyester no plastic but you know.
Making it cool to repair your own clothes when they're damaged making it cool to swap your own clothes so you'd have like a swap station a repair station or Runway um and and you'd have like a you could have a Runway where you'd have like um secondhand clothes from you know it could be from an OP shop or consignment store or whatever.
Who have styled it in really cool ways just to show people what you can do with like styles from I don't know like the early 1900s mix it up with modern Trends just to show so cool yeah just to show people the creativ how creative you can be Nina G thank you so much for joining the daily o thank you for having me.
