Hello, everyone. Welcome to 100 Climate Conversations, although we’re only doing one of them today. Thank you for joining us. I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands in which we are speaking today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We respect their Elders, past, present and future and recognise their continuous connection to Country.

Today’s number, 63 of 100, we’re nearly two thirds the way through conversations happening every Friday. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. And we’re recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum. Before it was the home to the museum it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899, it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system in the 1960s. And so, in the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus towards the future.

I’m Craig Reucassel, I’ll be facilitating today. I make documentaries like War on Waste. Climate stuff like Fight for Planet A and Big Weather. My guest today, Clare Press, is a sustainable fashion activist and storyteller with a background in journalism. She was the first ever Vogue sustainability editor at Vogue Australia. Based on her book of the same name, Press’s podcast, Wardrobe Crisis, investigates the fashion industry’s impact on people and the planet, and her upcoming book, Wear Next, is out in October this year and asks, what sort of fashion future do we want to build? We’re so thrilled to have her join us today. Please join me in welcoming Clare.

Let’s start with a kind of controversial position here. You’re into sustainable fashion. I think those two things are mutually exclusive. You cannot have sustainable fashion. I’m not saying kind of sustainable clothing, but I reckon as soon as you bring fashion into it, it becomes unsustainable. What do you think of that as somebody involved in sustainable fashion?

An oxymoron?

Yes, exactly.

I think if we consider that fashion is tied to the trend cycle, it’s an engine of consumerism. It’s something that powers the idea that if we want to seem successful, glamorous, rich and fabulous, we need to buy, buy, buy more, more, more. Then absolutely fashion cannot be sustainable. But I love that you mention the word clothes, because fashion is actually clothing. And I like to expand the conversation and talk about clothes because clothes can be more sustainably produced. And when we talk about clothing, it expands the conversation beyond fashion, which can be actually quite exclusive in people’s minds, it seems to lock of people out. And actually, it’s an excuse for a lot of people to say, ‘It’s not my problem.’ Whereas when we talk about clothes, we can say, this is your boots, your jeans, your jumper, your football kit, your kids school uniforms.

I feel like there are those that do just see clothing as clothing. I get it because I have to. I wear it as long as I can, I throw it out. But once you start talking about fashion, as you say, it’s an entire industry built on churning through and trends and all that kind of stuff now. As somebody who has a fashion background, speaking to somebody here who is a fashion idiot, can you explain to me firstly, people that are really into fashion, what does it mean to them? What drives that passion?

I think one of the beautiful things about fashion is its powers of transformation. It’s very linked to our identity in terms of being a sort of tool for how we can – I want to say, it sounds very lofty this, but to craft a visual identity of ourself. It’s how we can play act in a way, a role that makes us feel more confident, more appealing. It’s about a visual impression that we make on other people. And when you look at it that way, it is powerful, and it can be beautiful.

Coming back to sustainability, why does that have to be something that we buy? Actually, the reason I got interested in fashion was because I love DIY things. I love vintage things. I love the idea of making these visual identities out of creativity. Doesn’t have to be that you’re running off to the mall to buy the latest trend. But why do people run off to the mall to buy the latest trend? Marketing, advertising, fear of not fitting in or of also maybe a stand of not standing out, and the engine of consumerism that tells us that we need to buy more to be accepted. So that’s sort of the problem that we’re dealing with.

Yes. The problem that we are dealing with is there is not kind of money in the going out to a vintage shop and doing that. As you say, there’s a whole industry there. And I guess let’s go back to your start, your beginning. As you start off as a journalist, you start off kind of in your early 20s, ended up at Rolling Stone. You were reporting from fashion runways in Milan and writing for some of the top fashion publications. How did you get involved in the fashion industry and what was it like reporting on that? I mean, tell us about that industry that you saw.

Well, I wanted to be a political journalist, always wants to be a writer. I never intended to be a fashion journalist. But in my early 20s in Australia when I moved here, I got an amazing job at Rolling Stone. It was the greatest job you could get at 23 or whatever I was. And I got to interview rock stars and I got to live the dream. It was brilliant. And it really made me think magazines is the future. Forget being a political journalist. And actually, this is quite a gendered sexist thing, but because I was the only girl on the Rolling Stone team, which was wonderful, by the way, no shame in that. But I was a senior whatever writer and the other two were old men, or to my mind they were old, they were 40. And so, I used to get thrown onto the fashion beat.

