The Women Leading Fashion Sustainability
When Livia Firth first set up environmental consultancy Eco-Age in 2007, the word ‘sustainability’ was not the buzzword it is today. “At the beginning, it was much more difficult; not many people were talking about the issue,” she tells Vogue. “The aim was to convince [brands] to start that journey. Now, everyone understands that if they still want a business in 10 years’ time, they have to think in a sustainable way.”
Firth is among a number of women who realised early on the importance of sustainability within the fashion industry, including Carry Somers and Orsola de Castro, who set up the campaign group Fashion Revolution in 2013 in response to the Rana Plaza factory collapse, which killed 1,134 garment workers in Bangladesh.
“It makes sense to me that it’s a very female-led movement,” de Castro comments. “There’s a lot of women who perhaps felt [they were] not included in the mainstream fashion world. [The sustainability movement] felt like a genuine place where you were able to show your value and skills.” Somers continues: “As women, we see the injustices in the industry at every level, whether that’s in the boardroom [or] the lack of equality throughout the supply chain.”
Despite the progress made, the fashion industry still faces a vast range of challenges, both on the environmental and social fronts — as highlighted by the current coronavirus pandemic, which has left brands struggling to stay afloat and garment workers in the supply chain out of work. Here, six women at the forefront of fashion’s sustainability revolution reflect on how far the industry has come over the past decade, and the work that still lies ahead.
Livia Firth, founder of Eco-Age and the Green Carpet Challenge
Livia Firth set up Eco-Age as a retailer-cum-consultancy in 2007, after her brother Nicola Giuggioli spotted a gap in the market. Now a major player in the sustainable fashion space, Eco-Age works with brands including MatchesFashion, Chopard and Reformation, and is behind the Green Carpet Fashion Awards, which encourages celebrities to wear sustainable fashion on the red carpet.
Have you always been interested in sustainability?
“Not in the way that you might imagine. Being from an older generation — I’m 50 — and having grown up in a period of pre-consumerism made me really look at things in a different way. I never thought about sustainability in terms of what the word means because I always consumed things slowly. Obviously when we opened Eco-Age, the word sustainability became more and more relevant in everyday life, to the point we are at today.”
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