21st APRIL 2021

To mark Fashion Revolution Week and celebrate the first anniversary since the launch of the Creative Conversations podcast series, the first episode of Season Four opens with Orsola de Castro, the fashion activist who founded the Fashion Revolution campaign in 2013, which has led the global movement for change within the fashion industry – from sustainability to working practices.

For Orsola de Castro, all you need is love. Love for fashion, and love for all beautiful things – that last. Talking to us in 2021, the last year has been a lesson about lasting. Or, as she puts it, “Re-wearing your clothes can be a revolutionary act.”

Orsola de Castro, fashion activist and founder of the Fashion Revolution movement

Her new book is titled Loved Clothes Last (Penguin Random House) and is a passionate ode to the rebirth of our old fashion friends, lurking in closets and stuffed into drawers. Up-cycling is so much more than a fashionable trend. For Orsola, it was triggered by the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh in 2013, when an eight-storey building filled with clothing workers collapsed and caused 1,134 deaths.

A shocked Orsola asked herself why people demand ever-cheaper, disposable clothes, and what could be done to make a lasting difference. Her response was to found fashion‘s largest global activism movement, Fashion Revolution, to change the way the industry works and change ur attitude to clothes.

April 19th-25th marks Fashion Revolution Week, when more than 100 countries come together to take responsibility, remember the lives lost, and demand that no one should die in service of the industry.

In our conversation, Orsola’s urgent enthusiasm reminds us that we can all be fashion revolutionists. Our clothes deserve new lives, instead of being thrown away.

Her book is a mix of practical repair with thoughtful and passionate commitment to fabric and treatment that prolongs their life.

To participate in the eighth Fashion Revolution week, wherever you are in the world, spread the word and educate yourself. Let’s believe that today’s fashion and textile industry can change, evolve, and become more transparent.

Visit fashionrevolution.org to get involved, and you can listen to our conversation here.