So, if there was ever a fashionable popstar or a collaboration with Levi’s, they’d send me. And so, then I started writing about clothes, and I loved clothes, and I then got various jobs in different glossy magazines. And again, it was very seductive, it was glamorous, and it was all the things that you might imagine it to be. I got to live a life that wasn’t mine. It wasn’t real. Pretend that it was. Fly to fashion shows and sit there amongst celebrities looking at beautiful things I could never afford and go to parties. So, look, I’m not going to lie about that. It was great. But there was something missing. And after a few years, I changed course.

And what was it that led you to change course? What is it that led you to start questioning the industry you were commenting on and you’re writing about the fashion industry. What was it that led to that?

So in the course of my work, because I did work at Vogue for quite a long time in my 20s, I did use to interview designers about craft. So, I did understand about how things were made and it wasn’t all just writing about celebrities. I think there’s great artistry to beautifully made clothes. But for me there was an inciting incident that changed the course of my work, and it was Rana Plaza, which is interesting because it’s 10 years ago this week.

So, if people are not aware or can’t remember that terrible disaster that happened outside of Dhaka in Bangladesh in April of 2013, there was a complex of industrial and retail buildings that housed a lot of different businesses. Downstairs were actually some banks and some retail outlets and maybe some food places. But upstairs there were many different small factories and garment makers. The buildings had started to crack, so they were clearly unsafe a couple of days before what happened, happened. And downstairs, the businesses said, ‘It’s not safe. You can’t come. Don’t come back.’ And upstairs on the upper floors where the garment factories were, workers were ordered to come back in because of the pressure to make those garments for brands. And the buildings collapsed. I remember watching it on the news and I remember the numbers – this is grim this, but we should remember it – the numbers of deaths rising. And it was like now 200 people. Or now maybe 300 people. Or now maybe 5-600 people. In the end, more than 1,100 people lost their lives. Absolutely hideous.

I hadn’t realised that there’d been other businesses downstairs that hadn’t come in. They knew this was happening, and yet that drive to fulfil the orders kept people coming back in there.

That’s a lesser told part of that story. But I researched it and I think it’s significant because it was the garment makers that were required to go back. And I’m not saying that every single person knew what was going to happen. I don’t think they could have imagined that the whole thing would crash down, but it was clearly an unsafe workspace. And these issues continue to beset the fashion industry.

And you ask me why I moved my work. That was the moment that I started to connect what I did with potentially harmful impacts on people and planet. I didn’t know how to use that language then. And then I started to try to figure it out. Like I’m a journalist so I can research, what is my role working for an engine of consumerism, selling new clothes and the desire to get more, more, more? How does that actually link back to something like Rana Plaza? Am I complicit because of that role?

And I guess that link back is that, you know, you talk about crafting clothes, but that’s expensive. Most of our clothes have become cheaper and cheaper because of the way in which it’s made overseas in these really cheap places. So yes, that that speeding up of the consumerism has led to this, the social problem you’re talking about there.

An interesting stat for you and I remember this because it’s shrunk so terribly. So, when I first started asking how much – what proportion of our clothes sold in Australia are made here, it was around eight per cent. And when I checked more recently it was less than two per cent. We’re not making stuff here anymore.

No. And it’s coming in from overseas. And this is exactly – but we don’t see that footprint, I guess. So, we’re talking here about the social footprint that we don’t see, which is that we don’t see the Rana Plazas, we don’t see where it’s been made. But we also don’t see, I guess, the environmental footprint. And that’s also where you started to focus your work as well. Can you explain to people what’s the environmental footprint of our clothes?

Yes, we are here talking about climate, and I’m not sure that everybody’s made the connection between fashion and climate. It might seem like a long bow to draw, but of course, it’s a big industry and by virtue of its sheer size, it has a relatively big impact. Most of the carbon footprint of the fashion industry comes from textiles. It’s quite difficult for us to put a number on this. Imagine millions of different businesses and also the scope geographically of where we’re making stuff. So, I like to put that caveat on it because I don’t think we can be concrete, but the stuff that I like to share comes from a McKinsey report that came out in 2019. It’s called Fashion on Climate, and they estimate that the industry is responsible for four per cent of global emissions and that, well, it’s certainly only going to go up.

