 the end result of fast production is that cheaper, inferior garments that you don't want to wear for a long time. And we've all kind of become conditioned to think, oh, well, there's a hole in that t-shirt. Well, it was only $5. I'll just go and buy another one. Or what's the point in getting this jacket repaired? It's old season. Anyway, I want something else new. And when you're on that kind of cycle of trying to satiate something, we're not even sure what it is with a dopamine hit from buying a new t-shirt or a new jacket, which is all kind of fed into by social media and the internet. It starts to become a really kind of toxic and endless cycle machine that's very hard to get off of. Welcome to Inside Ideas with me, Mark Buckley. We will be speaking to regenerative futurists, game changers on systemic change out desirable futures with those who want to see us on the right side of history. Brought to you by 1.5 Media, Innovators Magazine, and sponsored by the Aloha's Regenerative Foundation. Lucien Tonkty is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas. Brought to you by 1.5 Media, Innovators Magazine. The wonderful team at Island Press and the Aloha's Regenerative Foundation. Lucien is a journalist, author, and regenerative fashion consultant. She is the fashion editor of the Saturday paper, a regular contributor to The Guardian, where she writes the weekly series Closet Clinic. Her writing also appears in Australian Bogue. Her first book, Sundressed, I have a copy right here, Natural Fabrics and the Future of Clothes, was released in Australia in July. And will be published by Island Press very soon, if it's not already out. I think we're right on the cusp of a few days. In the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom this year, Lucien has worked in sustainable and luxury fashion in Melbourne, Sydney, London, and Paris. It's so great to have you here. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's nice to be here. It's really good, and I'm glad you could make it. I'm so glad at Island Press that the wonderful team has connected us, put us together so that we could have this discussion. It's a passion of mine as well, as I would imagine it is, is yours. I want to start out first, and you discuss this in the book, kind of right in the beginning, you talk about the pandemic and how kind of the lockdown. Did that really help you to write this book? But also did it kind of nudge you to make sure it was birthed to the world? Yeah, I mean, really, the book came out of the opportunity to slow down the pandemic presented, because I was living in Paris, and when COVID kicked off, my mom's a doctor, and she was like, I think you should come home and just see what happens. So when I got back to Australia, my business was in Paris, and so I wasn't working, and I had a real moment to kind of reflect and pause and do more research around sustainability and fashion. And think about kind of what a truly sustainable industry looks like. And so if I hadn't had that kind of slow down time, because Australia had some pretty intense lockdowns, yeah, I might never have had the opportunity to write some dress. And also it was helped, because I was locked away for 12 months, kind of just focusing on this piece of work, which might have been harder to do if I knew everybody else was around having a good time. But everyone was, we all were going through the same thing. And also I think that kind of seismic change that the world went through certainly gave me reason, and I think a lot of people reason to pause and reflect on the way we were living and look for those kind of really big solutions to the climate crisis and kind of a different way of approaching modern life. So I know you've spoken about regenerative fashion previously, but kind of in ties to the lockdown, the pandemic, the kind of the pause and the things that you just described. Do you think not only that, but the kind of the bubbling of the trend of the discussions that we've heard for probably decades in the fashion industry, not only about fast fashion and kind of where the future is going, that that was expedited, pushed forward or kind of came under a bigger microscope during that time of pause. And kind of we also saw a lot of logistical problems globally that were kind of a ripple effect tied to not just sustainability, but also and climate change, but also the pandemic and how we were in this mass lockdown. Yeah, definitely. So the fashion industry for a long time, as you said, had been talking about needing to slow down and needing to change. It's an industry based around speed, the speed of trend cycles, the speed of production. And we were doing four fashion weeks a year, which seems crazy. And now they're embracing, and as COVID kicked off, suddenly there was this outpouring from the fashion industry saying that it was unsustainable. It was too fast. We were producing too many collections, traveling too much and all these things. So there was a real moment of reckoning that happened, especially because suddenly it was clear how disparate the industry supply chain was, how many different countries the government would kind of touch before it was finally produced. And the COVID really showed us that Australia certainly wasn't self-reliant when it came to fashion. Neither was the US. And that gave us real pause to think about what we were actually doing, how disconnected we are from the origins of the garment. We grow 90% of the world's finer power wool in Australia, but we can't mill it ourselves. We grow cotton in Australia, but we can't process it ourselves. And because over the course of decades, we had slowly outsourced all of our production, manufacturing, garments, everything to other parts of the world. And we were extremely reliant on the ability to spend everything everywhere whenever we wanted to. And that's not a sustainable way to live. It's not a sustainable way to run a business. I don't even think it's a smart way to run a business, to be totally honest with you. So COVID really was, as much it was an enormous challenge and it was really tragic and a hardship, but it also really was a wake-up call. And that's something that I was very grateful for for the fashion industry at the beginning, but now that we're kind of open again and back to normal life, we haven't actually realized that much change, but we've kind of snapped back. But we have started some important conversations. So that's something good at least. Well, I'm very thankful for you for starting those conversations and also addressing them in your book. And I'm definitely on your side and an advocate, so don't feel attacked by any of the questions. And you mentioned that we couldn't