The South African Fashion Week (SAFW), together with UK-based non-profit organisation Fashion Revolution, will lead the charge to clean up the international fashion industry.
The two have joined forces to try and gain momentum in the global movement’s impact on the local industry. The initiative will be led by Cyril Naicker of Fashion Revolution’s Cape Town-based South African office and SAFW director Lucilla Booyzen.
Josh Low will be tasked with expanding the business-to-business SAFW trade show and seminar series, as well as the designer pop-up consumer retail division.
Fashion Revolution will be involved in the first phase, where it will integrate slow fashion into the DNA of all SAFW’s competitions. These competitions include scouting menswear, new talent search, and student competitions.
“Fashion Revolution has a powerful global presence, and the SA office has already been in place for eight years. Partnering with SAFW’s high profile will now allow us to ramp up our fashion activism considerably and with much greater visibility,” said Naicker.
“It will also allow us to mobilise local projects on the ground with greater traction.”
Naicker added that although international retailers are opening up stores in South Africa, which has been good for creation of jobs, there is also a fundamental challenge with transparency.
“Very few people know what really happens behind closed doors of the factories that produce the garments for global fast fashion retailers,” said Naicker.
The SAFW has committed itself to a five-year plan in 2019 to spearhead the development of a sustainable local design culture by 2025.
According to Booyzen, the key is to develop collaborative networks for problem-solving with the designer community and the broader clothing industry to envision a realistic local sustainability ethos that can support people, the environment, creativity, and profit in equal measures.
This will be done by including critical sustainable fashion evaluation criteria such as the usage of low environmentally impactful fabric, crafting techniques, zero-waste cutting such as draping, knitting, or patterning, as well as an emphasis on creating timeless and trans-seasonal collections, said Booyzen.
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