And so where’s that coming from? What is it about the making of clothes and making of fabric that’s creating this problem?

That McKinsey report is interesting because it breaks it down in terms of where do those impacts lie? And clearly, textile production is the lion’s share, but actually there is also a big chunk – forgotten the exact number – but something like, I think it could even be more than 20 per cent that is once you bought those clothes. So, it’s in our washing of and our wasting of clothes.

Just as well my clothes are dirty here today is just trying to reduce the carbon footprint of them. Absolutely. One of the things I find difficult with this is people always kind of saying to me, ‘Okay, well, what’s the sustainable option for this?’ It’s like, well, okay, well, a lot of our clothes, probably 60 per cent now, are made from plastic, which is made from oil or gas. That’s the first part. You go, ‘Well, that’s okay I’m wearing cotton.’ Well cotton has an enormous kind of footprint when it uses a lot of water, and it uses a lot of other things. It’s very difficult. Most fabric in clothing seems to have a large environmental footprint. So, what’s the solution? Where does sustainable fashion come from?

Well, I think we can say that it certainly doesn’t come from virgin polyester. I’m happy that you mentioned the link to the fossil fuel industry because I think we can also be quite sure that it’s in the fossil fuel industry’s interest for fashion to keep on expanding its polyester use. I don’t even think people know that it’s made from oil or derived from petroleum. The classic line is the most sustainable garment is the one you already own. And actually, that hides quite a – you know, that sounds like a glib statement, but it hides quite a lot of deep answers to what we can do in terms of sharing more, repairing more, wearing more, all of that.

But I think the textile thing is very significant. We need to recognise that it matters what our clothes are made of. And if you look at polyester, it’s derived from fossil fuels. It’s got also associated impacts when it comes to microfibres. Every time you wash something made of synthetics, thousands of tiny plastic fibres run off into the wastewater and into our oceans. Actually, this is a story of climate impact on so many levels. I mean, we know how microplastics are affecting, are bio accumulating into the food chain. We’re eating them, we’re breathing them. And while some of those microplastics come from tyres driving down roads or paint flecks, a lot of them come from your polyester football kit or your polar fleece that sheds more.

So, I really think when we talk about ‘sustainable fashion’, I know that’s in inverted commas, but making more sustainable choices when it comes to what clothes we do choose to buy and where we need to think first about fabric.

Okay, well, let me put my hypothetical to you then. You go okay, great. I’m going to avoid buying plastic. I’m wearing wool here. This is woollen. Now, wool obviously has quite a large carbon footprint because it’s grown on the back of sheep. Sheep obviously have a very high methane output. So, there’s a very large carbon footprint. Now I guess in terms of the use of the wear of it, I rarely ever have to wash it. So, it has a lower carbon footprint on that side. But when you say we’ve got to make the sustainable choice, what is the sustainable choice? Is there one?

I wanted to jump in there and interrupt you because I was like, hang on a minute. But that was before you said methane.

That’s the point. I mean, wool has a larger carbon footprint probably than your polyester top.

Well, first of all, my top is silk.

As I said I know nothing about it.

Secondly, silk’s actually got quite a considerable, depending on how it’s produced carbon footprint. But coming back to wool – as if I’m wearing polyester, who do you think I am?

I was reaching.

If you come back to wool though it’s an interesting case study because and this is quite a techie thing, but it’s important for us to get our heads around. If you look at the lifecycle analysis of a particular fibre, wool will come out well if you consider cradle to grave, not cradle to gate. So, when we talk about how we measure what the carbon impacts are, environmental mental impacts of a fibre are, it really depends on the methodology. But the polyester lobby I reckon have done a really good job in making us think that we need to only count emissions until the point of sale, whereas actually we need to look at the whole lifecycle of a fibre. We have to consider does it biodegrade? What’s happening to it when we wash it, for example? And wool is going to come out better if we do that.

I totally agree. It comes out well in that particular part of it, this is the difficult thing from a sustainable fashion perspective. And I think what I guess I’m getting to here is that crucially, whether it’s polyester, whether it’s wool, whether it’s cotton, whether it’s anything, I mean, hemp is probably the one that comes out best in lifecycle analysis. But even then, the reality is it’s about wearing it for as long as humanly possible. And that, to me, is the very opposite of fashion. Fashion is about getting the new thing, following the latest trend. Fashion is very much anathema to the idea of sustainability.

