Sustainable Talk - In Conversation with Alice Wilby

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Alice Wilby discusses all things fashion waste, BTS over-consumption, and styling sustainably.

In the grand scheme of fashion, styling is a language of its own. Stylists create personas and narratives to draw audiences in, to convince, to transport us into their made-up universes of glamour, exclusivity, and sometimes wackiness. They’re story tellers, image makers, collectors, curators, …

But behind the thrill and excitement of this luxurious facade, hides the reality of waste and over-consumption.

In cohesion with the ongoing discussion about sustainability within the industry, styling norms need to be reevaluated, and changed, drastically. The old way of doing things might have started to change, but only few have actually implemented sustainability into their own practices.

Alice Wilby is one of them. Fashion stylist, activist, and co-founder of NOVEL, a consulting agency specialising in creative direction and sustainability services, she has dedicated her career to making a real change within the industry, and inspiring others to do the same.

It is from her home office that she joined our Zoom call, ready to unravel the tales she’s collected in 20 years of working in the industry.

Leelou Reboh: What inspired you to start working in sustainable fashion? I’m assuming that, at the time you started working in the industry, sustainability wasn’t nearly as talked about as it is today. When did you realise it was a real issue in the styling field?

Alice Wilby: Besides fashion, I also used to do a lot of work in advertising and different areas of media. I was witnessing all this waste, overconsumption and overproduction. I started doing a little bit more research on it, and discovered that it wasn’t just about that. It was also about human right abuses in the fashion supply chain, that that the people and planet were suffering to bring us the clothes that we wear. This made me feel very uncomfortable, because I’d always loved clothes. I grew up loving and understanding textures, beautiful tailoring and craftsmanship, because I was wearing a lot of my mum’s clothes from the 60s and 70s, pieces that had been passed down in my family, or clothes that she’d make for us. They already carried a lot of love, and a lot of history. So I hated the idea that we could be walking around with clothes that were polluting the environment, or were helping fuel the climate emergency, or that were made by people that were suffering and weren’t paid properly just so that we could dress nicely. It became clear to me that, if I wanted to keep story-telling, it had to be with positive, sustainable, and ethical stories. So, in 2009, I launched a magazine called “Future Frock”. It really was a first at the time, in terms of having a magazine that focused their editorials on sustainability. That feels weird now, because you keep falling over yourself with sustainability content. Back then, you would only occasionally see “vintage” or “stylist’s own” in a magazine, but fashion editors didn’t like it, because that meant you couldn’t buy it on mass. You couldn’t send hundred of thousands of people out there to buy that one vintage item. So I was definitely an outlier at that time doing that.

LR: You were talking about waste in the advertising industry. What did you mean by that precisely?

AW: The practice was, and still largely is, that you create a campaign for the product you want to advertise, and naturally people have to be dressed. So you go out and sort the items and clothes that you need for it. Because we’re talking about advertising, and not editorial, there’s no credit for the brand, or the stylist. For editorials, you get things for free because of the credit the brands will get for it, but you have to buy it all for advertising. When I started, there were still larger budgets, and I’d simply get a large chunk of cash to go out and buy the items. Two things would then happen once the campaign was shot: either the brand or agency would say “We own it”, so you’d hand it back to them, and they’d either share it around the office, or it’d go in a cupboard and then be thrown out at Christmas. It would just be redistributed in some way, but still that felt very wasteful to me. The other scenario is when they would let you keep it. That was great for a stylist, because then you’d be able to build a collection of stuff, and these items would be repurposed. But as the budgets were getting smaller, they started expecting you to go back to the shop, and return all the stuff. This also felt very unethical, because if people had used and worn things, it shouldn’t be returned, right? But I’ve had clients that were like “Couldn’t you just get the money back for that”? Again, it’s all about overproduction, and overconsumption. There’s very little care for the actual craft, and the items that are being created aside from the way that they’ve been assigned to certain genres of style, or cast characters. For someone who loves fashion and clothing, it feels very counter intuitive.

LR: We were talking about styling editorials, but we all know that this isn’t where to money is. The money-making machine is the commercial work. When you work with bigger brands, you have a bigger budget, so you tend to care less, waste more. How do you integrate the aspect of sustainability in your commercial work?

