“I don’t mend; I extend,” Orsola de Castro, Co-Founder of Fashion Revolution and ethical fashion expert, tells me in a conversation about her memoir-cum-well… mending manual, Loved Clothes Last. To Orsola de Castro, fixing a used or damaged piece of clothing is not so much mending as it is part of its constant transformation as a piece of clothing that will exist for a long time, whether that be on a body or on an ever-growing heap of discarded clothes.
“Fashion begins in the soil. Shrubs become fabric which is made into clothes. This clothing becomes mine. If it breaks, I make it into something else,” she shares, continuing: “Mending is just one part of many representations and functions of clothing. And, those who mend, are not just seekers to an unbroken dress but also to reparations for a very, very defective system.”
It was 1997 when Orsola de Castro first entered the fashion scene with her first brand, From Somewhere, which repurposed pre-consumer textiles waste into upcycled collections that were worn by the stars. In 2006, she launched Estetica before moving on in partnership with Filippo Ricci to found ReClaim To Wear. All the while, she’s mentored and taught emerging designers across the British Fashion Council, Fashion Open Studio, Central Saint Martins, amongst other institutions.
Then came the revolution, the Fashion Revolution. Fashion Revolution was founded by Orsola and partner Carry Somers in response to the collapse of Rana Plaza in Dhaka, Bangladesh on 24th of April 2013, resulting in the loss of over 1,100 lives. The following year, over 62 countries took part in the first Fashion Revolution Day, marking the day that the Rana Plaza Collapse took place to reflect on this failure.
“We were one of the first organisations to speak negatively about fashion, whilst still speaking fashion. We came from the inside, we loved fashion and that is why we were scrutinising it,” Orsola tells me. “The truth was that the fashion industry was so exclusive, it was designed to be opaque, excluding anybody that it didn’t deem cool enough. We knew the only way we were going to make a difference was from within.”
Published by Penguin Life in 2021, Loved Clothes Last is an anecdotal, highly detailed, personal and planetary account of Orsola’s relationship with the textiles and garment industry From Somewhere until now. It’s also an illustrated and practical step-by-step guide that equips its reader with a multitude of ways to mend, rewear and breathe new life into the wardrobe. From shopping habits, washing tricks and revival tips through to an inspection of emotional linguistics derived from garments, Orsola urges us to care, repair and rewear.
“Clothes are a form of escape. For me, it’s the same escape that one might have as a child when reading fairy tales,” she tells me. “Each time I put on clothes, I’m dressing up with the same spirit as when I had a big dressing up box.” To this day, Orsola dresses with a similar infantile spirit: “I don’t style, I never have. I just dive into my wardrobe and put things on; inspired by how the materials fall and drape together.”
“I love fabric, I love colour and I love texture. They give me joy, they give me entertainment, context, history and a grip on who we are or where we are. I’ve learned so much about people, so in that sense they are maps.” But her passion is conflicted and coalesced with an ulterior reality whereby the origins of our clothes aren’t quite so fantastical.
Liking fashion but disliking the fashion industry meant her entry into this sphere was antagonistic. “From the second I dipped my toe in it, it made me feel uncomfortable with its unkind and unduly snobbish ways.” So it was decided, she tells me: “Watch me, I’m not going to dip a toe in or paddle, I’m going to jump in and make a wave.” But in ’97, it wasn’t about sustainability, Orsola tells me, remarking on how frequently she felt she was ‘kicked in the teeth’ by the industry.
As is often the case with visionaries, the world is never ready for them… or for what they prophesize. Nonetheless, Orsola was patient and as temperatures rose, conversation started to bubble under the surface. “It wasn’t before 2004/2005. I knew it would take a while but there was no doubt in my mind that it would come,” she says, “it had to.”
Since then, conversation has changed. Orsola notes how Fashion Revolution has evolved with these changes in conversation be that through different foci at each hub across the globe or through communication strategy. “We were dealing with a generation of people who were just learning. We needed to make that learning process all encompassing,” Orsola says. Now people know. Now, it’s about finding the agency to push change.
Which, Orsola tells me, requires more than one admitting they want change, it requires introspection. We need to ask ourselves: “‘Okay, now what the f* am I going to do about this? What is my power in this?’ You put yourself on the line, and once you’ve decided to do that, then every small step counts towards the next.”