process the wool. We couldn't process and that. And then you kind of answered it, because the production had been all outsourced, right? And then you even went deeper and you said, and I don't think that's the right way to do business, if you ask me. And so let's talk about that. I mean, we're going in deep right in the beginning and that's good because how would it not only be right? Is it just a bottom line thing? It's fast, fashion, cheap, fast and good and all over the world. Is that why we've come to this and that's affected this local production, better fashion, longer lasting fashion, more sustainable, better for humanity, better for the environment? Is that kind of a vicious cycle we got into because of cost and fast fashion? Or how did we get there and what are your thoughts around this, specifically for Australia, but then what you're seeing globally and also what you've seen in the research in your book? Yeah, so it wasn't that long ago when we had thriving garment industries in America, in Europe, not quite so decimated, but certainly Australia's garment industry is, it wasn't until kind of the 70s and the 80s that we started to reduce tariffs which were placed onto imported goods so that and they were, they kind of had the effect of protecting the local garment industry, certainly in Australia. And so as free trade kind of took hold all over the world and those tariffs got slashed, it gave companies the opportunity to outsource production to countries in the global south where wages and environmental regulations were much lower. So in Australia, that really devastated the garment industry and I know something similar happened in America as well where all of a sudden we went from having a skilled workforce, we went from having technology and infrastructure and factories and a community of people who could, you know, could make anything and make it at an extremely high quality, lost their jobs. And it was costs that drove those decision-making for designers and because if one person does it, then all of a sudden everybody's trying to compete on cost. But what's interesting is that there's this very established designer in Australia called Lee Matthews and she's been around for 25 years and she told me that the decision she made to outsource production when she moved it all to China, well, you know, in other parts of, you know, Vietnam and Bangladesh and places like that, she actually don't know if she makes it in those places but I know it's not all in China but she basically said she started producing way more product and which meant that she needed to have, you know, more staff on the website, more shops, more, you know, distributors and all of this stuff. So it immensely increased the workload but that it actually didn't make the business more profitable. So they might have been making more money overall but what she was actually taking home out of that wasn't significantly increased. So that's kind of, she's a high-end designer. So what happened over those kind of first years in the 90s was, you know, all of a sudden everybody could access clothes much cheaper. When we get to the 2000s and the final tariffs were removed, that was kind of the onset of the internet in those kind of that first decade of the 2000s and what happened then was we saw kind of global companies like H&M and Zara and Boohoo, you know, figure out how to kind of play the logistics of the supply chain. So rather than just dropping say four collections a year, they could start to turn around product in three to six weeks. And what that meant was they could be delivering new stuff to store over, you know, very, very quickly and so that they could capitalize on the trends. And so when we have the internet and all of a sudden fashion shows that used to be private events kind of can be beamed around the world globally in a matter of seconds and the ability of these massive chains to pick up on what the trends were in Paris and then be able to get it onto the rack in three weeks. That's when you start to see the cycles of the trends really speed up. And this notion of fast fashion as we know it today was kind of invented. And what's happened since then is just an acceleration because we have more technology, we have more social media, you know, we have faster internet, we have faster delivery services, turnaround times, everything. And so now we have arrived at a place where what, which was described as ultra fast fashion where companies like Sheehan are delivering literally tens of thousands of SKUs to store or to their website every week. And what that means is they can see what's popular, what's selling through and then they can turn it around faster again. So it's this complete acceleration and how much we produce and consume. A stat is something like we are consuming 60% more clothes now than we were compared to the year 2000. And by the year 2030, that'll have increased by another 60%. So in real terms for, you know, the average person, that's a lot more garments and it's a lot more garments that are being not just produced but that are also being thrown away because the quality has declined. The end result of fast production is cheaper inferior garments that you don't wanna wear for a long time. And you're kind of, we've all kind of become conditioned to think, oh, well, you know, there's a hole in that T-shirt. Well, it was only $5. I'll just go and buy another one. Or, you know, what's the point in getting this jacket repaired? It's old season anyway, you know, I want something else new. And when you're on that kind of cycle of trying to satiate something, we're not even sure what it is with a dopamine hit from buying a new T-shirt or a new jacket, which is all, you know, kind of fed into by social media and the internet. It starts to become a really kind of toxic and endless cycle, you know, machine that's very hard to get off of. There's two things I wanna go, oh, kind of two paths that I wanna go. They're both connect, they both connect in the end, but they're a little bit different. In the last, I don't know, seven years it's become more and more transparent, especially during the pandemic where they're taking fashion, almost knockoffs, basically, pictures of, you know, Ralph Lauren products or Gucci or whatever they are. And you just order it from this online shop and there's thousands, I mean, hundreds of thousands, literary, and you do it and it's kind of this manufacturer on demand. It's like a cheaper process of production, but it's a lot more rapid, but it's this on-demand type of a clothing, even though you're stilling someone else's pattern or the design or the cut of it. I don't really wanna get into the legalities of that, but I wanna get into, does