AW: That’s a good question. Let’s take South Africa for example. As I’m sure you know, South Africa is huge for the film and advertising industry, and lots of European brands will flight there in the winter to get some summer sun and photograph their products. When you work in that important of an industry hub, you can just go to a hire department and hire clothing to do advertising campaigns with. In that sense, there is a more sustainable solution to wardrobes and dressing. My friend and business partner, Khandiz, actually set something up like that in London about 6 years ago, called “Wardrobe Bank”. It was fairly successful, but it didn’t take off. There were a few reasons for that, but the main one was because the industry is smaller here. The concept was smart: it was a collection of stylists’ wardrobe, we had a warehouse space, each stylist brought their own wardrobe to the bunch, and you could come in and loan stuff. It was great, and she’s not particularly precious about this idea, so if anyone wants to revive this… I think another issue lies in the fact that, nowadays, we have (and want) such a vast scale of sizes, styles, genres, and looks to be made available to us that, if it’s not available immediately on the high street, you can just buy it from Amazon or have it made exactly as you want very quickly. This is a really recent sort of hiccup in consumption, and supply and demand in fashion and apparel. It’s not always been like this. But now, when you can get anything at the touch of a button, and the customers know you can, and the client knows you can, we feel entitled to all this choice. There’s something, in the wide of the sustainability conversation, that’s not just about clothing, but about how downsize and de-grow, and how we try to right-size an industry that’s gone completely out of control.

My own personal approach to this issue is what I call “My best” practice. If a client comes to me, and, for example, says they want a red dress, then I go and try to source as many red dresses for my moodboard for them, from as many sustainable brands as possible. If ultimately they want something that can potentially only be found on the high street, and I need to make my money, and I need to do that job, then I will go to the high street, and I’ll get it for them. But before that, I try as hard as I can to convince them that they should invest in those other red options. For me, it’s always about continually try to educate the client in a very friendly way, that doesn’t leave them feeling like I’m passively-aggressively trying to push my agenda. The other way, of course, is by having things commissioned and made, if you really physically can’t find it, and making sure that a seamstress, or someone, is paid a fair living wage to deliver whatever the client needs. What I’ve observed since Khandiz and I launched Novel in 2014, doing sustainable, ethical production and styling, is that there’s now a wider acceptance and understanding from the client, through to the brand client, through to the advertising agency, that we need to work with more restricted briefs if we are to deal with sustainability issues in fashion. Ten years ago, clients and editors probably would’ve

“Well I don’t care, just get it for me”, but now they’re more likely to compromise and invest a little more, as they realise that they’re paying up for their actions and they contribute to something positive. There’s a real shift in understanding what sustainability really means, in terms of choice and consumption.

LR: What kind of shift are we talking about?

AW: Well, one of the big problems, and I’m really talking about advertising now, is that, as a stylist, you’ll be one of the last people to see that brief. You see the brief only once a bunch of people who have no idea about your working practice, have sat at a table, and have decided what they want. You often get it really last-minute too, and, when you have to go and execute it for them, it gives you a lot less time to make more sustainable choices. A lot of sustainable brands are small, and they might have only one person in the team who can’t compete with Amazon for delivery. It’s different with editorial. It can be really difficult to implement in terms of sustainability, because you don’t really have a choice from what to pick. You have to work with the brands paying the magazine.

When I say there’s a shift in understanding, it’s because, 10 years ago, editors didn’t want it, and now they do. They’re really starting to understand it, and what you’re finding is that they’re so eager to include sustainable brands that they’ll often put things in that aren’t particularly sustainable at all. Stuff that has 10% of organic cotton, for example, and they think that’s great. So it’s a constant balance.

LR: Talking about understanding sustainability, do you feel like people are actually willing to continue down that path, or that they are acting concerned simply because of the pressure they’re facing, and will revert to old practices as soon as they will be able to?

AW: I love that Greta Thunberg quote: “Change is coming, whether you like it or not”. The climate emergency isn’t going away, and one of the smartest ways to change it is to change the way we do business, and to do that really fast, at quite a radical scale. One of the strangely positive things is that more and more businesses are having their hands forced towards sustainability, because it’s becoming an ever-increasing business case. A lot of consumers now want to know why and how their products are ethical and sustainable. They don’t want to buy from brands that are polluting, and furthering the climate emergency. This has definitely been helped by the environmental activists, but also across the board in many different industries. For example, in the insurance industry currently, they’re really openly talking about whole areas of our lives becoming uninsurable if businesses don’t step up and help fight the climate crisis. There’s really a push forward to sustainability happening from lots of different angles. Have you ever heard of “Doughnut economics”? It’s a really interesting book by Kate Raworth. She’s an economist, and she’s created this entire new economic model based on a doughnut. You have the space in the middle of the doughnut that we don’t want to fall through, because that would leave people in our societies in poverty and in need. Then, outside of the doughnut is the space we don’t want to encroach over, meaning overusing planetary resources and that kind of thing. It is incredibly logical, and planet- and climate-centred. It’s actually being trialed at the moment in the Netherlands as an economic model for recovery after Covid. It always comes back to business models and economics with fashion. There are so many really exciting new economic models, like this (Doughnut Economics) one, talking about a greener growth that isn’t centred around constant economic ascension with the destruction of planetary resources. They talk about a prosperous economic model that centres the needs of people, and planet, and the environment together. We’ve got old guards in charge of the industry at the moment, that are really predicated on old ways of doing things. And the point is, we need to transform our business models.

LR: We’ve been talking about the people in charge of the industry, but as for other stylists and creatives, is there also the will and concern to change towards sustainable practices?