Like a chick might fly the nest, Fashion Revolution has grown into a globally active organisation that Orsola feels no longer needs her. Having recently left Fashion Revolution, Orsola is now focusing on projects centred around reimagining waste.
“There’s a huge sense of anticipation and excitement in the fact that we actually need to invent a whole new industry based on recuperation. That is new. A devotion not to the industry, but to the industriousness of craft and reusing what we’ve already covered our ground with. That is innovation.”
Industry is defined as the ‘economic activity concerned with the processing of raw materials and manufacture of goods in factories’. From this stems ‘economic value’ which is ‘a measure of the benefit provided by a good or service to an economic agent’.
What about value as a measure of importance and usefulness? And cost as a factor that takes into consideration the environmental expense of extracting and processing these materials and manufacturing these goods? How do we shift the paradigm of a cost structure centred around finance to one centred around the environment?
“It [the industry] achieved what it wanted to achieve. Complete confusion. People don’t know whether or not something is well made; people don’t know where things come from,” Orsola tells me. “The way people assess the difference in quality is through the price. Whether something costs £10 or £1000, actually, there’s little difference between how they’re made. Right now, fashion is either too cheap or too expensive and there’s no honesty in any of the pricing or the costume that you see.”
So how does Orsola value clothing? “Value for me is linked with a love for the work that has gone into it.” And luxury? It’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. “Unless you know the very seed that it came from, it’s not a luxury. Luxury is something that is rare. What’s rarer than 100% traceability? What should be deemed more of a luxury than luxury? The livelihood of the garment worker; paying your garment worker a living wage for the product that they’ve made. That’s luxury.”
She adds: “And, if we don’t know how much someone is paid, we don’t know the value of the piece of clothing that we’re buying,” inspired by a brazenness that’s awoken in the new generation who are undoubtedly more open about conversations surrounding cash. “Gen Z are not afraid to talk about money, to tell you what they earn, how much they’ve been paid or how much they spend on things. My generation was not like this. We never spoke about money.”
At the other end of what at present we believe to be a spectrum sits fast fashion. A hugely nuanced and complex phenomenon given that, as Orsola rightly says, we need affordable clothing. But, this is the clothing that needs to be the most sustainably made. The alluring thing about fast fashion is its speed and its price, but while it might be cheap to the consumer, garment workers and the environment are paying the price.
Then comes greed. More often than not, one will substitute low prices with high quantities. This deceptively low value then feeds into this mindset that our clothes are dispensable. The product of this throwaway culture is frightening. “We have proof. It’s visible from space,” she says, referring to the Atacama Textile Desert, which is visible in satellite imagery taken from space.
The answer is redistribution, Orsola tells me. “Make less, pay your workers more and, instead of investing in yourself, invest in your supply chain and the people that made you the money in the first place. Take a pay cut. Forego the yacht.”
Orsola finds the fashion industry is closely affiliated with the patriarch. “With its billionaires behind closed doors, it’s incredibly representative of this culture. But it’s been twisted and contorted and manipulated so it seems as though it’s a female industry. It’s not. It’s been co-opted, appropriated, bastardised to exploit us. Something that was designed to enrich us, to occupy us, to feed us, to cover us, to embellish us. Now, every single woman on the planet is having the piss taken out of them by the men that run the industry.” Was it Marx that once said? “Fashion is Capitalism’s favourite child.”
Here we are, offsetting the blame; which Orsola notes down as another symptom of the patriarch. Offsetting is all around us. Carbon. Blame. Misinformation. Ignorance. “It’s a historical mindset, the nature of sapiens. We offset. We are a species that don’t believe in balance. And this “I’m going to pay you” attitude is integral to Western culture, colonialism and now, the climate crisis.”
I often ask my interviewees whether they’re optimistic for the future and what their parting words of wisdom might be. For Orsola the solution is simple and it all starts with love and care. A joint effort between brands and consumers, between society and the environment; collaboration and community; taking accountability and responsibility for what we use and what we waste. “Now is the time to coalesce, that’s where our agency lies. Together, communities can bring down castles. And, loved clothes last.”