And we’re back to fashion is an oxymoron. And this is why I’d like us to re-evaluate our use of that word because, like I said, it puts people off. But also, you can easily make the case, or you can persuasively make the case, as you just did, that fashion’s the problem. But I also think we need to be realistic about what we mean when we use that term or how it’s understood. It’s a huge global industry. If we switched off the fashion tap tomorrow back to garment workers, you’d have 60 million people out of work, mostly young women who can least afford to be so.

I agree let’s go back. That’s a great example. So, when Rana Plaza happened I remember speaking to a friend of mine who is a human rights lawyer who is working in Bangladesh, and some of the global brands response was to say, ‘We are so appalled by this, we’re not going to buy clothing from Bangladesh anymore. We’re going to move our production from there.’ On the ground you know, all of the garment workers are saying, ‘No, that’s not what we want. Yes, we want a safe workplace, but we don’t want it to be taken away from that.’ But when it comes to the question of sustainability, if you’re saying we need to keep making enormous amounts of single use throwaway clothing to keep this the garment industry going, is that really an answer?

Absolutely not. One thing I’ll say is that I interviewed Kalpona Akter, who is a leading garment worker union leader in Bangladesh a few years ago, and she said, ‘Please don’t boycott Bangladesh. That’s not what we want you to do. We want you to walk with us alongside us to make sure that we can move towards a living wage and have better conditions so that we can work in dignified, safe places where we can thrive and feed our families just like you want to.’ But should we be producing massive amounts of single use, cheap clothing to be thrown away? Of course not. Of course not. I think you’ve hit on the central problem that the industry doesn’t want to discuss, which is overproduction.

And I guess the thing that fascinates me is that so from 1992 to 2013, consumption of clothing doubled. It’s the consumption that has changing, really. Like we are buying more, more and more clothes, but we’re also wearing them less and less and less. And that’s the thing that I find the hardest thing to actually change. So, as somebody who does a sustainable fashion podcast, who worked in the fashion industry, you’ve seen it going, how do you make it so that people wear clothes for longer? How do you make that fashionable?

Yes, I was thinking about you, Craig, when I talk to students or get the chance to speak to industry as well, I always show them a picture of you standing on that pile of clothing in Martin Place.

Yes. Which was six tons of clothing that we throw out every 10 minutes.

It’s crazy. And I think there’s real power in that image of you standing on this hill of clothes, because people can’t imagine when you when you mention the numbers, they go, oh, okay. But it doesn’t visually have the same effect as seeing what it looks like to overproduce. What a pile, a monstrous mountain of clothing looks like when we’re going to throw it away. But the thing about brands is you said – you just referred to clothing production doubling. We actually think it may have tripled, but we don’t know.

So, Fashion Revolution, which is founded after Rana Plaza to encourage consumer activism, they put out something called the Fashion Transparency Index every year where they look at, what do brands tell you about how they’re making their stuff? How much do they disclose? And some things have improved, of course, but the last report showed that there’s 250 brands in it, and the last report showed that 85 per cent of them will not disclose their production volumes. So, they don’t want to tell us. So, actually we don’t know. We’re guessing, but we do know that keeps going up.

You also talking about the oversupply. I’ve never been able to prove this, but you know, the kind of the general discussion is like that a third of clothes are just basically disposed. They’re not sold. They never get sold. They are kind of disposed of. Have you looked into that? How much over production is happening in the fashion industry?

Timo Rissanen who is Professor at UTS, told me that stat, which comes – from an I have forgotten the name of the academic who wrote it – but someone in the Nordics authored a report which figured that a third of clothes go to waste before they’re sold. Again, we don’t really know because it’s so difficult to track production volumes and waste is embarrassing and people deny it. So, there’s that. What we can say is in a more targeted, perhaps geographical sense, how much waste turns up in various places.

When I think of you on the part of clothes in Martin Place, I then zoom over to Accra in Ghana, where the Kantamanto Market, which is an enormous secondhand clothing market there, receives I think 15 million pieces of second-hand clothing every single week. A week. They know that you can quantify that, they know it, and they reckon, although they don’t know this part exactly, about 40 per cent is immediately waste. We’ve got a huge fashion waste problem. And brands really, brands need to be forced to address their waste issue. One thing I will say is that legislation that’s happening particularly in the EU, is pushing brands to not be able to destroy waste. And that means that it will hopefully become less efficient for them to do so.