AW: As activists, we made this video over lockdown after we’d been campaigning the fashion industry to step up and take responsibility for its environmental footprint, and its role in the climate emergency. We were arguing that, as a leader of culture, fashion is a really exciting vehicle for change. It’s ahead of the Zeitgeist, and it’s always got its finger on the pull. It always knows what’s about to happen next. So why isn’t it doing everything it can protect us from this threat that we face, the climate emergency? Before that, in 2019, we also held a huge protest at London Fashion Week. We organised a funeral procession, and marched down to lay 3 coffins outside of 180 The Strand, for people, planet, and animals. We kind of hacked their press, and we made the news. We continued campaigning, and they were so upset. The were outraged, and really offended. A lot of egos were dented by the work we did. We started working on that video by the time it was April or May 2020. All of those comments in that video were from that period of time. They either referred to fashion’s responsibility to climate emergency, fashion’s impact on the environment, or what we, collectively, as human beings, through business, had done to the planet. We started to see that the narrative was changing. From the fashion industry being very upset and angry at we were asking, they started to say things that felt quite radical, and that felt very much in line with what we’d been saying for a while. What I’m getting at with that, is that we’ve got two elements in fashion: we’ve got the machine, the fashion industry, which sort of is the barest form of capitalism in our society, and then we have the beautiful, aspirational, creative side of fashion. This is where lovely, often very sensitive, very creative people come to work and express their vision. Many of these people, the designers, the stylists, the makeup artists, all the creative people who flock to express themselves via this medium, are often very much in touch with what’s happening to the planet and other people. A lot of them are deeply empathetic, caring, feeling people. So there’s a real disparity between what the individuals within the system know and feel, and what the machine that powers the system demands of them. Alessandro Michele, when he was at Gucci, posted on Instagram during the pandemic, and said: “Separated from nature, we felt cunning and almighty”. It was this huge tirade at the world, at people, at humanity, at the way in which we treat the planet. It felt so deeply resonant, because the pandemic sort of felt like the first glimpse that, collectively, we got to see what social breakdown and environmental destruction might look like on a global scale. So to go back to your question, people are definitely turning towards it. You’ll see a lot of people moving over from mainstream fashion into sustainability, because it’s trendy and cool, and it’s what smart business people should do. But there’s also a lot of people that are shifting focus, because they are these intuitive, rational, caring human beings who understand that this is the future.

LR: So what about yourself? Have you ever suffered any repercussions because you were fighting and going against the industry?

AW: There’s a whole bunch of people I will not name, who I know have never particularly wanted to be associated with sustainability, and have ridiculed what I’ve done from the beginning. They will surely be some of the last adopters to this, because they are die-hard fashion fascists. They’ll go down with the ship, and that’s absolutely fine. It’s just a journey that we’re all on, isn’t it? The thing that I always wanted to do was to make it look fun, and make it look exciting and interesting, so that people would want to get involved. I don’t think you can ever change anyone’s mind. I mean, we were obviously shouting at people quite a bit with the activism. But with the sustainability work, it was very much about making it engaging and fun rather than making it preachy.

LR: And do you personally believe that the industry can become sustainable? Can we still hope for salvation?

AW: I think fashion can. I don’t know if the industry can, because it’s not just about transforming the fashion industry. It’s about transforming these models of profit and extraction at the expense of people and our planet, and it needs to happen across all industries. So again, models like “Doughnut economics” and economists like Kate Rowerth are leading the field in this space, but we need a tremendous amount of political will in order to affect and really transform capitalism.

LR: I recently read a Business of Fashion article talking about imposing restrictions on big fashion corporations to force change towards sustainability. Do you think that could be part of the solution?

AW: Yes, definitely, yes. There’s a large section of the industry where there needs to be legislation and legal recourse in place to stop certain extractive and exploitative practices, whether that’s the misuse of environmental resources, or the misuse of social and human resources. But I really do believe some people won’t stop unless there is a legal recourse to make them do so.

LR: So what do you believe the role of styling is in that change?

AW: Story-telling. There is something that I, and many of us come back to in the sustainability conversation, is this desire we have as humans for new things. It doesn’t have to be the untouched box-fresh pair of trainers that’s wrapped in plastic, but having a different jacket to put on one winter, or fresh things to wear when you go on holiday in the summer. That also translates to every aspect of our lives, doesn’t it? We like to decorate our homes, we like to feather our nests, but it’s the way in which we do it that that has to change. We’ve got all the sustainable answers in terms of innovations of fabric and materials. There’s the first fabric recycling plan that’s opened in Sweden, for example. So we are creating and building the solutions. We just need new stories to tell to the public and consumers for them to engage in new ways of enjoying that sustainable newness, and new ways of seeing, enjoying and experiencing it. I think that’s the really exciting role for stylists of now and the future. We must help weave these new stories, and help a whole generation of people transition to being more sustainable and ethical.

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