Already and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday, the seventeenth of May.
I'm Zara, I'm Billy.
You may have seen that it is currently Fashion Week. I know that I have not seen any other content this week and it's definitely an exciting time for Australia's fashion industry, showcasing the talents of some of the country's best homegrown designers. Now, we're not here to take away from that excitement, but we're hoping to add to that
conversation by talking about sustainability. How do we reconcile the need for businesses to make money by new trends coming through with the need for a more sustainable fashion industry. Today on the podcast, Billy is going to speak to sustainable fashion educator Nina Gabort to answer all of our questions before we get to that deep divert Billy, what's making headlines.
The unemployment rate, which is the percentage of people who were looking for work but couldn't find any, rose from three point nine to four point one percent in April, according to seasonally adjusted Australian Bureau of statistics data. Seasonal adjustment means the ABS has removed the effects of calendar specific patterns like fruit picking in summer or Christmas casuals in retail in December.
The Federal Police have launched an investigation after an Australian e script provider was attacked in a large scale ransomware data breach. Medi Secures said patient personal and health information was leaked during the incident. The electronic prescription provider suggested the cyber attack originated from one of its third party vendors. The National Cybersecurity Coordinator is coordinating their response with the federal, state and territory government agencies.
Twenty one crew member remained stranded on a cargo ship in the US more than six weeks after their vessel collided with a Baltimore bridge, causing it to collapse. I'm sure many of you remember that footage. Six construction workers were killed when the bridge collapsed in March. A power outage was blamed for the incident. A group of Indian and Sri Lankan crew members haven't been able to leave the ship since due to visa restrictions and ongoing investigations.
A preliminary report from the US Transport Safety Body found the ship experienced multiple electrical faults in the days before the collision.
And today's good news, Australia has been announced as the host nation of the twenty twenty six Women's Asian Cup. While Australia was the only country to submit a bid to host the tournament, you know what you have to be in it to win it, the head of the Asian Football Confederations said. The Asian Football family joins me in reinforcing our confidence in football Australia to elevate the ever evolving stature and growth of women's football in Asia.
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Nita Goodball, thank you so much for joining the Daily Ods.
Thank you so much for having me. This is incredibly exciting.
So it is currently Fashion Week and you were there last night.
How was that.
Oh my gosh, it was amazing. It was just so amazing to see all the different styles and expressions of individuality and creativity and of course trends, and the vibe was just electric. So I enjoyed it.
That sounds incredible.
It's such an amazing moment for the fashion industry, and I'm interested in how we talk about sustainability in that conversation. You know, we're seeing lots of these new trends that people will obviously be influenced to go by. How do we line that up with a sustainable future fashion industry when these new trends are constantly emerging.
So I coined this phrase called the fashion trendmill, which kind of explains about how, for I'd probably say about a century or so, we've been influenced by fashion trends where we're told what to where, when and for how long. And then as time went on, the trends got shorter, shorter, shorter.
We had fast fashion, now we have ultra fast fashion, and pretty soon we're gonna have supersonic fast fashion, right because the trends just keep getting shorter, and with micro trends on TikTok and so on, and it's just pushing us to buy bye bye spence, spend spend to the point where we're not even using a lot of our stuff, right, and there's so much waste attributed to that. Right. And in terms of fashion brands, particularly in Austria, we know
that they're businesses. They have to profit understandably, and we want to support them. However, you know, there are different models that we can create where it's not just fashion trend by use for a short period and throwaway. We can recycle or reuse a lot of the stuff that's already existing. We can use materials that are already in existence. And instead of having short lived trends, let's just make it like there's no trends, because trends don't fully express who we are in the moment.
It's so interesting.
When I was preparing for this interview, I was thinking maybe I should ask is there ever a world in which trends don't exist? And then I thought, maybe that's too ambitious. But it sounds like you don't think it's too ambitious.