that make the industry more sustainable? Does it make it less sustainable? Does it make it worse or perpetuate the problem? When we see the rise of that kind of on-demand, when you see it, when you wanna, and then you order it immediately online, you know, a couple of days a week later, it's quickly done up and shipped out from wherever. Yeah, look, it certainly makes the industry less sustainable because we, you know, when we're producing that much stock, that quickly, there's not the time to investigate what's happening all the way down the supply chain. So really when we wanna know if the garment is sustainable, we have to look at the source of the raw material. Hopefully it's a farm and it's not an oil refinery. We wanna know what's going on on the farm. We wanna know, you know, how the cotton balls are being turned into yarn, how the yarn is being woven into fabric, and how the fabric is being turned into a garment, what's happened at every stage, what chemicals were used, how the workers were treated, what kind of energy is being used to power the mill, the factory, et cetera. And you can't do that when you're just churning garments out because you don't even know, most of the time you've got no idea where your raw material will source from because you're ordering off a spreadsheet. So certainly it makes the industry less sustainable in a very material sense, but it also makes the industry less sustainable because if we wanna have a sustainable fashion industry, we have to dramatically reduce the amount of clothes that we make and that we consume. And what that means, what that requires us to do is to we need to be buying less, wearing what we already own more and only investing in pieces that we're gonna be able to keep and wear for a really, really long time. And what that requires is us kind of tapping out of this cycle that's really drawing on some really basic psychological principles to try to get us to feel like we're not enough and that we need something more and that maybe that new dress, that $13 dress is the thing that's gonna help. So, and what I mean when I say basic psychology is probably not that basic, but so you kind of have to think about fashion exists in, so our brains are wired to perceive threats, right? So that's kind of, we're kind of constantly scanning and looking and being like, is there anything here that's gonna hurt me, that's gonna affect me in a negative way? And because fashion exists in a space where it might mean that we are accepted or cool or desired, it occupies a part of our brain that is very susceptible to fear and very susceptible to being played on. So what these companies are doing when they rip off something on the runway in Paris and put it into stores is they're like, they're trying to make you believe that by having the latest thing that looks like the Mark Jacobs thing or is the Mark Jacobs thing that your life will improve. You might walk into the party and you'll meet someone new, your friends will think you'll be more popular and it's these really kind of base level kind of high school emotions that it's tapping into, but we all experience it and we're all susceptible to it. And when we're feeding those fears by buying the new thing and then the new thing isn't satiating them because we play the thinking all the way through of course buying a new dress doesn't change the way my friends treat me. My friends treat me a certain way because they love me. They don't care what dress I'm wearing. We search and we reach for something else again. And so really the challenge of sustainable fashion and the challenge of consuming in a more conscious way is really checking those impulses when they arise, spending the time looking at your wardrobe, thinking about the garments that you do enjoy wearing that you keep for a long time that you want to enjoy and take pride in owning and then try to replicate those purchases and you're probably gonna have to spend a little bit more money if you want the quality to keep them, to wear them over and over again over decades. So we need to kind of reeducate our thinking so that we know we're saving up for those investment pieces and we're slowing down and we're checking ourselves when we get tempted by the new thing like it might have some kind of promise that and really be more considered in the way that we're buying our clothes. Now this is the second line of questioning but you've opened up another pathway that I want to ask you about to see how you know. So with that pause that we all had did online purchases of clothing go up and actually an increase in the market? Because I was kind of understanding worldwide and what you see in general is that people were going back to wearing their pajamas all day and stretch pants and lounge wear because they were at home there wasn't a lot of places to go especially the office and so they were enjoying some of those comforts but did that mean once now that we've emerged and we've come out of this for the greater part that they purchased more or that they got a deeper look at kind of no I can do with less or I just wore the same piece all the time or what kind are the trends or what did we see during that time? So I mean definitely spending was suppressed during the pandemic because people weren't working, people were scared that's what happens. We saw a boost across the board in at leisure wear so leggings, track pants, sweats and jumpers things that are good for the couch but overall obviously spending was down and then once people started to come out of lockdown we saw, we have seen an increase people want to express themselves again they wanna wear lots of color was one of the big trends they called it dopamine dressing and now we're kind of seeing a push towards more kind of slightly more formal clothes than we had before but also we've come out into a cost of living crisis so it's across the board it's tricky for retailers and designers at the moment it's not so straightforward that we're out and we're spending again there's been, it's kind of cyclical so the fashion industry has absolutely kind of come back full force and which is a shame because it's like we didn't learn anything but I think for people in their day to day lives the world really did change and I don't know about where you are in Germany but certainly the people that I'm talking to here everybody feels a little bit different as much as we're excited to be back together again and able to travel again and you know, able to throw parties and have a really good time there is a sense of looking at the world in a slightly different way that isn't so conducive to just kind of embracing consumption yeah, I don't know if that's a very good answer to you