If anyone wants to read it, there’s an amazing article in The Atlantic, which is called something like ‘The Terrible Cost of Your Too Small Pants’, and it tracks the waste footprint of online shopping, not just clothing, but also consumer goods, and tells a terrible story about how it’s more expensive to pay for returned stock to go back into inventory than it is to set fire to it.

Yes. I mean, this is the thing is, yes, sadly, since I stood on that pile of clothes, as far as my understanding of the fashion industry is, it’s basically got worse. Can you explain to us, we’ve moved from fast fashion to ultra-fast fashion, what is ultra-fast fashion and why does it mean we’re getting worse, not better?

Well, if we think of fast fashion being the speeding up of the production cycle and the time it takes to get a garment from the design room to the shop floor, in the sort of mid 2000s that turned from a few months to a few weeks to at the kind of speediest end, a few days. But, you know, you’d still be looking at a couple of weeks to get something into a store, even if you were the fastest big, bad, fast fashion brand on the planet. But now we’re looking at hours. You can do it.

So, ultra-fast fashion refers to a new breed of online players, the most famous of which are the largest of which is Shein which is a Chinese company which essentially scrapes the Internet for trends. So, would pull in a lot of data from TikTok, from what celebrities are wearing at the Oscars from could just be your Facebook page. Some of it is actually just from ordinary in inverted commas, ‘citizens’ and then churns it out with no design team into a kind of hotchpotch of ‘this is trending’ and it sends it to a very kind of carefully calibrated network of makers close to Shein’s headquarters in Shanghai. And then they can chuck this stuff out in literally two days, and they can have it on the site 24 hours.

Yes. And the thing about Shein hauls are kind of a Tiktok trend where you see people, you know, they go, ‘This is what I’ve bought,’ and they kind of take them out and, you know, you get 10 bits of clothing for 80 bucks. It’s insanely cheap. It’s been done insanely quick. A lot of it is polyester. A lot of it is plastic, although even I’ve seen some of that is still cotton as well. But for the most insane prices. I’ve seen, you know, things there – I’ve seen, jeans in Shein hauls that are cheaper than I get at op shops. It does my head in, I mean, ultra-fast fashion, how – we are literally going backwards.

When you look at that end of it we are, and it is actually alarming. And not only do those pieces of clothing cost nothing, but the workers get paid nothing. There was a big investigation by a British news outlet recently that showed workers getting paid just pennies. But also, each one of those things is delivered – in Shein’s case – in a plastic envelope. So, it’s exploiting workers. It’s producing, using mostly polyester. So fossil fuel fashion. Clothes that are ‘designed’ – designed in inverted commas – to last a very short amount of time. They cost nothing. And then think about the carbon footprint of shipping them all around the world. And if you want to talk about op shops, we are now flooding op shops with extremely low-quality junk. So, that’s a bad story.

But there is another side. So, at the same time as particularly younger people are shopping for ultra-fast fashion, they’re also shopping for secondhand. So, there’s a tension there that you’ve got a whole new outlook on how aware people are of fashion’s impacts on the planet and a yearning to do better. But then at the same time, and maybe even in the same wardrobe, you’ve got the temptation to buy into this very fast, very cheap rubbish.

Looking at the fashion industry. There has been a lot more talk of change. And you know, you have seen some of those initial kind of fast fashion brands, your H&Ms. I was walking through one of their stores the other day just out of interest looking at things, and there was a lot of this is organic cotton, this is recycled plastic. This is – you know, a lot of the labels have this kind of stuff. Is that changing or is that greenwashing? I mean, I know you’re very kind of on top of looking at greenwashing in this fashion space and a lot of that happens. Do you think there has been positive change by those big brands or do you think it is just greenwashing?

I’m torn. I think much of the language is greenwashing, and I think that we cannot pretend that marketing is not a dark art. Of course it is. They are there to sell you more things. That’s their agenda. But when I say I’m torn, it’s because I understand that brands are simply places where people like you and me work and I interact with many, many people that work for brands who are really, really determined to try to make what they do more sustainable. They have to do that within the parameters of a system that is built to foil them in a way. But they’re still trying to do it.

