ELLE South Africa – Style With A Cause
September 27, 2017
Fashion’s focusing on what’s important
Fashion’s focusing on what’s important
Ethiopia’s tannery has improved its technical footwear development capabilities while giving access to local artisans and their regional techniques
“El objetivo de este programa insignia del Centro de Comercio Internacional (ITC) es facilitar a los pequeños productores de países en vías de desarrollo la posibilidad de colaborar con marcas reconocidas de la industria de la moda. Esta unión crea empleo digno y justo en Etiopía”, dicen desde Camper. Además, los zapatos están teñidos manualmente por lo que su impacto ecológico es menor.
Camper colabora una segunda vez con Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI), lanzando una edición limitada producida completamente en Etiopía. Se trata de una colección que fusiona la estética africana con elementos urbanos para crear el estilo perfecto para el verano.
On a weekday morning, the foyer of the plush Sheraton on the Park hotel in Sydney is filled with businessmen heading to morning meetings and corporate women hunched over laptops. As the jet-setting head of the Ethical Fashion Initiative, a subsidiary of the United Nations for which he travels eight months a year, Simone Cipriani is no stranger to hotel foyers.
What has been the highlight of your career so far?
Working with the United Nations’ Ethical Fashion Initiative in Africa is definitely top of my highlights list. We work with the EFI’s artisans to create accessories using their local and traditional techniques such as beading, embroidery, screen-printing and metal work. After each collection we receive an impact report explaining how the Karen Walker order impacted on the community and the individual. It’s extremely rewarding and humbling to see. Going to Kenya to meet with the initiative and artisans we work with is also a life highlight!
“Not Charity, Just Work.”
That’s the Ethical Fashion Initiative’s motto, and it reflects how they help communities grow through fashion: by providing them the tools for a continuous empowerment. The EFI (a flagship program of the World Trade Organization and the United Nations) connects artisans from around the developing world to the international value chain of fashion, consequently transforming fashion into a vehicle for development.
Moderated by Italy native Simone Cipriani, founder of the Ethical Fashion Initiative, six leaders at the forefront of sustainable fashion across the world gave individual presentations of how they’re making a difference in the industry, whether through clothing design, journalism, or software.
Some young emerging talents that are breaking into the international market through the support of groups such as the Ethical Fashion Initiative
Inside the central market building of Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, with its tiered terraces and concentric staircases, the vendors are arranged in arrondissements: meat and fish at the centre, moving outwards to cooking pots, wooden carvings and musical instruments. At the edge, textile merchants display wax-printed cloths in a cacophony of colours.
STELLA McCARTNEY launches 2018 spring and summer men’s swimwear collection
Another year, another opportunity to begin afresh. But what does 2017 hold for the fashion industry? We asked more than 40 eco-fashion movers and shakers, including an overseer of a multi-brand conglomerate, Greenpeace campaigner, a founding dean, a fashion compliance attorney, a vegan footwear designer, a “slow fashion” boutique owner, and a few of our media comrades in arms to play soothsayer and offer predictions for the year ahead.
Working with the Ethical Fashion Initiative of the International Trade Centre, a United Nations agency, the designer started working with African fabrics handwoven by women in landlocked Burkina Faso and Mali
Le haut de gamme se développe aussi, notamment sous l’impulsion d’Ethical Fashion Initiative
Programma che mette in contatto piccoli artigiani emarginati dell’Africa subsahariana e di Haiti con l’industria internazionale della moda.
This partnership creates fair and dignified employment in Ethiopia while minimising impact on the environment.