EFWA 2024 Interview with Team Member Jane Milburn, Sustainability Advisor

Can you share a little of your journey that led you to embrace and become a champion for sustainability?

Looking back, I realise I’ve been a slow fashion practitioner all my life. Growing up on a sheep farm sparked my love of natural fibres and making skills were learned by osmosis from family members. While studying agricultural science at university, I wore handmade/thrifted clothes and some of my favourites were dresses gifted from my Great Aunt Winnie which I took up and in to suit my shape.

My career was in rural journalism and communications where I worked on various advocacy campaigns with farm groups and then had the opportunity to study rural leadership.  In 2011, I noticed fashion excess and the overwhelming shift to synthetic fibres and the following year (as our third child finished school) I resolved to bring all my skills and experience together into purposeful values-based work raising awareness about these issues. I set up Textile Beat and rediscovered the op shops as a material source. This sparked my Sew it Again project (sewitagain.com) when I upcycled and blogged for 365 days in 2014 on a mission to share creative and sustainable ways of dressing that don’t involve buying new clothes.

My activation in this space coincided with the global Fashion Revolution movement that honours the thousands of workers killed, injured and orphaned in the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh which opened our eyes to the exploitative realities of fast fashion.  There is more awareness about problems within the fashion industry now and some positive changes but the volume of garments being produced globally continues to grow exponentially therefore it seems little has changed and greenwashing continues unabated.

Your work focuses on several aspects of sustainability. Could you share a little bit about all the different things you are doing?

Sustainability is really just common sense. For our survival, we need to eat and dress every day and making sustainable choices is a no-brainer in my mind. Contemporary consumption culture is unsustainable. We (humans) are part of nature so we can’t waste, pollute and overuse natural resources if we want to keep living.

My work is about behaviour change and citizens placing sustainability at the heart of their everyday practices. Most of my engagements are with local councils, community and sustainability groups where I talk about influences on the way we dress and strategies to extend the useful life of existing clothes. When we think about sustainability we need to apply it across life; and when we think about it too much we realise that there is almost nothing about the way we live that is truly sustainable.

During the COVID slowdown, I was fortunate to complete a permaculture design course which is about living simply based on the ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. Permaculture was developed 50 years ago by Australians in response to industrial agriculture and now its principles are being applied to industrial fashion. Fashion needs a profound rethink. The Earth Logic: fashion action research plan talks about new learning grounded in the ethics of permaculture. We need to become actively engaged with our clothes and be more connected to natural systems. If we look to the natural world as our guide, it is a regenerative circular system that produces no waste.

You published a book in 2017 called Slow Clothing: Finding meaning in what we wear. What inspired you to write this book, and what can readers expect to find within its pages?

Slow Clothing is a philosophy. It is a way of thinking about, choosing, wearing and caring for clothes so they bring value meaning and joy to every day. My book presents the case for why we need to change the way we dress, to live more lightly on Earth through the everyday practice of how we wear and care for our clothes. It is about becoming independent of fashion cycles and dressing to reflect our own style and spirit. The book was a compilation of my personal research and advocacy and I was honoured to have support from people such as ABC War on Waste presenter Craig Reucassel launching it in Sydney and Gardening Australia’s Costa Georgiadis in Melbourne. You see our clothes do for us on the outside what food does inside. They protect and warm our bodies, and influence the way we feel and present to the world. Our choices matter. In an era dominated by passive consumption of cheap and synthetic fashion, we need to: think more; choose natural, locally-made clothes when possible; have fewer clothes of better quality; care for what we have; embrace preloved clothes; and if we so desire we can learn to make, upcycle and compost clothes so textiles can be endlessly useful.

As a result of the hundreds of workshops/talks/media interviews I’ve undertaken during the past decade, I won a Churchill Fellowship and travelled the world for two months investigating how being more hands-on with our clothes (mending/upcycling) can help reduce textile waste and enhance wellbeing. It was wonderful to meet many like-minded citizens tackling these issues in a variety of ways. My report is about regenerating our agency in the wardrobe and interviews with the 55 people I met are available through my Textile Beat website and Jane Milburn youtube channel.

How did you connect with EFWA founder Zuhal, and what about this event aligned with your work?

I had been speaking out about the unsustainability of fast-fashion culture for some time when Zuhal got in touch and invited me to be involved in Eco Fashion Week Australia. Of course I said yes because it involved natural fibres, creative solutions and sustainable approaches. Up until that point, most fashion events seemed to be about the spectacle of beautiful (aka unrealistic) bodies, exciting (if impractical) styles, colourful (synthetic) fibres without any explanation or discussion about clothing culture, inclusive styling and sustainability issues. Zuhal has pioneered an innovative event with sustainability at its core. I was pleased to be involved in that first event in November 2017 because it also gave me a deadline to complete my book and have early copies available. 

For EFWA 2024 you have stepped into the role o Sustainability Advisor. Can you share a bit about what all you will be doing in that role?

Sustainability needs to become intuitive in everything we do. My main contribution to EFWA 2024 is having carriage of the Upcycling Challenge. This is an opportunity for anyone to apply their creativity and resourcefulness to dormant natural fibres and present them on the runway. We all already own or can easily come across textiles that have seen better days and our upcyclers have the skills, motivation, time or creativity to reinvent them. They choose a vintage natural-fibre as their ‘hero’ and give it new life on the Upcycling Challenge runway and beyond. Applications have closed now and we now have the job of selecting 15 designers to have their creations showcased in the 2024 Upcycling Challenge.   

What do you most hope those attending this event, or following it online, take away - something they can apply to their lifestyles that will promote change?

We can all do something to reduce our material footprint. Seeing the various ways people reimagine and recreate from existing textiles can inspire us to begin to play with garments lying dormant in the back of our wardrobes. Playing is such an under-rated learning tool for grown-ups. It is by playing with different combinations, styles, patterns and textures that we can develop our own independent, individual aesthetic and not feel like we need more new stuff. We can get more mileage out of everything we own and textiles that others throw away. Just as cats have nine lives, so can our clothes!

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