“Fashion is a big beast and it takes a long time for it to change,” says Emma Wallace, as she welcomed a small group – customers, fashion students, friends – into Kowtow’s Pōneke workroom last month. That is really one of the understatements of the century, reflecting on a global industry that has very slowly acknowledged its harmful environmental and societal impacts.
Impact is a word that comes up a lot with the brand, which has had circularity at its core since it launched in 2006, before these sustainability conversations were mainstream. As part of that, Kowtow recently launched its first impact report, sharing its sustainability journey, achievements, aims and supply chains (it follows the brand’s first sustainability strategy in 2022).
Today managing director Wallace, and her wider Kowtow team including creative director Marilou Dadat, have opened up the doors to their head office to demystify the brand’s own ‘seed to garment’ process while marking the release of the report, with typical clear-eyed pragmatism and hope.
Several local designers and brands have released sustainability strategies and reports; Ruby has what it calls ‘Toolbox for Change’ and Juliette Hogan recently released a progress report. It’s important to note that brands need to be at a certain level to be able to invest the time, resources and money to do this.
Kowtow’s is a hefty report, 60-pages, split into two halves: people and planet. They worked with sustainability professionals Go Well Consulting on the reporting framework, and are open that it hasn’t been externally assured. Wallace – who was recently appointed as a new board member at Mindful Fashion NZ – wants people to ask questions; her email is in the report itself for feedback and questions.
She explains that they chose to do it now because it was a way to record and quantify what they’ve been doing since the brand launched. “We decided to do an impact report because Kowtow had been following these principles and this purpose for 16 years, but we hadn’t really been writing it down much or measuring it,” she explains.
“And we saw a need in the industry to really bring evidence to the table of what you are doing – not just talking about it, because of the massive wave of greenwashing that’s gone through the industry. We felt that an impact report aligned with the GRI standards – a global sustainable framework – would allow us to talk about it in a way that we felt confident.”
The report maps Kowtow’s supply chain, and shares locations of the farms and manufacturers that the brand works with in India. Traditionally the fashion industry has been relatively secretive and competitive when it comes to sharing such information, but increasing consumer calls for authentic transparency have brought the walls down so to speak. Why share so much now?
“It was a tough decision actually,” admits Wallace. “We’ve talked about it in the past, many times. But now it just felt right. Substantiating the claims is really important, and actually talking about it. And also sharing that knowledge that we’ve got with the rest of the industry. Because we don’t want to be the only fashion brand in another 10 years that’s around, we want to bring the industry up with us because it’s an industry that we love.”
Founder Gosia Piatek is in Prague, where she is currently based having taken a step back from the brand, but here in spirit and on screen, with a pre-recorded greeting touching on her original premise when she launched Kowtow solo. I remember Gosia emailing me back then, introducing me to her newish brand with an obvious passion for her mission. I’ve watched as it’s evolved and grown into a fully fledged global business, while staying true to its original premise: the use of Fairtrade organic cotton and an approach to fashion that considered people and planet.
The brand still champions Fairtrade organic cotton, with the process from sketch to stores taking 18 months and encompassing a Pōneke-based team and multiple long-time manufacturers in India. In Wellington Dadat and her team talk through the various stages of the design process, from a textile ‘library’ and development to a digital pattern making programme that reduces the need for paper patterns. The design process is usually split 50/50 – half spent on textile development, and the other on design.
Dadat is passionate about textiles, and organic cotton’s biodegradability and ability to leave little impact beyond regular wear, which comes through when reflecting about what she thinks comes next in the sustainability conversation.
“The next thing is to really focus on materials: where are they from, and once they are out in the world and transformed into product, what’s their end of life? And how can we regenerate that material into something else?” she says.
“I think it can be overwhelming for people to choose the right thing, and we can all feel a bit guilty about the impact of what we buy and purchase. But there is that saying that the most sustainable fashion is the one you already own - we really believe in that. We want to make clothes that last longer, and that means you stop buying new clothing.
