It was the second day of the Omina Summit in Costa Rica, the biggest fashion sustainability conference in Latin America, and we were on a lunch break. A conversation caught my attention. It went something like this:
“I like to see more people of color discuss issues around the environment, fashion and social change and tend to see the voices of white models being elevated the most in this space”.
“Well you know, people who care about sustainable fashion need to see an image they can relate to.”
My mind spun. Only rich white people care about sustainability?!
It’s certainly true that the richest people produce the most waste. In fact, the richest 10% of the population account for fully half of the world’s carbon emissions. This staggering statistic was also shared at Omina as part of Katherine Trebeck’s talk. Katherine Trebeck is a Senior Researcher in Oxfam's Research Team where she is exploring an economy that delivers social justice. Her insightful talk highlighted Oxfam’s report on Extreme Carbon Inequality, which also found that the poorest 3.5 billion people account for just a tenth of carbon emissions.
I was invited to speak about Fashion Activism, a term I coined six years ago when I first began using fashion as a medium for social and environmental change.
Born in Lebanon in the middle of a 35-year war that tore my country apart, my keynote opened with a home video of me belly dancing as a child at a family gathering, and shortly after that video was taken, we had to escape into the shelter to be safe from bombing. A few months later we were at the airport seeking refugee status. I then show our refugee status portrait, which has been mistaken for a Christmas card. My mother looks beautiful, she has a full face of makeup on, and both my sister and I are wearing lovely wool sweaters my mother had knitted. Yet this was taken at the airport on our way to the unknown.
Having experienced fleeing a war torn country, and returning soon after the last cease fire, the cost the war had on both the environment and human lives marked me forever. At 13-years-old I made a vow to advocate for social and environmental change and began protesting, reading and educating myself on the issues.
I left Lebanon again when I was 18, and found myself as an expat working in the predominantly white spaces of design and fashion. Having experienced lack of resources first hand—electricity and water outage on a daily basis—I approach sustainability from a different angle; out of necessity. So I question the rhetoric that too often surrounds sustainable fashion as a kind of added bonus on a luxury item.
My research and work have shaped the way I approach sustainability from a post-colonial, anti-racist point of view. Fashion creates meaning, and that meaning creates action. For example, at my label Slow Factory, I created a scarf in collaboration with the ACLU (made with sustainably sourced material and eco-friendly dyes) in response to Trump’s travel ban, which has just been upheld by the Supreme Court today. I printed the word “Banned” with a line through it across a print of the night sky over the Middle East (where several of the banned countries are). The scarf generated a flurry of press and attention to the issue.
It’s like this: we can pressure companies to adopt sustainable practices, or we can work towards changing the culture or customer behavior. The latter often uses shame, guilt, or disgust in order to force a significant change in behavior using peer pressure or other methods. But whenever I hear “I want to make people who shop at any fast fashion store feel bad!” or any version of that, I can’t help but wonder: who are we collectively blaming and punishing?
By prioritizing listening, learning and collaboration with minorities, Native and Indigenous people, and developing countries, we can lead with innovative and collaborative solutions that can impact millions. When we don’t prioritize diversity and inclusion we tend to miss on the richness of this exchange and how it can foster meaningful change. How can we learn from low income families about reducing and reusing, the two more important of the three R’s that are arguably the foundation of the sustainable movement. How can Indigenous nations shape the conversation around the circular economy and green energy?
Sustainable fashion must immediately adopt some of the more progressive open and transparent processes developed in the recent years, or risk falling behind all the while failing our ecosystem. Made by Voz, a label also represented at the Omina Summit, has a very innovative model. Instead of buying and selling the sumptuous knits made by the Mapuche artisans of Temuco, Chile, Voz offers the weavers a stake in the company. By being co-founders together they shape and adapt the sustainable artisanal hand work into modern slick silhouettes and sell them to a Western audience looking to support sustainable practices.
When we use fashion as a medium for social and environmental change, we become social justice workers. Fashion is culture and we ought to create it together, weaved tightly with all of our different perspectives to inspire and move our civilization forward.
Céline Semaan is a Designer, Advocate, Writer and Founder of both Slow Factory and The Library; her focus is on sustainable literacy and accessibility in the fashion industry and beyond. She is a MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, and shares her research on publications like The Cut, Elle, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and Refinery29. She has coined the term #FashionActivism and recently has started the hashtag #ArabGirlMagic.
Her sustainable conference series Study Hall in collaboration with MIT Media Lab, G-Star Raw and Ace Hotel is on August 26, in Los Angeles.
Tickets: SHOP NOW