So, I don’t believe in the big bad brand story. I don’t think that’s right. I think that the problem we have is that we have multinationals that are too big, that are overproducing and don’t want to address that, the clichéd elephant in the room, but they don’t want to talk about the big thing, which is overproduction. They want to do everything else, everything but that. And that is a core problem. But is everyone greenwashing who is trying to create a more sustainable collection? No, they’re not. They’re actually just trying to do better within the boundaries of what they’ve been served.

I guess let’s take an example there, because I’ve heard you speak before about organic cotton, for instance. Is that part of the solution? Is that actually happening? Is it is it a positive step or is that kind of a greenwash?

No. Organic cotton is certainly part of the solution. It’s also, as everything in this discussion not perfect. There’s been controversy around some of the certifications last year. Can we be sure that the cotton that we’re buying is necessarily organic? Traceability has been a real problem. Of course, it’s better to use an organic product than one that is not because you’re reducing the pesticides. That’s just obvious. I don’t think we should be scared of saying there are some more sustainable solutions. But I think we should be scared of saying that there’s a silver bullet, that we’re just like, this will fix it.

You said use less pesticides. Sometimes with organic you have less a yield and you need more land, for instance, and more water. Is it necessarily better environmentally?

It depends where you’re growing it. Some organic cotton is rain fed. If you’ve ever read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, you would think that anything without pesticides has got to be better. That’s my view. I mean, I’m not an expert cotton producer, but it can have a larger footprint. Depends where you grow it.

It’s interesting you say this because it becomes so complex doesn’t it. As soon as you look into a product, it’s a nightmare. Like you kind of go, ‘Okay, I want to buy this piece of clothing. Firstly, I have to track back to another country where it’s been made. I have to look at its labour laws there. I have to look at where it’s been constructed. I have to look at then where the cotton has been.’ And it’s literally, you know, tracking the footprint of one piece of clothing it’s one of the most impossible tasks. It could take you entire year to buy a pair of underpants, basically.

So, you mentioned there certification, and that’s, I think, where we seem to fall over constantly a lot of this. We can’t do it ourselves as consumers. Government seems really doesn’t want to come into the system. How do we make it so that we have a proper – somebody who governs this and actually, you know, put something on the label that we can trust in the end that somebody’s done the hard work, that somebody’s checked that it is organic, or it is, you know, fair trade or it is these kind of things. How do we have that system? Because without that, as consumers, I think we’ve very blunted in actually what we can do.

Yes, I would agree with you. And I think that what happens is people get overwhelmed and they say, ‘I’m not going to do this. I’m parking this. Not doing it. It’s too hard. You’re asking me to do research before I buy a T-shirt? I’m actually just looking for something I can afford that looks reasonable quality.’ And that is totally understandable, isn’t it? It’s not actually up to the consumer to be the police on this. We do need regulation.

We always talk about we need three actors. We need brands to change, we need governments to legislate and we need the consumer to care. But without one of those pillars, the triangle falls over. I don’t know what kind of analogy that is. A table, a stool falls over. But we need regulation, so governments have to step in, but they’re reluctant to. I would say that there is movement on this front because of particularly work that is being done in the EU, which is impacting the whole global industry, because once they start to legislate, particularly around circularity, looking at things like product passports that will show through a QR code, all of the detail around how things were made and how they were produced, these things will have a global knock on effect. But at the moment it is difficult for consumers to make the right choice, and that is very frustrating. And what do you do, crochet your own bikini? I don’t know the answer. It’s hard, right?

I’m going to need some help on my crocheted bikini, I’ve got to say. It’s also the issue you talk about there, which is cost, because cost is a big driver. We’re in a cost of living crisis at the moment. People are really struggling and it’s easy to say, ‘Hey, you should be getting that, that brand repairs all this stuff they will keep it going for 10 years.’ And then you go, ‘Oh, yes, that costs $500. I can’t afford that as well.’ And I guess that’s where I’m glad they’re the op shops, because that’s the kind of issue where you can go, look, if you want to be sustainable, but you can’t afford to buy expensive, repairable things, the op shops are the only way to do it, you know is that the kind of solution?

