Placecast Episode 25: Rebuilding Local Economies Through Textiles and Procurement

It's very pertinent given the rising heatwave issues that we're facing.

I've just been in France and in Paris.

I was, quite frankly, really shocked by the levels of refugees who are living in absolute squalor right in the middle of the city.

I've never seen anything like it.

And, you know, this was in July and it was as hot as when I was a child, southern Turkey was in August.

So there's going to be massive issues around climate migration and that is going to impact on a domestic level.

And then if we keep exploiting, it's a different subject from what we covered.

But in fashion landscape, there's an EU policy called extended producer responsibility, which is focusing on waste reduction, which is an important part of the solution.

But currently what's happening with our textiles waste is it's going to the global south.

So it's all part of a cycle of what we call waste colonialism.

And that's relevant to domestic and international being a bit more aligned than they currently are with the cuts that happened and the loss of reach within the Foreign Development Office.

I think that's a really important part of what you're saying.

I think it's fascinating as well that...

The sort of anthropology of intimate things.

So again, making consumption choices, what you wear, how you construct yourself using clothes.

I've just been listening to Fashion Neurosis.

I absolutely love that podcast.

It's just so clear how your aesthetic decisions and your decisions about fashion She always just starts by, she says, and what are you wearing? Why did you choose those clothes? And within a minute, people are in the worst that's ever happened to them and their kind of real hopes and dreams.

It is quite amazing how that material culture, quite literally, is a different jumping off point, I think, for all of the relationships that we're talking about, global, with supply chains, with resource.

And younger people certainly understand so activist around fast fashion, around wanting to know where their clothes were made, things like that.

So I feel really hopeful when you talk to some younger people about kind of not being kind of blind consumers for kind of the ways that clothes are put in front of them.

I agree.

And I think the issues we see domestically when it comes to cost of living and challenges with people being unhoused, etc., As soon as those issues start to become more prominent, I think it very quickly leads people to call for investment to be pulled back home, away from the international sphere.

And I think there's sometimes a struggle to understand that those two things are intrinsically linked.

And every person wakes up every day and every person gets dressed.