CRAFT WORK
United in purpose, designer Kit Willow Podgornik and Eco-Age founder Livia Firth discuss the future they are helping to shape. Interviewed by Alice Birrell.
United in purpose, designer Kit Willow Podgornik and Eco-Age founder Livia Firth discuss the future they are helping to shape.
On different sides of the world, Kit Willow Podgornik, founder of label KitX, and Livia Firth, founder of consultancy EcoAge, were working for the same cause. It wasn’t until Vogue’s guest editor Emma Watson wore Willow’s creation, the label introduced to her by the sustainability-conscious Firth, that they were first brought together via sequins and velvet. Now a new project spearheaded by Firth reunites them again. The Commonwealth Fashion Exchange brings together designers from 52 Commonwealth nations and pairs them with artisans around the world, with the resulting eveningwear gown to be shown at Buckingham Palace this month. Here, Willow Podgornik and Firth reunite to talk to Vogue about their path to doing better for our planet, and a bright fashion future. VOGUE: Do you remember when you first came across each other and became aware of each other’s work?
LF: “We worked with Kit for the first time with Emma Watson on a stunning dress that Kit made and you did it with artisans, right?”
KWP: “That’s right. It was the sequin dress that was done in Kolkata by artisans. Those actual plastic sequins were made from up-cycled PET bottles. And so Livia, I love, love the work that you do and I came across you first when I was researching KitX.”
LF: “Well, for the work that I do, I need designers to follow and do the work, so it’s great to have people like you. It’s so inspiring to see the way that you create. Some of the clearest progress in shifting the focus of fashion to environmental and social justice has been made by working directly with the designers who are so heavily invested in bringing positive change for the industry.”
KWP: “That’s absolutely right, and empowering the women making the garments and the artisans is great.”
LF: “I was looking at the pictures of the three artisans from the Solomon Islands who helped you make the dress, and they’re all women from mid-40s to mid-50s, two of them have primary education, one has none, but when you look at their faces and you read about their lives and see how they work you think: ‘My god, this is such a powerful collaboration’, because usually these people are invisible. One of the main aims of the whole Commonwealth Fashion Exchange is to properly unlock this potential of the artisan trade, which has such a direct positive impact on human empowerment …”
KWP: “We worked with two different artisan groups: one is beading, which is actually their currency – the shells. There is $1,000 of currency on the dress. This is how much they value the natural resource. There’s so much love and effort and energy that goes into not only collecting the shell but actually grinding it down and shaving it and putting the love into the currency. How good is that?
“Then the raffia we used is bark from trees, which is stripped and then softened using a coral from the sea which has an alkaline substance, which reacts to the sun and it softens it.”
LF: “Oh, wow.”
KWP: “And all these women have hand-tied all the straw together, so it’s gentle on nature, it’s using natural everything; there are no dyes, no machines – it’s all done by hand and it’s wonderful.”
LF: “It is totally unlocking the world of artisan fashion and the many, many opportunities and possibilities that designers have to use these resources. Meanwhile, we go once a week to the high street and buy polyester dresses and then we throw them away and we don’t think: ‘Who are the hands behind this?’ and: ‘What is this material?’ It is so powerful to have a project that is worldwide, it is global, and it includes so many forgotten communities and so many designers who have an appetite to work in a different way … It is putting the heart back into fashion and what fashion really is.” VOGUE: What do you both think stands in the way of the industry engaging in more storytelling and educating the consumer?
KWP: “As a designer, nothing. And this is what I’m loving about doing this – the customer’s reaction and women really loving the storytelling. It is almost like ‘show her something that she’s never dreamed of before that she’ll fall in love with’, and by storytelling and communicating about people hand-making these garments they can even feel it, looking through clothes. You pick up a textile and it has a certain soul to it and that hand-feel that passes on.”
LF: “On a more societal level, it is so complex and so disturbing what has happened to us a society in the last 20, 30 years, through globalisation, through mass consumerism, which has been fuelled by everything being fast. At the same time, this insecurity you can call it, of millions of women in the Western world who are put under so much pressure to have to conform to a certain standard – what you look like, what you’re wearing – you find that on one side you had an addiction to consumption. We don’t realise how much we buy and how much we consume and because we are used to thinking that that is democratic fashion, that each one of us has a right to buy something so cheaply without thinking about the repercussions that that purchase has on women on whom it’s not democratic at all to produce it like that.”
KWP: “Someone is paying. The planet and people are paying.” LF: “We unravel it by telling these stories, by doing projects like this, by working with designers like you, Kit, reminding people that fashion can empower you if you use it in a good way, because you’re wearing beautiful stories and you have to be proud of that. There is so much change with the renewed women’s movement, there is more and more awareness of environmental and social impact of fashion, so things are changing and it’s a really exciting moment.”
KWP: “It is, Livia! I feel like that, too. When I started KitX, sustainable fashion was an ugly distasteful word. It was daggy. I thought I want to break that and if you can create beautiful desirable fashion that looks good and you want to wear it and love it and cherish it, but it also is consciously sourced from sustainable materials.”
LF: “For me it is very, very simple and it is about the handprint of fashion. To remember the stories behind what you are wearing and I think that this project is the manifest of that.”
KWP: “I am always thinking you don’t want to bombard people with statistics: you want to keep it simple. The big thing at the moment is that they’re in the last generation now that their skills are still alive. In one more generation it will be gone. It is a very crucial point, working with artisans, which is why I love this project so much. The product is so beautiful; it is not out of charity that we are working with artisans, it is the magic and soul of this incredible creation.”