no, that's good because obviously it's not only the circles you're in and you write that as about it as well but have researched it in your book as well and so you would be someone very good and wise about the pulse of what's going on during this time and it's important to know the second line of my question is really so in Australia, we'll speak about that specifically but I see the trend worldwide is really, you know, you talked about cotton you talked about wool and are those, one, those are kind of crops tied to some form of agriculture or ties there and which is a big huge strain on the environment and how we do it but then we ship those end goods off around the world for someone else to do the production processing and maybe even manufacturing before either sending it back or then sending it to the next destination as it gets distributed around the world and it's a little bit like a resource curse I kind of want to know specifically how much of those products, is it 100% is it above 90% that are leaving Australia somewhere else because the production of facilities aren't there and are those actually turned into commodity crops in that process, is that cotton is traded like a commodity is that wool traded like a commodity and because that's important to kind of go deeper to pull back the carpet or the rug a little bit the curtains a little bit further to get the full view of what's actually going on what kind of a system we've created especially in Australia. Yeah, so like I can't, the start of the wool we make 90% of the world's a parable here and we're exporting about 85% of it to 90% of it greasy so what that means is it goes offshore before it's even been washed and we've got the capacity, I think I've gotten that wrong I think China buys 85% of our wool clip and then there's another 10% that goes to other places Italy buys 5% so we're exporting upwards of 90% of the wool before it's even being it's called scouring when you clean the wool so we have one small facility in Australia in Adelaide who's capable of doing kind of end to end with the wool but really what they're making is a really tiny portion of it so the wool is an interesting one because it's such a wonderful fiber and it can be farmed in ways that regenerate landscapes not all wool farming is done like that but a lot of it is but China is the biggest market for wool in the world so not only do they buy most of our wool clip and manufacture most of the wool clip onshore there they also have a population that is consuming it at retail because you need two things to sell wool you need a really cold climate and you need an affluent population so Australia is not cold enough here and we don't have enough people to buy as much wool as we're producing so there is an argument for that relationship and the dependency of that relationship with China because we want to thrive in wool industry and it's something that we're very proud of to have as such a large portion of the market however, should we have more capacity for local processing here? Would it be better for the environment? Would it be better for Australia? Yeah, because when the wool goes offshore greasy we're selling it at its lowest value and every other process after that adds value so China has a very thriving industry there because it's not like when they buy a bottle of Australian wine which is just put on the table and sold they are adding value at every step along the way so they're creating jobs and a thriving wool economy off the back of the raw commodity that we're exporting to them from here. Setting up wool processing in Australia is complicated so we don't have the infrastructure anymore you need, obviously you need facilities to scouring and carting and spinning and knitting and I had the CEO of Australian Wool Innovation tell me that it would take 15 to 20 years for us to have the capacity to process just 5% of the wool clip here. I still think that's a worthwhile path to go down and there's a few reasons why local processing is important. The environmental cost of shipping is one of them, obviously but also, and it, I was gonna say sovereignty which it's not unrelated but having the ability and the capacity to be self-reliant as a country is important too, having the ability to feed and clothe yourselves without relying on international imports is important because with climate change and now that we've experienced a global pandemic I don't wanna scare anyone but it's likely that there will be another event where supply chains are shut down all over the world. So it's in our interests, it's in everybody's interests to reinvest in their own local industries and local manufacturing. The other side of that, the argument is and the stats are similar for cotton so we produce about 6% of the world's cotton, we gin it here and then most of it goes offshore. There's very tiny, tiny, tiny portion that can actually all be processed in Australia and there are conversations happening around that as well around changing that as well. So the environmental argument of being able to process your fibres within proximity to where they were grown is basically this kind of extreme reversal of big agriculture and globalization and so the two forces aligning in terms of the industrial revolution and industrial agriculture kind of moved through and this is a very crude analysis and I'm sure some historian would call me up on it but as one took off so did the other. So as the world industrialized and globalized so did agriculture change and it became about producing more and more at scale using chemicals and other artificial things like machinery to really exploit and take as much from the land as possible and so the argument is that when we bring back local production and local manufacturing and we also bring back more local farming of the raw materials because we can see the link and the connection between the two things. We create localized economies so that the cotton farmer in Queensland has a relationship to the cotton mill in Adelaide and that proximity brings about a certain level of stability in terms of our economy but also in terms of our environment because if you're a cotton farmer that's interested in protecting his land you are also gonna be wanna work with a factory who's interested in protecting the environment around them as well. So it's about control over the supply chain and I'm also about bringing these things back under the umbrella so that we can kind of, so that it's sensory in a way because at every point when we are outsourcing we're losing sight of what's happening to the river next to that factory we're losing sight of what's happening on that cotton farm and when we can bring it all back within close