It is ambitious. I'm not going to lie, but it's not impossible, right. I always give what I call the great example of like when we had the pandemic back twenty twenty. Look how quickly the world changed, like almost overnight, you know, and it created new systems, new careers, and new ways of existing. So we don't have to wait until there's like some kind of climate catastrophe or something happens in the world before we change behaviors that we know are not good for our culture, that are not
good for our systems. So in terms of trends, I know that it's not just fashion, it's everything electronics and automobiles and stuff like that. But if we want to be sustainable, we're going to just going to have to find alternative ways of enjoying new designs and new things, but in healthier ways, and trends, unfortunately as we have them today, don't serve that purpose.
And you talked before about the fact that you think that there are a few models that the fashion brands could go down in order to improve their sustainability.
Can you explain more.
About that, because, like you said, obviously these brands are businesses and they need to turn a profit. So what are the kind of solutions that they can take that still align with their need as a business.
Okay, so some businesses they produce with good quality. So for example, you know what fast fashion, it has something called planned obsolescence where you wash it a few times and it fades or it's just not you know, or you wear it once and equality is not there anymore after that. So that's called planned ops.
And when you say planned do you mean.
It's designed to fail so that you keep buying and buying and buying, right, which is why it's often made with cheap fabrics. So we want to encourage people to buy less fast fashion, but also encourage brands to produce durable clothing, right, good quality clothing that lasts a long periods of time. So there's that. But then with fashion, particularly if you make good quality products, as people are
buying them, you can say, oh, this has a resale value. Right, So as you're buying I don't know, the three hundred dollars dress, if you know that there's a market for secondhand of that brand because it has such a good reputation for making quality clothing, you'll feel good about buying it because you know that after you use it, you can sell it and get a portion of that money back, and somebody else will get it and love it and use it and also pass it on right. So that's
one model that brands could be more sustainable. But it's really critical that this is particular for big brands to manufacture less because at the moment they're manufacturing too many clothes and that's the problem with sustainability.
In the last decade, as we have become more aware of the impacts of the fashion industry on global warming, have we seen a shift in consumer behavior?
I wish I could say yes. I've been in this sustainable fashion industry since I was like fifteen years old, and to be honest with you, unfortunately not. In Australia, we're the second biggest consumer of fashion and textiles in the world after the US, So if you just wrap your head around that for a second, and globally we're manufacturing between one hundred to one hundred and fifty billion garments a year. That's billion with a bee, and that's in the whole world, and we're on a planet of
eight billion people. So it's not surprising that, you know, I think it's about eighty four eighty seven percent of it ends up in landfill every year because we can't use the amount clothes that we're manufacturing, So the problem is actually getting worse despite of the fact that we are a lot of us are beginning to use more secondhand, but we're still buying the ultra fast fashions, the Shean's and the Tamus you know, at the same time. So
unfortunately it's actually getting worse. So we need legislation to nip it in the bud.
I think I was going to say, when I think about the fashion industry over the past decade, I think about the rise of Shane, which just rips off these I mean, even these trends that we're seeing on the runway this week. Unfortunately, I'm sure that we'll see a lot of them ripped off by the cheap of fast fashion brands.
Unfortunately, Yes, Shean is expert, a master at ripping off particularly small and medium sized brands, creative brands, you know. So I think we should be super hyper vigilant about protecting our makers, our designers, the Australian fashion industry as a whole.
And I think the other thing to talk about in this conversation is the cost of living crisis, because I think a lot of younger people know what the right decision is and they want to make that, you know, green a choice, but they can't afford to what is the solution between that disconnect?
