Regenerative Fashion
As our climate, ecological and social crises converge, urgent action is needed to maximize our chances of survival. A new commercial approach is possible but it requires a systemic shift, with companies learning to operate as part of a wider ‘ecosystem’, allowing fashion to restore what it has taken.
Regenerative Fashion presents a roadmap for new ways of doing fashion. To keep our planet safe, we must cut production and end our dependency on fossil fuels. We must also create dignified livelihoods for the millions of people working in the industry. By using natural resources, paying factory workers and farmers a living wage and scaling up craft production, we can not only rebuild soils, ecosystems and biodiversity, but also support decarbonization, regenerate communities and ensure a just transition for all.
Part guide and part manifesto, this book shares stories of our interconnectedness with the natural world and each other, divided into sections on Nature & Materials; People, Livelihoods & Crafts; and New Economy & Leadership. Fully illustrated throughout, it features interviews from best-practice designers and businesses around the world, as well as thought pieces from leading campaigners within the industry.
Regenerative Fashion presents a roadmap for new ways of doing fashion. To keep our planet safe, we must cut production and end our dependency on fossil fuels. We must also create dignified livelihoods for the millions of people working in the industry. By using natural resources, paying factory workers and farmers a living wage and scaling up craft production, we can not only rebuild soils, ecosystems and biodiversity, but also support decarbonization, regenerate communities and ensure a just transition for all.
Part guide and part manifesto, this book shares stories of our interconnectedness with the natural world and each other, divided into sections on Nature & Materials; People, Livelihoods & Crafts; and New Economy & Leadership. Fully illustrated throughout, it features interviews from best-practice designers and businesses around the world, as well as thought pieces from leading campaigners within the industry.
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Reviews
Safia's latest work builds on her incredible insights and leadership as one of our world's foremost sustainable fashion pioneers. Regenerative Fashion is honest and clear, while also being exceptionally polite and accessible. It appropriately articulates the urgency of regenerative models as well as the beauty and joy of a better way. The examples across the fashion industry also make this vision clearly actionable for brands, and the book's conclusion offers practical advice that enables anyone to support the regenerative revolution.
This book is very important. Safia articulates the urgency with which we must act to transform the fashion industry and save our planet with both authority and optimism.
Her vision for a holistically regenerative model is truly inspiring and touches on every part of the garment-making process; starting with the soil and good farming practices through to design, production and distribution.
I share Safia's vision for a nature-based approach to fashion and have been putting this into practice through my work at Bamford, Daylesford and Nila for over twenty years. Reading this refreshing new perspective serves as an important reminder that we all have a responsibility to make better choices - shunning damaging synthetics and supporting livelihoods through craft while helping to restore all that we have taken from nature.
Fashion can - and should - be a force for good, and Safia's key commitments are a viable way for us to achieve this for the sake of future generations.
A call to anyone out there who still believes that a better future is worth fighting for.
This book is written by someone who knows their onions and has been campaigning, through the lens of the fashion industry, for a fairer world for a long long time. [...] Safia Minney lays down the gauntlet, from experience, with intelligent and well-thought-out arguments backed up by hard-to-argue-with facts. [...] This book nudges the reader and the fashion industry to understand the consequences of ignoring the facts.
I came to the conclusion some time ago that I pretty much hated the fashion industry - or, at least, most of it. Its negative impact on people and the planet (notwithstanding the hundreds of millions of jobs it creates) has been clear to us all for more than 20 years. It's only marginally reduced those impacts during that time. Its marketing and advertising presence in people's lives is huge - and equally dishonest, devious and exploitative. Its 'greenwashing capabilities' are limitless, as is powerfully revealed in 'Regenerative Fashion'.
And because governments won't regulate the industry in the way they should (in both rich importing countries and poor exporting countries), and most consumers are either unwilling or unable to use their purchasing power to transform this malevolent force on Planet Earth, and most companies and their investors are stuck deep in volume-based, lowest-cost business models, it just goes on. And on.
Safia Minney has fought against those oppressive forces for decades - with courage, compassion and creativity. 'Regenerative Fashion' is wonderful - as if all that success and failure, pain and joy, false starts and breakthroughs are distilled in one beautiful, hard-hitting burst of inspirational insights and shared experiences. Her brief 'Editorial' introductions to each of the three sections are packed full of analysis and thoughtful ways forward.
But no-one goes alone in an endeavour of this kind. Safia has sought out 36 co-creators of sustainable, ethical fashion brands, providing a platform for their own astonishing stories, working alongside ten campaigners and thought leaders to amplify those practical efforts.
The combined effect is hugely invigorating. If, like me, you sort-of hate this industry and what it stands for, 'Regenerating Fashion will make you fall in love with what it could stand for in the future.
Recent books like Alyssa Hardy's Worn Out (2022) and Dana Thomas' Fashionopolis (2019) explored the fashion industry's excesses, decrying such practices as the enslavement of clothing workers, the overuse of fresh water and non-renewable resources, and the disposal of tons of clothing which sits rotting in warehouses the world over. This book offers hopeful, ethical, and sustainable alternatives gathered through interviews with nearly 50 clothing producers, designers, and craftspeople hailing mainly from the U.S. and the UK, but also from India, Egypt, Vietnam, Iran, Nepal, and Ethiopia. Some of the individuals run small family farms and local collaboratives. Others are suppliers to major international outlets. All have committed to methods that value the well-being of humans and our planet. There are discussions about returning to traditional crop rotation and herding techniques and reinstating the use of natural fabrics and dyes alongside explanations of emerging research on new sources for sustainable fabrics, such as seaweed. It's both refreshing and reassuring to know that these initiatives exist; hopefully the fashion industry will use them.
It is a good overview of sustainability and great to see that the book is coming to this from lots of different angles, from fibres to case studies. We hope to make the students fully engaged with this as it is key to becoming an informed designer.
A great overview of leaders within design and manufacture within the responsible fashion space.
An excellent resource... I love the depth and explanation the book provides - especially all of the examples. The interviews with different people and brands/companies are extremely insightful.