proximity to us we have a much better idea of what damage we're actually doing to the environment every time we buy a cotton t-shirt and throw it away because it was only $5. I absolutely love that and I don't disagree with you at all matter of fact you're 100% right the agricultural revolution was definitely a precursor to the industrial revolution paved the way for that entire process and it's also a big part of this you know this discussion as well as and led into all the things we've said when I was younger there was a big a great book called The Jungle but it was also talking about the sewing industry in New York and how child labor and we've all heard the stories around the world where the clothing industry has done horrific things around child labor or also just production standards where the facilities are sweatshops and things like this and it's always kind of taking a backseat to environment and sustainability but those two go hand in hand. If you're paying someone an unfair wage or the processes of how you produce is not local and I don't even want to say control but kind of in your eyesight in your surrounding in a local type of a way so that you can see what's going on and how it's being processed and treated and manufactured and produced it's really easy to kind of distance yourself from the natural capital, the true cost if it's being done fairly if the people who are involved in that process are being treated fairly. So I really like that you see that in our world before and I don't know I didn't read this out anywhere in the book really but Gandhi had two big huge things in his life and one was around salt in the production and getting salt and that's why he did his vast and treks down to produce salt and an easy way to piss off colonialism and show them different but the other one was to make his own clothing to spin his own cotton and to jeanette and to do different things of producing that was a huge process because at that time there was shirts and all sorts of things that were done in the United Kingdom to treat countries and people unfairly and in the process of something that we all need like food and clothing and sustainable and so I really think it's unique how such a vital thing is wool and cotton and I'm sure there's other things in Australia and also all around the world that we could reign in a little bit closer and have a closer eye at but most of us don't get that view behind the curtain or the understanding of how complex these systems are that we've created and how they really function and what our role is in them overall so I think we've started it out great even though we're already pretty deep into it and I think you've given the good setup but why is regenerative agriculture the future of the fashion industry? What do those two have to do with each other? Yeah, okay, no small questions here. So look, okay, so the fashion industry to make clothes, we take a lot of resources out of the ground and we use a lot more resources to turn them into garments and so at the moment the way that happens is over 60% of our clothes are made from polyester which is oil and which is turned into plastic and then melt it down and spun into fabric so when we talk about decarbonizing the world we have to get off polyester like that's just like a very simple equation and then when we talk about natural fibers so when we're talking cotton, linen, silk, wool, cashmere cotton, linen, silk, wool, cashmere and hemp what's happening on those farms where they're grown when we're using the principles of industrial agriculture which is spraying lots of nitrous oxide spraying lots of pesticides, tilling the soil using big machinery to harvest, to rip up the crop at the end of the season we're talking about more exploitation of the land to make these garments so for a long time the fashion industry has talked about sustainability and what that really does is mitigate those harms so you might switch from polyester to recycled polyester or from cotton to organic cotton and that's really about reducing the emissions and reducing the toxic chemicals that are being released along the supply chain and that's all great but what regenerative agriculture offers is the opportunity to actually regenerate and rehabilitate those landscapes where the raw materials of the natural fibers are grown so with polyester, we don't have any opportunity to with polyester or nylon or any other synthetic we don't have the opportunity to drive positive outcomes like we do with the natural fibers and what I mean by positive outcomes in terms of regenerative agriculture we don't have the opportunities to restore soil health to bring back biodiversity to recreate life, to restore life to these landscapes we don't have the opportunity to give farmers a different way of operating their land so really what regenerative agriculture does is it invests in these communities and the landscapes on which they're farming and it restores them to a different kind of time it invests in the power of nature to kind of rehabilitate and literally regenerate and what that means is that we go from having cotton farms where the soil is degraded so it's releasing stores of carbon into the atmosphere it might be desertifying to a landscape where the soil is rich in nutrients healthy soil stores carbon which is also a really wonderful thing we can bring back pollinators like bees and birds to restore ecosystem functionality and to make sure the land is visibly and audibly kind of grooming with life you restore healthy water cycles because healthy soils also store water which makes the landscape more resilient to fires, to floods to all these other kind of extreme weather events and one of the most wonderful things about farming in this way is that it allows farmers to get off the harmful chemicals that they've been using because of industrial agriculture and that's kind of the chemicals are toxic literally in one very literal way they're toxic but they're also, they come at a really high price and it means that farmers for decades have been chasing their tails because they're in debt to chemical companies and the only way to get out of the debt is to buy more chemicals to spray the land to produce more crops in this kind of artificial way and it's killing their soils it's killing the landscapes and so there's kind of once they get into this cycle there's kind of no way off it's spend a lot of money on chemicals put the chemicals on the ground, create the crops all the soils died again we need more chemicals and that's why we're seeing all over the world the mental health of farmers is in serious decline and so regenerative agriculture has this immense power for rehabilitating the earth and also