The Role Of Education In Connecting Food With Fashion

Materials researcher and designer Alice Robinson's work focuses on the UK meat industry and how it is inherently connected to the manufacture of leather products. Her Royal College of Art graduate collection Sheep 11458 and a separate collection Bullock 374 created for the Victoria and Albert Museum's Food: Bigger than the Plate exhibition, both used only one animal for each, making use of every part to ensure nothing was wasted in terms of the materials and the meat.

In this Interview, learn about traceability within the leather industry and how Alice's leather production processes and fashion collections support agriculture, rather than standing separate from it.  

An hour-long panel discussion from the founders of Community Interest Company Cordwainers Grow and Cordwainers Dye, Kate Poland and Debbie Mitchener. This was first shown as part of our monthly panel discussion series in March 2021, to uncover regenerative fashion practices to end hunger. We address how this pair work to support nature-based practitioners, encourage community urban food growing, and educate on the connections between food and fibre.

The UN's Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger, looks at ending hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture. There are organisations that are building practices to reach these targets. So in our Masterclass on this topic, we spoke to a range of experts to learn about fashion’s impact on food sources, crop health, farming communities and local processing plants, alternative regenerative fibres for fashion fabrics, and the ways designers can support regenerative agriculture practices and a traceable leather industry.

One aspect of this is producing textiles from food, growing textile crops alongside food crops, and utilising byproducts from the agricultural sector. In this article we take a look at some of the talked about "food fibres" on the market today, and their pros and cons when it comes to sustainability and ethics.

"FOOD: Bigger than the Plate" opened at the V&A Museum this month, highlighting a timely debate: as a society, how are we tackling the vastly unsustainable methods of farming and eating that have been escalating over the past century?

The first 200 visitors received edible tickets - which speaks volumes for the message the exhibition's curators are aiming to convey. Waste - and how we tackle it - is at the forefront of the show and the contemporary design projects showcased serve to join some of the dots between two of the planet's most wasteful industries: food and fashion. According to reports, in the UK alone, 18 million tons of food ends up in landfill while 1.7 million tons of textiles follow it. Our wasteful culture needs addressing, but from which direction? Are consumers to bear the blame for the human instinct to acquire more stuff, or is it manufacturers and designers who need to improve their output?

The exhibition’s main driver is its emphasis on community and collective action (something we discuss in great detail this month in the Masterclass, "Building Communities with Ethical Events"), allowing it to tackle the "Who is responsible?" question from several angles. Spotlighted in the exhibition are over 20 exciting contemporary designers, working principally within the concepts of a circular economy. Experimenting with biomaterials and food waste, their pioneering products reassess how we design, make and consume.

This thought-provoking exhibition runs until October, and we highly recommend checking it out if you have a chance. If you can't make it to London or are just in need of some material inspiration, here are a few highlights of the intriguing design innovations on show. We’ve been lucky enough to interview some of these designers for The Sustainable Fashion Collective already, and you can find the links to those videos below (available to Professional Members only).

Simon Cooper, co-owner of Flaxland in the Cotswolds, UK and farmer of linseed and flax, explains what the benefits of growing flax are for the purposes of increasing resilience, building biodiversity and nourishing both soil health and our health. 

Simon also works wood and is crafty with materials and uses his skills and knowledge to create composite fibre canoes out of his own fibre and oil. He and his wife Ann conduct workshops to increase awareness around the flax cottage industry, from growing to weaving, and the additional products you can get from this magnificent heritage crop.

Thumbnail image: Ian Paterson on www.wildflowerfinder.org.uk

The Beyond Cotton Project is a joint initiative of the World Food Programme's Centre of Excellence Against Hunger in Brazil and the Brazilian Cooperation Agency. Hear how the project's organisers view cotton as a key tool to support food security and local development, and their strategies for empowering farmers.  

Join us for an hour-long online live Q&A with guest experts from the food and textiles sector to learn more about how fashion can offer a positive impact in building resilience, alleviating hunger and providing biodiversity.

Simply head here at the date and time of the event to join in with the Q&A - the stream and chatbox will show below just beforehand. You must be a registered member of The Sustainable Fashion Collective Member. Registration is free: join here.

We are asking for a suggested £3 donation for this event. All takings will go to community organisation Cordwainers Grow to support their educational activities. If you are a Professional Member, you can attend for free, but if you would like to donate, we would greatly appreciate that. To donate you must RSVP via the Eventbrite page.

When?

