The Future of Fashion

Brighton Fashion Week will take place from the 15-17 October 2015. The coastal city of Brighton will transform into a fashion mecca for International innovative designers and artists with events that include, competitions, industry networking, workshops, installations and catwalks shows. As the UK’s biggest platform for new fashion design talent outside of the capital, the last six years have seen us showcase collections from over 600 new designers, and stage unique fashion and art events in a huge variety of Brighton venues.

Brighton Fashion Week offers a fresh approach to promote sustainability within the fashion industry. Our aim is to encourage as many excellent quality innovative sustainable fashion brands to showcase at the event as possible and showcase the very best in sustainable fashion. We also work with new designers at the start of their careers to adopt ethical practices in their work.

Brighton Fashion Week is produced by FAQPOP, a not for profit Community Interest Company committed to producing high quality public events in fashion and the arts.

Fashion Revolution Talk

12-1pm

Renowned speaker Orsola de Castro began up-cycling in 1997 with her original label, From Somewhere. In 2006, Orsola and her partner launched Esthetica at London Fashion Week under the British Fashion Council, to showcase labels designing sustainability. Recently, Orsola created Reclaim To Wear, resulting in collaborations with retailers such as Topshop as well as projects with Central Saint Martins and Hong Kong Design Institute. After the Rana Plaza Factory collapse in 2013 killing 1,132 garment workers in Bangladesh and injuring 2,500 Orsola founded the Fashion Revolution campaign along with Carry Somers from Fair Trade brand Pachacuti. With all these credentials Orsola has the experience to share both the style and ethical side of fashion that we are advocating throughout the

SCAP presents talks by Anne Prahl, Ben Thomas and Carol Rose. 

1.30-3.30pm 

Resource efficiency experts WRAP, which leads the SCAP initiative, will present three short sessions in this hour long workshop. The workshop aims to raise questions on how we re-invent, re-think and re-define.

Re-inventing how we design, market and sell clothes.

Re-thinking how we use and consume clothes.

Re-defining what is possible through re-use and recycling of textiles.

Anne Prahl will start off showcasing new initiatives, processes and technology that can reduce the environmental impact of clothing followed by Ben Thomas from nonprofit fashion organisation Made BY. Ben will discuss sourcing and benchmarking sustainable fibres for sustainable design. Carol Rose will finish the talks with the relevance of sustainability in the fashion industry tying the whole event together and giving you the opportunity to see how the sustainable fashion industry works from every angle.

The SCAP workshops will be followed by a showing of the AEG film the "Next Black" which will be introduced by Joe Oram from Electrolux. New technologies, sustainability concerns and innovative minds are transforming our clothes. In the “Next Black” documentary film, you meet the designers, innovators and leaders that are shaping the future of what we will be wearing. This is not a film about what’s new, it’s about what’s next.

The Future of Fashion Panel

3.45pm-4.45pm  

Following the hugely successful SUSTAIN Debate at last years Brighton Fashion Week. We continue to explore ethics in fashion with opinions, insight and ideas from a new set of exciting panelists. 

“This is the end of fashion as we know it” was exclaimed by Li Edelkoort, one of the world’s most influential fashion forecasters at the beginning of this year.

Our panel will build upon the debate started last year discussing their vision on how they each see the industry changing. With fast fashion consuming so many of our natural resources and a million tonnes of waste going to land fill in the UK each year we start to question, why do so many of us feel that we need cheaper clothes at the expense of low paid and poorly treated garment workers? With this type of work ethic achieving so much success for the high street and showing no sign of slowing down, this debate will alternatively show us the next steps to achieving a fairer fashion industry.

Clare Lissaman will be leading our debate for 2015 with yet another excellent panel line up including:

Leah Borromeo. With over a decade’s experience in television news at an editorial level, journalist and filmmaker Leah Borromeo bridges a parallel arts practice with documentary to extract new angles and emotions around factual narratives.

Leah has “desk-jockeyed as Deputy Foreign Editor at Sky News, fawned over Jon Snow’s socks at Channel 4 News, and stood around a satellite truck looking important for APTN.

Able to generate, shoot and edit her own material for broadcast and print, she’s also making The Cotton Film: Dirty White Gold, her first feature documentary on Indian cotton farmer suicides, pesticides and fashion.

Having a knack of being in the wrong place at the right time, she sometimes gets into trouble. It’s usually on film, and only once has it been on a tank. She’s also been featured in Grazia Magazine (!) for her Tweets over the 2009 Iranian elections and received not one, but two kisses from Yasser Arafat.”

Christine Gent MA MSCD is Executive Director of WFTO-Asia, representing the 125 members of the World Fair Trade Organization in 19 Asian countries. She has over 25 years of experience working in income generation with labour intensive production through Fair Trade including working on supply chain managements with People Tree and her own Fair Trade brand Fairly Covered. She has worked with many Fair Trade and UN bodies, with eight years as Ethical Trade Development Manager at the Body Shop.

Clare Lissaman is a consultant on ethical and fair trade. She has a particular focus on labour standards in global supply chains, helping disadvantaged producers to access mainstream markets and exploring the impact of trade on poor communities. Clare works with businesses both large and small, NGOs and innovative projects. Clare is also an experienced trainer, developing and implementing training courses on social accountability and ethical trade to several UK retailers. Clients include Gap Inc, and the Fairtrade Foundation (where she helped launch Fairtrade cotton)

A trained social and environmental auditor, Clare has a breadth of knowledge and experience in the challenges of building up sustainable supply chains, the ins and outs of standards and certification and a passion and belief that trade can, and should, benefit rather than exploit poor communities.

Carol Rose Technical Advisor for WRAP . Carol’s ethos is about delivering sustainable lifecycle solutions and creating change within the fashion industry. Carol also runs her own consultancy “Carol Rose Associates” with a team of dedicated clothing specialists and academics who collectively have decades of experience working with multinationals, government and brands in the areas of: resource efficient concept design; New Product Development NPD strategies; supply-chain management and corporate strategy.