giving these farmers a healthier and much more profitable livelihood which is a really positive, wonderful, beautiful thing and then how this relates to the fashion industry is even more exciting because we talked at the beginning of the podcast about how we need to be wearing our clothes for longer, we need to enjoy them more we need higher quality clothes so guess what? Polyester, because it's made from oil has a very complicated relationship with oil and with sweat which means that if you spill something on polyester or if you sweat in it it will hold onto that odor or that stain and it won't let it go so what does that equal? That equals a really not very durable garment, right? And it also not to mention is really uncomfortable on the skin because it's plastic so it makes you sweat, it doesn't keep you warm it's all of these awful things so we need polyester out of the fashion industry and out of the garments that we wear and we need to be wearing clothes made of natural fibers because they thermoregulate, they are more beautiful they're more durable and they feel so much better against your skin which means that you enjoy wearing them and you want to wear them more and so what we have with regenerative agriculture is this ability to farm these natural fibers in this really positive way and so we can have beautiful clothes that are also giving back and regenerating the environment which is pretty powerful, in my opinion It is extremely powerful and I love how you sum that up and it gives us the deeper insight of what it means because it's a big process but a lot of people don't really look at what's all involved and how the downstream of that are you also seeing, I mean there's definitely in what we're talking about there's an overarching theme of kind of what the solution should be long term for us staring us right in the face but I really want to know are you seeing that regenerative fashion basically those made with wool cotton, hemp and what was the other one? Cotten wool, hemp, silk, wool, yeah, flax, cashmere that after they've been purchased down in the long room so I don't know what they call that in the industry is the last mile or once they're in your hands then the impact on the environment or long term when you go to wash those you're not putting hopefully plastics back into the water system because you're using the wrong detergent or things or because they wear better, they wear longer they don't get the sweat and stink and other things in them that when you go to reuse them or to wear them again after you've showered and that the long term effect on the environment and kind of that it keeps and can be used for decades that that is better than what we're seeing from fast fashion and industrial produced clothes that is done in the wrong way, in a bad way Yeah, absolutely, the microfiber pollution is a really big concern so every time we wash polyester or synthetic garments there's microfiber shedding which is tiny little plastics that infiltrating our waterways they're ending up in soils and the atmosphere really not good in places where we definitely don't want them to be the stats with what's coming out of how many microplastics they're finding at the bottom of the ocean and they've even found them in human blood are really alarming and we don't have good solutions for this at the moment because we need the two avenues that the experts I've spoken to advocate for microfiber filters on washing machines to catch the microfibers before they end up in the waterways which is the most effective way but then they still need to be disposed of so it's not a perfect solution because if they end up in landfill there's still a risk of them ending up in the environment and the flip side is advances in material innovation so that there's less shedding that happens on from each garment so the worst offenders for this kind of thing are poly fleece so the kind of Patagonia zip up jacket so those are the kind of things that really shed a lot of microfibers, microplastics but also they shed from our shoes they shed when we walk they shed so it's not a good solution to just only focus on the washing machine filters these just really aren't things that we should be wearing and my friend Alden Wicker who's another sustainable journalist has just written a book called To Die For and it's about the toxic chemicals in our clothes and I haven't read it yet but she's told me that she discovered some things about the toxicity of polyester and that I think will really revolutionize this space because this is kind of the next frontier for fashion reckoning with the chemicals that are on our clothes that are getting absorbed through our skin but the other thing that's important to know about polyester and synthetics is that when they get blended in with the natural fiber so if you buy something that's like a cotton polyester blend that's much harder to recycle so in the holy grail of the industry is only new garments coming from regeneratively farmed natural fibers and then also other materials coming from recycled fibers from all of the textiles that we already own right now as the technology stand it's much easier to recycle or mono material so it's 100% wool, 100% cotton, 100% viscose whatever it is the moment it's blended you make that equation much more complicated and you risk having an inferior product on the other end because the fibers have to be chemically separated out so that they can each be recycled separately so the prevalence of synthetic fibers in our clothes especially in blends is really problematic and I've spoken to some expert recyclers who are advocating for blended materials to stop now because if we want this holy grail in 10 years, in 20 years we need to stop producing clothes that are gonna make that much harder for us to recycle them at the other end so we really, I'm really looking forward to a future where we've eradicated all polyester from our wardrobes and from, you know because the other thing about it is if we wanna recycle all the polyester that we have now which we do because it's a valuable resource we pull it out of the ground it was down there for 60 million years hundreds of millions of years maybe is we should capture it and recycle it and turn it into things that are easier to capture and recycle on the other end so put it into cars, put it into washing machines put it into fridges, you know like these big things that it's not as difficult as clothing to get that to sort out to figure what's in it to recycle it so yeah, there's some large scale solutions and I'm getting out of my wheelhouse now but yeah, definitely no more polyester Wow, wow, yeah, I agree no more, no more of that it is a complicated industry it's