There’s an unusual book that I wanted to highlight this week: Insights from the Big Picture Narrative of a Sewing Machine Activist, by Miranda Green. This isn’t a review exactly, for reasons that will become clear.
Miranda Green is a miliner, writer and activist based in Australia. A few years ago she got in touch to see if I was able to help with editing a collection of essays, and I said yes. We like hat-makers here in Luton, and I’ve always got time for people with interesting perspectives on sustainability and stories that need to be heard.
The essays covered ethical design and production, based in the author’s own story, and then expanded outwards to look at sustainability and culture more widely. Green’s vision was for a richly illustrated and browsable book, and after a couple of years in production, here it is.
The first section of the book explains a model for ethical artisanal production that Green piloted in India. Called the Lionheart Project, this was conceived as a direct counter to some common problems in the fashion industry. Production is often outsourced overseas, using poorly paid labour in sweatshop conditions, with little concern for quality or fairness. There’s been a concentration of power in international fashion houses, and designers have been disenfranchised as their work is appropriated for mass production. Green’s workshops took a very different approach, hiring Tibetan women and valuing their skills, working together and creating a socially responsible business that brought employment to a marginalised community. Having piloted the workshop model, the book passes on the learning so that others can replicate it.
This hands-on experience serves as a springboard into wider themes within the fashion industry. Some of these problems are fairly well documented, such as the aforementioned sweatshop production, but the book extends this concern for ethical fashion into some areas I hadn’t considered before. What does ethical retail look like, for example? How could you run a fashion outlet that really valued people as individuals, and that serves the real purpose of fashion, which is to express ourselves through what we wear? I hadn’t really considered this before. Neither had I given much thought to what ethical design might be – not in the materials and the production, but the idea itself. This is a blind spot in fashion, Green argues. “Why is it a mortal sin to plagiarise a paragraph from another’s written work, yet we have no robust laws or restraints to inhibit the stealing of another’s design work in the clothing and apparel industries?”
Moving outwards again, the book opens up from the fashion industry to the underlying structures that lie behind its problems – the drive for profit, a disregard for environmental consequences, and a competitive ethic that sees success through dominance. This is a fundamentally male idea, Green argues. The economy needs to “upload the feminine”, and the book profiles some women business leaders and thinkers who demonstrate the kind of right-brain thinking that would set things on a healthier footing.
Insights... is a sprawling collection from an eclectic mind, combining years of experience in design with a concern for justice and a thoughtful interrogation of culture. The book moves from economics to the circular economy, to philosophy and mythology, mental health, feminism, drawing together different ideas and seeing unusual connections. All of this is presented alongside full colour photos showcasing Miranda Green’s hat designs, graphs and diagrams, quotes, profiles of inspiring people, recommended reading and much more besides.
The Earthbound Report 