I also worry greatly that we are making sustainability a kind of middle class, privileged choice that locks out everyone else and we’ve got to be really careful about that. Fashion’s already exclusive and divisive enough. It comes back to government. I really don’t like the idea that it’s down to the consumer to make any of – not any, we can lead by example – but I don’t like the idea that we’re telling the consumer the climate crisis is your fault fix it. Fly less, buy less, choose this over that. You do all the work. No. We know that the biggest polluters are what, 100 companies worldwide? They’re doing it all.

My advice to people when they go, what should I do is be realistic. Pick your battles. This is not your fault. The onus shouldn’t be on you to fix it. And if you’re passionate about fashion, you love clothes, there are some things you can do to make more sustainable choices and those things can make you feel energised and good and part of a community for change. And that’s cool. If you’re not into that, that’s fine. I’m giving you a pass that’s not – I don’t care if you buy a cheap T-shirt from Kmart. That is not going to be the thing that brings us down. It’s a system problem. And I think it’s – you know, I’d come back to vote better if you’re going to do something rather than choose that T-shirt over that one.

And as you said, it’s interesting, though, because it’s a system change. But how do you get the system to change? Because, yes, it’s 100 companies that are the most of the emissions, but it is in no way in their interests to change that at all. So, unless we’re voting better or consuming better or choosing better or protesting better or putting the pressure on them, there will never be that change.

One thing again, to come back to [is] what is fashionable and what is the power of fashion outside of the trend cycle? I think it’s about lifestyle shifts that happen gradually when people just start to prefer a different way of being and you are seeing, for example, how much people love to after Covid, go back to nature, start gardening, think about touching your feet in the soil. All of that stuff actually is about lifestyle shifts and fashion is part of that. So, if people are gravitating more by choice towards secondhand, talking about the issues and impacts of how clothing is made, learning repair and making skills, supporting small indie brands that are doing a really good job of communicating how they make things, all of that adds up to a shift, and I think it’s happening.

When I started working at Vogue in the mid 2000’s nobody talked about this, nobody knew about these issues or outside of niche expert circles. And so, I think we need both an enormous thing, which is a huge system change away from late-stage capitalism and consumerist mindset. But I also think the way we get there, or part of that way is through small actions that shift expectations. Maybe we need to do some soul searching and ask ourselves if we’ve got the capacity. And again, it’s down to privilege. If you’re into this stuff, you’ve got time. Maybe it’s about asking what sort of life you want to live, and maybe that isn’t the life that the marketers told you it was. And it doesn’t actually depend on a new suit.

Indeed, it’s interesting you say about system change because you don’t just write about fashion. You’ve written about activism as well. A trip to the Great Barrier Reef, led by the scientist and long time climate activist Tim Flannery, who’s part of this series, inspired you to write Rise and Resist: How to Change the World, published in 2018. You went around the world spending time with activists across various environmental and social issues. What are some of the key learnings you took from talking to such a broad range of activists?

Oh he’s the best. Tim Flannery is the best. Shout out to Tim Flannery, because sometimes just an interaction with one person can change your path if you’re in the right spot for it. And while I changed gradually my work after seeing the Rana Plaza disaster happen years ago, in 2017, I went on this trip to the Great Barrier Reef to Heron Island, and we learned from coral scientists, and we heard from Tim, and I was probably on the cusp of my work where I was thinking like I just said to you, I’m worried about product. I know if this is the right thing.

And out of that trip I thought, What can I do with my platform to raise awareness about the climate crisis? And I figured I could research people who were making a difference, beginning with fashion, but also then moving into the whole gamut of, what does it look like to build a movement? How do we do that? What can we learn from history to take forward with us? Who’s doing wonderful things that show that we can change systems? And I sought out people in linked but different fields, and it led me down all these different paths that haven’t got anything to do with clothes.

One of my favourite things was to go and meet the guys in Adelaide who run something called Grow Free, which was basically about growing vegetables in your garden wherever you got space and then giving them away. And it’s such a simple idea, I actually just got goosebumps talking about it. It was so incredible. It took nothing really except enthusiasm and a bit of organisation, but nothing in terms of money to do this thing, which then spread because of the simplicity of the idea and the beauty of how people reacted to it. So, you grow your stuff and then you put it on a cart that Grow Free organised outside of the post office down the road and then people come and take it and you don’t even watch because it’s not about being performative. And then the people that take it start thinking, Should I do that? That was amazing. I’ve got a balcony where I could grow some tomatoes and they start to do it too and it spreads. And now it’s in America and it’s a sort of leaderless movement of brilliance.