She and TIMU are not the answer to that. You know. The first thing people want to do is go op shopping, and then a response to that is like, oh, op shops are so expensive now, blah blah blah, And that's true,
they are. However, there's an alternative. So I've been running clothes swaps for like thirteen years, right Basically, everyone brings a specified number of items, let's say five to ten items, your best quality items, not the stuff that's like horrible fast fashion, and get rid of good stuff that you
just no longer need or use. And everyone brings those items and you just have like a haul or a shop or it could be run throughout the day or several days where people come in and out and you just take what you need to posit what you don't need, and you can have a standard or quality of what people can and can't bring or run a close walk. You get free clothes, you give out stuff you don't need. It doesn't cost anything, and that's what I encourage people
to do. You know, in addition to things like op shopping, you know, buying secondhand online and so.
On, if people did want to buy new clothes, do you think it is realistic for a large majority of consumers to completely shift their perspective on buying something a bit more expensive that will last longer over the cheap thing that, like you said, is designed to fail.
Yeah, so I think, yeah, if you can afford it, definitely go for something that will last longer. Also, something for people to bear in mind is that when you buy that cheap thing, know that somebody somewhere, any other you know, probably in a different country, is paying potentially with their lives, with their blood, with slavery. So that's something to bear in mind when you're paying probably two
dollars for that top, but somebody's paid for it. You know, what that top is worth is probably like thirty dollars considering the labor and the material, even fifty. And if you're paying two or five dollars, know that somebody else is paying the balance, even though not financially. Then you look at the environmental factor. You know a lot of it is made of plastics, and plastics are bad for our health. You the person that wears it, and you know we have the issue of microplastics pullw in the
oceans and the soil. So there's a lot of factors to consider in buying something that's cheap, so you are better off. You can buy something that's well made, made with good materials and made to last, that's durable, that's going to last too longer. And it's hard because I mean, throughout our lives, like we've been told, you know, the next season's trends are. And I'm sure if you grew up since you were a toddler hearing that on the
news or from stylists or designers. We've been dictated to like how we should dress, how we should look, how long we should wear it for. And you know you have the fashion police that Lord help you if you are not on trend this season. Oh my gosh. You know you're there for crucifixion. So you know, we've been police. We don't realize that we've been coerced into living thinking that this is how we have to consume clothing, and this is our relationship with clothing, which is it's not the truth.
I'm currently going through the process of selling all of the clothes that I have stupidly bought for you know one or two occasions, and I'm selling them all and I'm never doing it again because it is literal just waste.
It is waste and unfortunate. In Australia, over two hundred thousand tons of clothing goes to landfill every year. That's how much we're wasting. So the average person buys about I think it's fifty six items per year, which is almost fifteen kilos, and yeah, a lot of that goes to waste.
My last question, going back to fashion Week, in an idea world, what does a sustainable fashion weake look like.
I think you don't have more secondhand stylists shows demonstrating how you can use secondhand clothing or upcycled clothing or repair stations. Right, so it's not just about how you look in the moment and get rid of it, but you know, making it cool to repair your own clothes when they're damaged, making it cool to swap your own clothes.
So you'd have like a swap station, a repair station or runway, and you could have a runway where you'd have like secondhand clothes from you know, it could be from an op shop or a consignment store or whatever. Who have styled it in really cool ways. Just should show people what you can do with like styles from I don't know, like the early nineteen hundreds, mix it up with modern trends.
That would be so cool.
Yeah, just to show people how creative you can be. There's literally enough clothes on the planet to last the next six generations of humans. Wow, so your great great, great great great great great brand kids, we'll have enough clothes if we start producing right now. So using the stuff that's already in existence in core, fun and creative ways, I think that would make a phenomenal sustainable fashion week, in addition to the brands who are manufacturing you as well.
N Nikolele, thank you so much for joining the Daily Ohs.
Thank you for having me.
I love when our Friday episodes are a little bit lighter but also managed to teach us something and that episode was no exception. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Daily OS. It's been another big week in the news. If you have learned something this week, or if you liked what you listened to, it would help us a lot. If you could click follow on either Spotify or Apple wherever you are listening, We'll be back again on Monday, but until then, have a fabulous weekend.
My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Dunda Bungelung cargotten woman from Gadigo Country.
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