F4TE Week Review
Features Editor, Olivia Bybel, reviews Fashion 4 the Earth Week. F4TE week was a week long online event put on by the St Andrews Charity Fashion Show.
F4TE week, or Fashion 4 the Earth Week, was a week-long event put on by St Andrews Charity Fashion Show from 12 to 18 October. Feeling it their responsibility as a fashion-focussed society, FS aimed to spread awareness about sustainable brands, and educate on sustainable production and consumption in fashion. The event was put on entirely online, and the various digital formats were posted on their facebook page as the week went on.
The week began with a series of lectures from Monday to Friday, posted to their Facebook page. The topics included, Greenwashing, fast fashion, technology, upcycling, circularity, production, and politics, all given by experts. The lectures were engaging, informative, and relevant to all consumers of fashion, which is nearly everybody.
The lectures all led up to the live panels which were hosted on Saturday. The first panel featuring Noa Ben-Mosche, founder of Style With a Smile, sustainable blog, Kerry Murphy, founder of The Fabricant, and Francois Souchet, lead of Make Fashion Circular at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and moderated by Kerry Banndigan, the founder of the Conscious Fashion Campaign. Each of the panelists shared their experiences with sustainability in the fashion industry, and answered a series of prepared questions, as well as questions asked by the audience via chat. The relationship between social, and environmental issues within the fashion industry, the future of digital clothing, accessibility to sustainably clothing, and of course, COVID-19 were all topics covered. The panel was more personal and interactive than the lectures, while the interaction between the panellist was incredibly informative.
The second panel was held in the afternoon and featured Nicole Rycroft, the founder and executive director of Canopy Planet, Patrick Duffy, the founder of Global Fashion Exchange, and Ayesha Barenblat, the founder of Remake Fashion. It was moderated by environmentalist and community leader, Daphne Grant. The panelists answered questions excitedly and collaborated with each other, bringing with them to the panel evidence of existing friendships. The panelists spoke passionately about amplifying the voices of garment workers, protecting the environment, and finite resources when producing clothes, and using social events and human connection to conduct sustainable practices.
FS finished out F4Te around a week after the conclusion of the panels, with the publication of their first ever e-catalog. The catalog featured sustainable designers, and excerpts from the lectures and panels. For those who participated in F4TE week, the catalog is the cherry on top, where people can look at real examples of the sustainable brands they have been learning about. For those who missed the other events, the catalog is an aesthetically pleasing, easy to read alternative.
St Andrews Charity Fashion show took advantage of the increasingly virtual world that we find ourselves in, assembling lecturers and panelists from across the world, who otherwise we may have never had the opportunity to learn from. The content made was engaging, educational, and important to students in St Andrews who participate in the fashion industry as consumers, and those who hope to work in it in the future. Spreading the lectures out over a week made it easier to take in, with the panels being worthy finale to the whole thing. They successfully put on an event over multiple virtual mediums which educated anyone who was interested about sustainable fashion. While this week-long event may be quite different than what we in St Andrews are used to experiencing, FS took on the restrictions of our new world in stride, and used it to create something invaluable. Anyone wanting to experience F4Te week today can still find all the lectures, recordings of the panels, and the catalog on their facebook page.
