At Textile Exchange’s Annual Conference, Words Carry Weight
Sébastien Kopp, co-founder and creative director of sustainable sneaker brand Veja, does not like the term “degrowth,” or ”décroissance” in his native French.
Part concept, part movement, the buzzword has become both a rebuke of the capitalist impulse to pursue economic gains no matter what the cost—in other words, growth for growth’s sake—and a plea to scale back ecologically damaging resource extraction to whittle down carbon emissions.
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“It’s not human,” he said at Textile Exchange’s annual conference at the O2 hotel in London last week. “You want to grow, you want to learn, you want to meet people.”
Instead, Kopp said, the fashion industry should look at a different kind of growth, and being content once you “hit a certain level and don’t need it.”
“We don’t do any advertising. We don’t do any partnerships with celebrities. We took this money and put it in the supply chain,” he said. “We don’t do discounts. We don’t do Black Friday. Veja should maybe be 10 times bigger but we don’t want [that]. We don’t care about growing because we’re not on the stock exchange; we don’t have investors. Tomorrow, Veja works less, no problem.”
Do words matter? Participants at the weeklong symposium, the sustainability trade group’s largest yet with more than 1,300 in-person attendees and 400 virtual ones, certainly thought so.
“We’re not looking for customers, we’re looking for partners,” said Orlando Rivera, CEO of Bergman Rivera, a Swedish-Peruvian producer of organic cotton fibers, yarns and textiles.
Bergman Rivera doesn’t traffic in “spot cotton” anymore, Rivera said, referring to the practice of exchanging cotton for cash. Rather, the company engages with a handful of strategic partners, including Veja, to jointly develop and execute long-term, transformative plans.
“We’ll sell you the journey, not the product,” he said. “We’ll find an area that is conventional or that has been overexploited and you will be able to see how we change not only the land and the soil, but we change people’s lives during the five years that you work with us. We’ll start giving you transitional cotton, giving you organic cotton and, at the end, regenerative cotton.”
At a breakout session about standards that was held under the Chatham House Rule, meaning that neither the identity nor the affiliation of any speaker may be revealed, an audience member suggested a need to “change the language” being used by farmer-targeting schemes.
“I think that there is no place for the brands or the nonprofits or the certifiers to ‘train’ the farmers,” the person said. “In my community, the only true mechanism for change that I’ve seen is peer-to-peer learning…and I think that we will produce the reverse outcome of our intentions if we use the language, ‘We shall train the farmers,’ and, instead, I think it’s about ‘providing the resources’ for experimentation, for peer-to-peer learning. Farmers are always looking across the fence line and I promise you, if they see their neighbor come home with a new tractor, they start asking questions.”
Another common phrase that might need a rethink, said Claire Bergkamp, CEO of Textile Exchange, is “supply chain.” Speaking on the first day of the conference, the former Stella McCartney executive referred to a supply “system,” one that connects different parts of the industry, not just “brand to brand or farm to farm.”
“I really want us to enter this week thinking about how we change this system together,” Bergkamp said. “Because ultimately, our goal really is to make this change happen at scale. And it’s about listening, it’s about connecting, it’s about learning. And it’s about going beyond your comfort bubble.”
Jon Alexander, co-founder of the New Citizenship Project, a strategy and innovation consultancy, immediately glommed onto her words.
“I like the way Claire talked about the supply system rather than a supply chain, which is the conventional language and which positions organizations as consumers of other organizations in a kind of chain,” he said. “It’s really a bit of language that can become a sort of a shorthand that opens up a different way of relating to one another in every aspect of our work.”
Alexander isn’t a fan of the word “consumer,” either, preferring in its stead the alternative of “citizen,” one who might occasionally consume but is, critically, a “participant in meaningful change.” He said that people are “trapped” in the “consumer story” and that the story itself is “fundamentally broken.” It’s not the noun that’s the problem, he added, but the verb.
“That is a story that tells us that humans are by nature self-interested, and that the right thing to do is to consume for individual self-interest because that will add up to the collective interest, and that will lead to the best outcome for society as a whole,” Alexander said. “But you can’t solve an ecological crisis from within a story that says we’re separate from nature. You can’t solve an equality crisis from a story that says that life is a competition. And you can’t solve a loneliness crisis, which we also have, from a story that says we’re isolated, independent individuals.”
All of which is to say, the industry needs to be more intentional about the type of vision—inclusionary rather than exclusionary, generative rather than extractive, engaging rather than transacting—that the words it uses communicate, Bergkamp said at the closing plenary. From her podium, her eyes scanned a crowd of brands, retailers, innovators, manufacturers and farmers, most of them familiar faces.
“You are not our audience,” she said. “You are our community.”