Online - Monday 29th March 2021, 7-8pm BST

(PST 11am / EST 2pm / CEST 8pm / IST 11.30pm)

For our 2021 Masterclasses, we are visiting the Sustainable Development Goals, with a holistic look at how fashion and creative business can play a role in building stronger societies and creating healthy environments through positive solutions.

For our 2021 Masterclasses, we are visiting the Sustainable Development Goals, with a holistic look at how fashion and creative business can play a role in building stronger societies and creating healthy environments through positive solutions.

This month, March, we considered regenerative fashion practices to end hunger. So for this Q&A session, we will be diving in to how Cordwainers Grow support nature-based practitioners, encourage community urban food growing, and educate on the connections between food and fibre.

Thumbnail background image: typical cottage garden plant (turnip) hand-embroidered with donated threads (onion skin-dyed threads for a final World Food banner!), in collaboration with illustrator Kate Hyde and local London artist Richard Galpin.

Guest Speakers:

Kate Poland founded Cordwainers Garden and later Cordwainers Grow with Nat Mady; is a former journalist who made the transition from the newsroom to the garden via teaching and print-making. She is a champion of weeds and other mis- or under-represented sections of our social, political and natural community. She ran the year-long Grow a Garment project which produced a linen jumper grown and made in London; is fan of string and whittling and a strong believer in the power of nature to solve pretty much everything.

Debbie Mitchener joined Cordwainers in April 2019 after re training from costume to community teaching and growing. She enjoys turning flowers, roots, fruit and bark into natural colours for cloth and fibre dyeing as well as paint and ink making. She can plant a seed, grows succulents and really enjoys letting the weeds grow.

Find them on Instagram: @cordwainersgrow and @cordwainersdye

Follow us on Instagram for the latest updates on our guest speakers.

Moderator:

Moderated by Stephanie Steele, the content, sourcing and fabric guru for Offset Warehouse and The Sustainable Fashion Collective. Her background and practice is within craft-based sustainable fashion and organic growing.

Ticket cost:

For 2021, we will be charging £3 per ticket for our online discussions (Professional Members can attend for free, but can make a donation if they choose). This is to ensure dedicated sign ups, but also so that we can donate all of the takings to charities or not-for-profits. For this session we will be donating to Cordwainers Grow.

You can also purchase an Alive protest t-shirt here with 50% of takings also going to this fund.

Professional Members can log in to access the replay below or see full takeaways and audio here.

As all of our fibres come from the land - whether natural or synthetic - it is integral to understand and acknowledge the remarkable value within every single thread woven or knitted into the clothing we wear. Fibre systems are tied within food systems, and as a designer and business owner, it is your responsibility to educate yourself on where your materials come from, who produced them for you, and whether there is disparity in the basic human rights of those involved.

There are major discrepancies in the land rights of indigenous peoples who fight against big corporations for what is rightfully their common property, and inequalities in land access across the world due to race, gender and caste. Wherever you look within your supply chain - even if you only operate digitally - there is a requirement of land to allow business to run, for products to be made, for people to survive.

So what do you as an entrepreneur need to know in order to ensure you are supporting land justice, and therefore ensuring a future for incoming generations? Where do you look to educate yourself on seemingly new terminologies like "environmental justice", "intersectional environmentalism", "biodiversity", and "indigenous food systems"? In this lesson, we pull together resources that will get you started on understanding this topic and how it relates to fashion and textiles.

Thumbnail image: iStock

The way we cultivate our land results in wide-reaching impacts on our environment and society. Improved soil health means less habitat desctruction, less exploitation, freedom from toxic chemicals and less factory farming.

These factors relate both to food production and textile fibre production and in this Lesson we learn how the two come together in the pioneering work of the Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROA) which counts Patagonia as one of its founding members. Executive Director of the ROA Elizabeth Whitlow, joins us to discuss the ROA's revolutionary new certification for farmers and why it matters to fashion businesses. 

This is a 23 minute lesson. Textile artist and designer Arantza Vilas, founder of Pinaki Studios, introduces the ways in which she connects food with textiles through utilising food waste, collaborating with chefs, and experimenting with materials. The role of education - both via means of research and play - comes to the fore as Arantza explains her background. 

Even as our food resources grow scarce, food wastage continues to be a rising global problem. The 2011 SIK study puts the global food waste at almost 1.3 billion tonnes per year, while British IME 2013 report estimates that anywhere between 30% to 50% of the food that is produced for human consumption is wasted. It's just staggering! This recent article in the Wall Street Journal outlines the issues with collating figures and tackling the problem.