The Big Green Conference

There has been a bit of a delay since my last post because this week I went to Melbourne to a sustainability conference that I really wanted to talk about in this blog.

Yesterday I attended The Big Green Conference in Geelong, which aimed to address sustainability issues and challenges in the context of Australian TCF industries. Personally, I was a bit disappointed by the small number of students who showed up. For a $99 student price for a whole dense day of information – why wouldn’t you? We need to be at the forefront in this area, yet (borrowing from Tourism Australia) “where the bloody hell are you?” Maybe raising greater awareness in universities is something the organisers should consider for the future of the conference.

Apart from this personal gripe, I thought it was a wonderfully organised and informative conference. The variety of people speaking was refreshing and a great way of gauging the scope of sustainability within TCF and how people are approaching it from different angles. The speakers left ample time for questions which led to engaging debate on issues which are really confronting the industry.

Andreas Schimkus, Senior Advisor and Program Manager of Textile and Fashion Industries of Australia (TFIA) spoke of the growing importance of quality in manufacturing in light of rising costs in fashion design. He argued that the trend of ever cheaper clothing is over, and as consumers from China and India put pressure on demand, the costs of materials and labour will rise- starting now. The solution for the Australian industry, as he sees it, is emphasis on a quality driven product and a return to expertise and traditional techniques as a way to survive these new conditions. His argument really struck a chord with what I have been thinking and reading lately across a wide forum of design fields, and aligns with what I wish to achieve this year through my design practice and my collection.

I was similarly interested by the viewpoint of Matt Perry from the advertising agency Republic of Everyone. He highlighted that the problem of communicating sustainability is its complexity and reinforced the difficulty of turning this issue into a simple, interesting and engaging message by using examples from current advertising campaigns. I thought Levi’s Go Forth advertisements were particularly clear and engaging at distilling a huge issue like urban decay into a single tag line “Go Forth.” Perry sees smart companies integrating sustainability into their brand, not just tacking on a small range or some other token effort. Overall it was just nice to hear that the future of the industry is heading in the direction I would like to follow when I graduate.

Finally, this conference was particularly pertinent in light of the government’s carbon pricing – government representatives were keen to sell their solution to industry, but the main response seemed to be frustration that this hasn’t happened sooner.

On the train back to Melbourne I reflected on the irony of a Big Green Conference which stressed that sustainability was much bigger than being “Green” and became excited at the thought of applying all that I learnt during the day to my fashion practice.