So, what I learnt from researching that book was that if you have a very beautiful idea, that is – I’ll tell you something else. Whenever people come and try and get on my podcast, I say, ‘I only really want to talk to you if you’ve got nothing to sell, nothing to sell here.’ If you’ve got a brilliant idea with nothing to sell here, that doesn’t cost anything other than energy, enthusiasm that allows you to connect with other people, you can change everything, actually, because people come along with you. If you can strip the ego out of it and not even have a leader. It’s even better.

And can we apply that to fashion? Maybe. You see it in swaps, clothing swaps, in the way that Fashion Revolution as a grassroots global movement has become something that people pick up in different countries around the world and do their own things around, students at universities. I don’t know, craft groups, knitting groups. It’s not about brands. It’s about people finding an idea that allows them to talk about big stuff and potentially then shifts culture.

How would you then like to see society’s relationship with clothing shift? Is it a return to past practices or a whole new way of relating to clothing? You’ve talked about repair, for instance, and I think repair is fascinating. But again, it’s that amazing costing. I got these jeans I’m wearing repaired. It costs more to get these jeans repaired than it does to buy a new pair on Shein. Does it need to be government stepping in and having incentives for repair? How do we change our relationship with it?

Yes, I mean, there are ways to solve it. We’re saying it’s so hard to give a definitive answer because it’s so many moving bits, right. I do think two things are essential. One is that government moves to regulate brands, particularly around waste. And that’s happening. We’ve got really good news happening in Australia with the product stewardship scheme coming together. Brands actually want a solution on this too. It costs them money to waste stuff too. If we had better systems in place and better regulation, we would see improvement.

But I think if you listening to this and you don’t work in the sector, there is something that we can do. With my caveat that it’s not your fault and it’s the system and don’t feel guilty if you’re tired and you haven’t got time to focus on this. But if you care about this topic, if you’ve listened this far, I think that there is exciting work to be done by creating a vision for the sort of fashion future we want and taking back the power from the system that doesn’t work and the brands we don’t approve of and all the stuff that makes us frustrated and saying, ‘Well, actually what do we want from our clothes and our relationships with them and the people that make them?’

And actually, those are fundamental questions about coming back to how we want to live that I think they’re actually lovely questions and that when you start to work with other people to look at what different kind of life you could envisage, that’s very inviting. And fashion people, coming back to the fashion industry, particularly designers, but generally creatives are so good at that. If a fashion designer can make a, I don’t know, Alexander McQueen’s most incredible collection you’ve ever seen or a transportive incredible costume for a drag performer, we can use that and harness that creativity to make a system that is just as delightful, just as inviting, just as fantasy filled and transporting, but actually works in a different way. I think that maybe as well, and this is starting to happen, fashion education can shift away from simply making a load more product designers and into making systems designers who might have bigger ambitions about where they could see their talents be useful.

With those changes you’re talking about systems changes, I think some of the other positive stories come from innovation and creativity, as you say. What are some of the materials in the pipeline that you’re excited about that you think will make clothing more sustainable?

Actually, I was just thinking about what you said about wool and methane. There is a guy in Tasmania called Sam Eltham who is part of or co-founder of something called Sea Forest, which has worked on producing a seaweed supplement that could reduce the methane in ruminants. So, so many science solutions can reduce the footprint of certain textiles. Mushrooms, but that’s the wrong word I learnt. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of mycelium. That’s what the kind of thing I learned on my podcast, even though I’m not a scientist. Mycelium-derived leather alternatives are a very exciting. Lab grown everything is very exciting.

I feel like we’re on the cusp of a biotech revolution that’s going to change fashion materiality. We’re only at the beginning of it, and most of it isn’t at market. But there are so many people doing things that blow your brains. I came across someone in London who has trained bacteria to grow trainers in the shape of. Amazing.

Yes, it’s amazing. It’s good. I mean, there are these positive steps coming forward. I still think sustainability and fashion are definitely the strange bedfellows. But I guess maybe if we convince people that the alternative is nudity, then they’ll really get on board this sustainable fashion thing. Thank you, Clare Press, for talking to us.

I’m so glad we didn’t do this nude.

Yes, we threatened to do a nude, we were overruled. But thank you Clare. Please join me in a round of applause for Clare. To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.