If you do need more clothing, choosing natural fibres is an easy way to know that at least they are biodegradable, that’s a good first step.”
The report lists the brand’s three main design goals: designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems – which may sound simple, but are lofty aims with complex ramifications.
Plastic is discussed, a lot – in the report and throughout the open day. The report has a very nerdy section on workroom and office waste, explaining the aim to eliminate plastic waste from its stores and very chic workroom (to the point of using pencils, not pens).
The same goes for the clothing itself: plastic free by the end of this year. It’s a big goal that is probably more difficult than you would expect; the last thing in garments to feature plastic is the elastic in knitwear hems and polyester cotton thread to sew garments together (a pretty essential part). The plan is to purchase 100% cotton thread once current stock is used in full. And there is a much bigger challenge of plastic in their supply chain.
Back at the studio open day, we hear about the repair programme (which they say has repaired 862 garments at no charge, keeping them in circularity rather than ending up as waste), and an upcoming repurposed collection, set to launch in June: the first in a series of capsules transforming surplus materials into reimagined garments (there’s a shirt on the racks made up of fabric from two archival pieces I already own: a stripe dress and graphic maths page print). We get a look at the Kowtow archive (swoon). And we even hear a bit from HR; the brand has trialled and now committed to the 9-day fortnight.
There are other achievements that the brand is proud of, like creating a new head of supply chain sustainability role. There are others that speak directly to the brand’s ethos: they say they can confirm that no Kowtow fabric is sent to landfill through manufacturing and stock control, have diverted an estimated 620kg of clothing waste from landfill through a customer Take-Back programme, and that clothing is produced without chlorine, bleach, toxic heavy metals, formaldehyde or aromatic solvents (through GOTS approved processing). Other highlights that came following the reporting period include receiving B Corp certification, and being accredited as a living wage employer.
The open studio was planned to coincide with the last day of Fashion Revolution Week, which this year also marked a decade since the Rana Plaza clothing factory collapse – a horrific event that sparked wider global conversations around the impact of the clothing industry.
“What changed drastically since Rana Plaza is that it has become more public, and more mainstream — that the fashion industry can have a very negative impact on people and the planet,” says Dadat. “That event sadly made it very obvious that things needed to change. I think this awareness from the fashion industry itself, and the public, has been a big change.”
Wallace believes the big shift has been in the accessibility of information – for both the consumer, and the wider industry in terms of transparency and sharing resources.
“The lessons that have been learned have been evolving in the last few years in particular. The availability of information and transparency that bombards people all day - they see it everywhere they go - it’s making brands more accountable.”
She says that was one of the key reasons they wanted to launch their report: “because we want to stand up there and say ‘this is what we stand for’”.
I mention that I, as a fashion writer and obsessive who has a base understanding and context for these conversations around sustainability, often feel overwhelmed by it all. The facts are… bad. It is easy to feel guilty and discouraged by them.
One report said that less than 1% of used clothing is turned back into new clothes and that every second, the equivalent of a rubbish truck load of clothes is burnt or buried in landfill. A 2020 McKinsey report said that the fashion sector was responsible for some 2.1 billion metric tons of greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions in 2018, about 4% of the global total. A 2022 Bloomberg story reported that textiles are the second-largest product group made from petrochemical plastics behind packaging, making up 15% of all petrochemical products.
What can a general consumer do to take in all this information and ‘be better’ when it comes to fashion?
“A consumer can do one really important thing, and look at the clothes in their wardrobe and go, ‘how can I wear them more often? How can I make them last longer?’ Before you go off and buy the next piece; that’s the simplest thing,” says Wallace.
It feeds into what Dadat describes as the biggest challenge for the industry, in NZ and internationally: waste, and the fast fashion cycle.
“We’re used to this overconsumption, new trends, and always wanting the latest thing to have. I think that’s been feeding a lot of waste,” she says. “As a designer we want to make clothing that lasts for a very long time. That’s our responsibility, when you put something out into the world, it’s not just use and dispose.”
Zoe was hosted in Wellington by Kowtow
