Seamstress Lydia Higginson/Made My Wardrobe and Centre for Sustainable Fashion (UAL)’s Dr Mila Burcikova, are joined by chair Farah Ahmed from Julie’s Bicycle for a discussion about the fashion industry, people making their own clothes and an inclusive and fairer fashion future for all.

About the speakers

Farah Ahmed joined the Julie’s Bicycle team in September 2016. She supports the delivery of events and marketing programme, profiles the work of the artists and organisations in the Julie’s Bicycle network, and produces podcasts The Colour Green and Green Heritage Futures.

Farah is a co-founder and facilitator with Diaspora Dialogues for Our Futures, a reflective space for people of colour to centre collective care in the face of the climate crisis. She is an alumni of the peer-led accelerator programme Enrol Yourself, where she developed a self-portraiture project exploring climate grief, mental health and activism. She is also an Arts Emergency mentor.

Dr Mila Burcikova works across a range of research and knowledge exchange projects, with a focus on micro and small fashion businesses that offer alternatives to the current fashion system. Her current work at Centre for Sustainable Fashion includes the Condé Nast Sustainable Fashion Glossary and the AHRC funded project Rethinking Fashion Design Entrepreneurship: Fostering Sustainable Practices.

Mila’s research interrogates the options for balancing the immediate, mid-term and long-term strategies for fashion and sustainability. Drawing on her background in cultural studies and cultural anthropology, her research interests encompass the human dimension of fashion. Mila’s PhD ‘Mundane Fashion: Women, Clothes and Emotional Durability’ investigated emotional durability of clothing through the lens of a designer-maker practice. She uses the metaphor of ‘mundane fashion’ for developing a holistic understanding of fashion’s deeply personal, cultural, social, and environmental implications. Her research offers rich empirical evidence on how the long-term future of clothing is often shaped by short-term, mundane concerns.

Lydia Higginson decided to start making her entire wardrobe from scratch on 1st January 2016 . By the end of that year she had made over 60 garments and given away all the clothes that she had ever bought from shops. Since the 1st January 2017 she has only worn clothes she has made.

As the project built momentum she had lots of women get in touch to say they would love to learn how to make their own clothes, so she started teaching workshops all over the UK. Then she had lots of people get in touch from overseas who said they wanted to sew the designs she taught in her workshops, so she decided to collate all the knowledge she had gained from teaching in person and put it into one envelope which can either be downloaded or posted! She hopes this will allow women all over the world to make the clothes they dream of wearing. She has a dream that one day it will be as normal to make your own clothes as it is to make your own dinner.

How to take part

Book your free ticket and we’ll send you details about how to access this event closer to the time.

Access details

This online event will be live captioned. Please let us know if you have any other access requirements: info@seasonforchange.org.uk

Part of Season for Ex-Change

A three week programme of sector-facing events and workshops, 26 October–14 November 2020.
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