Refusing fast fashion is not a single decision. It is a slow accumulation of smaller ones — not buying something, noticing how a thing was made, asking a question you could have left unasked. The people who do this work well tend not to lecture. They build a different pattern quietly, and if you pay attention you find yourself following it without quite remembering when you started.
In the atelier, refusal looks like cutting a pattern again instead of taking the faster seam. Outside of it, I keep an eye on writers who refuse differently — on the page, in the wardrobe, in how they live publicly.
Francesca Willow
Francesca Willow has been running Ethical Unicorn since 2016, and what distinguishes her work from most of what gets called sustainability content is that she insists justice and environmentalism cannot be separated. Her writing is fact-based, quietly rigorous, and not interested in virtue. It treats the reader as a grown adult capable of holding difficult information and doing something with it. I have learned a lot from her about what it actually means to centre people, and I carry that thinking into decisions about who makes my linen and under what conditions.
Lauren Bravo
Lauren Bravo's How To Break Up With Fast Fashion made the slow-fashion conversation accessible without ever flattening it. She writes for UK nationals in a voice that is warm and wry and does not make people feel stupid for where they are starting from. That matters. Most people do not begin their lives thinking about supply chains. Lauren meets them where they are and walks with them somewhere better. The book has stayed on my shelf because it is honest about the in-between — the part where you are trying but not quite there yet.
Dr Brett Staniland
Brett Staniland's twelve-items-a-year rule is the kind of quietly radical thing that sounds simple until you try it. Twelve new pieces into a wardrobe over an entire year, chosen with care, worn for years. Across his work as a model and ambassador, he has made that restraint visible, and, more importantly, desirable. He proves the thing I believe most about slow dressing — that it is not a sacrifice. It is a relief.
I make everything at Souls In Clothes with wearers like this in mind. People who are building a wardrobe piece by piece and who want each piece to pay its way over years, not seasons. You can see the tops and dresses that are currently being sewn to order in the atelier in Bulgaria.