Refusing throwaway culture sounds like a small habit until you try to do it structurally. Keeping things, repairing things, demanding that the systems behind what you own actually function — these are small choices inside very large machines. The writers and organisers below work on the larger machines.
Bel Jacobs
Bel Jacobs's writing on degrowth and defashion has been some of the clearest in the UK for a while now. Her question — whether making and wearing clothes can mean something different from what the industry has turned it into — is the one I keep returning to as a maker. Her work with Fashion Act Now and Extinction Rebellion Fashion Action puts that question into real rooms. I do not think an answer arrives cleanly, and she does not pretend it does. She simply keeps holding the question open.
Alice Wilby
Alice Wilby co-founded Novel Beings, the first sustainable styling agency in the UK, long before the industry was willing to meet her there. That early conviction has paid out in the form of a lot of designers and editors who now take this work seriously because she did first. Her current teaching at UCA carries that through to the next generation. Conviction that old, kept that steadily, is worth naming.
Jocelyn Whipple
Jocelyn Whipple has been doing textile and fashion sustainability work since 1999 and was part of Fashion Revolution's global network for seven years. Now she is building Mend Assembly, a local making and repair space. Mending is a radical act, specifically because it undoes the disposability that fashion is supposed to be. Watching her re-locate that act into community rather than private labour feels exactly right. It returns repair to where it lived before industrial laundry — in the room with the person who wore the thing.
We try to make pieces at Souls In Clothes that are easy to mend and worth mending. Linen takes kindly to repair. A small patch, a reinforced seam, a darned elbow — these are part of the life of a garment rather than the end of it.