complicated period just as food is which is also my strong suit I was recently in Thailand at a 20,000 square foot bamboo restaurant facility like an experienced restaurant on this lake and 100% made out of bamboo but all the joints, all the tying together of the bamboo they had used elastics from underwear underwear bands and to tie all that together and for every stitch of it which is and if you think about all the joints and how they connected this as into an actual structure, a restaurant structure it was amazing how, you know and that's just one little place in Thailand how complex parts and pieces and blends of the clothing that we wear I mean, I hope a lot of people wear underwear maybe it's not a good thing but I know that in fashion and overall we've got a lot of waste bands and products out there so it's good to kind of take a look at what are we creating? Cause there is no place to there is no way on this planet everything that we throw away that we don't use it remains here so it needs to go back into reuse or be biodegradable to go back in our planet and as you're talking about these other bad fabrics you know, that we span decks and different things, whatever they don't really go right back into they're not biodegradable and so we need to watch out have you answered the question fully of how clothes made from natural fabrics such as cotton wool, flax, cashmere that that is the best way or one of the really good ways to support rural communities and regenerative landscapes or are there some things that you've left out maybe not told us about yet? Yeah, so in terms of supporting rural communities so farmers obviously need to have a product to sell, to have a livelihood so when the other benefit of regenerative agriculture is that it provides more steady income so for example in the book I talked to Hillman Huai who is the vice president of a silk company called Bombix and the way that they farm their silk is regeneratively so silk's a little of a kind of funny process to make so basically what happens is they grow mulberry trees regeneratively in these fields in the hills in Nanchong in China and the farmers harvest the leaves from the mulberry trees to feed the silkworms and the silkworms perform cocoons and then the cocoon is what makes the silk but when I spoke to Hillman he explained that the benefits of farming regeneratively this way for the farmers is multifaceted because previously they would have one crop a season and then they would have to leave their families and one crop a year and go and farm somewhere else and then they were commuting long distances it wasn't so good for their health but when they switch to regenerative agriculture it means that beside the mulberry trees they're growing spinach and other foods that they can use to feed their families and then also to sell so their incomes for the year is steady and consistent because you've got these multiple different streams of ways to earn money and so that allows them to have a much higher quality of life because it's a kind of a simple way of thinking about it but if they're close to home and the weather changes they just pop over across the field and they get their raincoat or their boots or their warm jumpers or whatever it is and also allows to have this better more powerful integration with their family and their community so it's not just financial it's also the way that their lives are set up and it's those two things kind of running together that really allow us to kind of see the positive benefits of regenerative agriculture because I don't really think I explained before but when we talk about reintroducing biodiversity in Regen Ag what we're talking about is we're not planting fields and fields and fields beside each other with just one crop we're not just planting acres and acres of cotton with no trees in sight what you're doing is you're trying to integrate as many different species into that field as possible so you might have sunflowers besides a row of cotton beside a row of chickpeas beside mung beans or whatever it is and that multiple species diversity is what allows the soil health to thrive and function and so you do that kind of example that I used in Nan Chong is true for all of these different farming communities all over the world because it's subsistence they're able to feed their families and they're also able to make money from these different streams of crops plus they don't need to be spending money on the chemical fertilizers and pesticides they've got healthier soils they're not exposed to those dangerous chemicals themselves so their physical health is also improved and it really does transform I don't wanna speak for farmers because I'm not a farmer but it does change the way that most farmers I know who switched to regenerative agriculture it's changed their lives completely yeah so it is this really and not to mention also that your yields improve over time so you're making more money from the landscape than you were with synthetic chemicals and fertilizers because when you're doing your kind of profit equation if you take out this enormous expense and you're producing as much as much of the same product you're making the same amount of money you're making more money rather so but and then in addition to that you can charge a higher premium because generally the quality of the fibers that you're getting from a regenerative landscape are better say for example with a sheep that's been farmed regeneratively that sheep is moving all over the farm so it's the regenerative sheep farming involves this method called holistic grazing which is about not staying on the same paddock it's the opposite of set stocking where you would just put the herd of sheep on a paddock for six months at a time and they would eat the grass all the way down to the ground with regenerative grazing you're moving them every couple of days so they're getting a diverse diet the landscape is rich and flourishing and they're able to kind of eat everything as they're moving around and what that does for their wool is it means that it grows the continuity of the fiber is much smoother and more consistent because you don't have these drops where their nutrition has been affected because they've eaten all the grass or because it's winter and the landscape is barren and so you've had to bring in a different kind of source of food so you're getting improved yields a better profit margin and then also a higher quality fiber which means you can charge more for it again so it is this, it can be a scary thing for farmers who've been farming industrially for a long time to kind of embrace but it absolutely is the positive impacts of it in the long term just speak for