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Three podcasters share what they’ve learned from their guests.
Pre-Loved With Emily Stochl
What has your sustainable fashion journey looked like?
Like many, I started thrifting in high school and college when I had a small expendable budget. Thrifting brought me so much joy, and I considered it a practical and fun outlet. But in 2013, I watched The True Cost documentary, and I learned about the ethical and climate-related issues of the fashion industry. I made a commitment to shopping second-hand first.
Over the next few years, I dove deeper and deeper into this world, watching YouTube channels, reading books, listening to podcasts, and consuming all the documentaries I could! I started the sustainable podcast Pre-Loved in 2018, because I wanted to create a space for other people whose connection to the sustainable fashion space was second-hand — just like my journey had been!
What do you love most about vintage?
I love how unique a piece is, and imagining (or knowing!) the life that a piece had before it came to be mine. I was a history student in school, and I love the stories that old things hold for us.
How do you think shopping for second-hand items helps our planet?
According to The True Cost, the world consumes 80-100 billion new pieces of clothing every year, which is a 400% increase from the year 2000. And we don’t even use most of it — the average American now generates 82 pounds of textile waste each year. As consumers, one way we can slow down massive overproduction is to reduce the demand for new clothing. There is already plenty of clothing in circulation, and the most sustainable thing to wear is something that already exists.
What do you want readers to learn most from your podcast?
I want to make sustainable fashion so fun and interesting that it’s irresistible! I love sharing the history of pieces, the personal style inspiration and the way second-hand has even changed lives of many of my guests. I want people to connect second-hand because they think it’s stylish, cool, and important.
But I also want to show that the second-hand industry is not a single story. Resale is large and complex, just like retail. And I want to approach that story from every angle possible.
What has been the most eye-opening interview that you’ve had so far on your podcast?
I recently released a two-part podcast on the second-hand industry in Accra, Ghana. I believe many of my listeners in the North have a lot to learn from the concepts of sustainability shared by our Ghanaian guests, and I also think as lovers of the second-hand industry it is important to know some of the issues of this industry, so we can be involved in changing it in a way that is equitable for all people it reaches.
Who has been your favorite guest so far?
So hard to say, however, it was a big career moment for me to have Elizabeth Cline on the show. Elizabeth wrote Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, which was a foundational book for me when I was learning about the issues facing the fashion industry. She published a second book, The Conscious Closet, in 2019, and I got to have her on my show surrounding the release of the new book. I loved our conversation, both for her stories about amazing vintage Escada finds in tiny little thrift shops, but also for the way she brings attention to the human rights issues of the fashion industry. I look up to her so much, so interviewing her meant a lot to me.
Manufactured with Jessie Li & Kim van der Weerd
What have your sustainable fashion journeys looked like?
Jessie: I come from the Hubei province in China. Yangzi, the longest river in Asia, flows through this province. Starting in the late nineties until around five years ago, there was a national debate about building the three gorges dam. For me, this was a moment of awakening about the scale, consequences, and impact of human activities on the environment.
After years working in the fashion industry I began to ask questions. ‘How can we limit the damage? How can we live and do business in a more sustainable way?’ Ultimately, these questions led me to leave her job with a garment factory.
Kim: I’ve always been driven by issues of social justice, which led me to do a Master’s in Human Rights in London. But after working in London for a few years, I wanted to understand how the exchange of goods connects us to people so geographically far from wherever we are from – and how the distribution of wealth across this invisible chain could be re-distributed. And this is how I wound up working as garment factory manager in Cambodia where I met Jessie. The more I inhabited the role of a factory manager, the more I realized that the sustainability challenges factory managers face are part of a larger system of asymmetrical power relations and a highly unequal distribution of risk and reward.
Why did you decide to highlight minority voices in the fashion industry?
Knowing how to mass produce clothes is a key ingredient to addressing the complex sustainability challenges the industry faces, and not something most brands or consumers possess. And fear of an unfair playing field and of retribution keeps most suppliers quiet, closing the door to dialogue.
We challenge the sustainability advocates out there: when was the last time you heard a supplier’s thoughts on sustainability? Suppliers are the experts, yet their silence is deafening. We need to ask ourselves why. We feel strongly that the perspectives of factory management are often misunderstood and underrepresented across sustainability conversations – both within the industry and beyond.
What is the #1 thing that you want readers to learn from your podcast?
A more nuanced understanding of how the fashion supply chain actually works! Our unconscious perception of the brown factory manager out to make a quick buck pervades the way we approach sustainability. And, while there are certainly factory managers out there doing bad things, for which they must be held accountable, so many suppliers we know are fervent champions of sustainability. We need to hear these stories too! And we must be willing to contend with a world in which the lines that delineate victims and perpetrators might not always be so clear cut. Sometimes, people might be both.
What has been the most eye-opening interview that you’ve had so far on your podcast?
There are so many, it’s hard to choose! But ok, we especially loved our conversation with Hansika Singh about systems change. Hansika lives in India and started her journey in the fashion supply chain working for an H&M buying office. Effectively, her job was to be the liaison between H&M and the factories producing for them. She later went on to work in consumer advocacy, and ultimately landed with Forum for the Future where she takes a systems-thinking lens to projects tackling big questions like how to do cotton more sustainably.
We loved learning about systems thinking from Hansika. Sometimes when we think about living more consciously it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and unempowered. Like any efforts we might make are just a drop in the ocean relative to what needs to be done. But Hansika illuminates the connection between the individual and the system and how meaningful change requires these two to move in parallel. Plus, where else will you get to listen to three women from India, China, and the US respectively, talking about garment manufacturing? ?
How do you think the fashion industry needs to change in order to be more ethical and sustainable?
A recent McKinsey report “Fashion on Climate” says that 70% of the fashion industry’s emissions originate upstream. Think energy-intensive raw material production, preparation, and processing. The upside of the report is that over the next decade the industry can cut its collective GHG footprint in half from current levels. However, this requires a 61% reduction in emissions from suppliers.
Suppliers are meant to achieve this though investment in new machines and technology. But why would a supplier invest in new technology when there are no order commitments? When brands will jump to another factory over just a couple of cents?
Changing the fashion industry requires disrupting the highly unequal distribution of risk and reward across the supply chain. It requires new narratives that do justice to the complexity of the problem. It requires a new kind of radical transparency that, instead of functioning as another tool of control, gives suppliers ownership over their own stories. Imagine a world where instead of brands publishing their supplier lists, suppliers could just list which brands they work with!