themselves Oh, I love that, and you describe it so well you don't have to be a farmer or a regenerative farmer but you explained it very, very well so Alan Savry, I know you work with the Savry Institute and that's where you get the holistic land management and regenerative, you're crazy and he was on the podcast but he also wrote a section in my book he's a wonderful man and a good person and has really made a big improvement in the movement around holistic land management and better practices all around not only for regenerative agriculture but for fashion, for many industries, for many things that just are the way that a world works and it's crazy that we have to describe regeneration, there's regenerative agriculture of course but there's regenerative medicine there's regenerative fashion, there's regenerative economics it's how our world works we need to follow the seasons and allow life and our earth and our everything to regenerate itself, to kind of go through a time where you get some sleep and some rest and eat some food and regenerate yourself and we're not the only ones who function that way everything functions that way and so I love how you describe that and you touch on somebody who, some practices that are really championed by Alan Savry probably this is about as controversial as I get and it's not really controversial it's kind of where I want to kind of bounce some since you're such an expert I want to bounce ideas and kind of have a discussion with you about it there is a section in your book and you talk about the importance of buying less and you spoke about it in the beginning as well as we started out, kind of buying less loving the clothes we own more, kind of reduce waste and for those skeptics would immediately say oh, there'll be a reductionism they want us to reduce they want us to consume less and there's people in the world they haven't had the opportunity to consume they're still coming up and they're developing countries that are still coming up and they would like to have the chance to have a cell phone or like to have the chance to have a cashmere outfit or to have a wool suit or whatever it is they would like that opportunity and now we're not even telling them that they get that opportunity we're saying you need to reduce so don't get it in the first place and so how do we look at that reductionism? How does it help? And then I want to kind of discuss a little bit more about that if you tell us what your thoughts in your opinions are on this and why this is what would you do and then I kind of want to discuss it a little bit more Yeah, so look, you know, absolutely it's something that we need to be aware of I think I feel it's tricky because I really truly passionately believe that this ability to consume the way that we have over the last two decades, three decades has not made us happy but I'm also aware of the privilege of being a white lady from a wealthy country it's very easy for me to say that whereas I know somebody that hasn't had experienced this amount of privilege might be like yeah, to make you happy because you're miserable but it would have made me happy just give me the opportunity we're drowning in junk like when I lived in Paris it used to shock me because the homeless people were also drowning in junk like you would see walk past them on the street and they would have a mattress covered in sleeping bags and clothes and other things and see them dragging these things around with them and just because we have so successfully exploited communities and landscapes with less money than us we have created this proliferation of just too much stuff that is not fit for purpose and that is clogging up landfills all over the world and I think the solution would be to the country to have not had the opportunity to make money and spend money the way that we have we want, I would hope that we would be able to offer them a better kind of consumption and a better path forward than what we've had ourselves and I think part of that is the message in the book, the message of Sundressed it's not, I don't want anyone to feel shame around wanting to own a beautiful dress or wanting to feel good when they're walking down the street because I think that these are real joys of life this ability to express ourselves this ability to appreciate beauty and the art that goes into making a garment but capitalism and consumerism doesn't offer people those things it offers people overwhelmed by the amount of crap in their wardrobe and then shame and sadness because they don't want to wear any of it and I don't, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy I certainly wouldn't wish that on a developing somebody from a developing country who's you know, who is fascinated by the way that we consume in the West because I think that it is extremely unhealthy and then the other side of the argument is that the only way we're going to be able to continue to feed and clothe the world is if we save our soils and regenerative agriculture is the best way to do that so while it will mean that we have to consume less overall hopefully it will mean that we can still offer we can offer a more beautiful path forward for consumption and for the fashion industry and for people who do want the opportunity to wear the cashmere outfit you know if we keep farming cashmere the way that we have been and producing too much of it no one's going to get a cashmere outfit we've got to rehabilitate those landscapes in Mongolia and China first and then you know hopefully we'll move our way forward to a more equal world so that it's not just you know Australian and Americans we consume more clothes than anybody else in the world and we throw more clothes away as well and that's a sickness like that's not a thing that we should be proud of and it's not something anybody should aspire to at all with the system broken we need to we need to fix it I absolutely agree the system is broken and we do need to fix it the the reason I kind of talk about the consumerism or this reductionism as well as I honestly believe that and when we talked about this kind of in the beginning as well I think it's about the way we produce and what we produce so it's it's not it's not the brands of the future it's not the you know the you know the Panagonias or Gucci's or whatever brands you want you want to mention in the future I think it's how we produce garments or fashion period that will have the biggest impact or produce anything in our world that will have the biggest impact on the future and so to kind of like say it's very similar to the bottling industry coca-cola Pepsi or whatever unilever big bottlers of beverages you know I don't think we told them hey let's give us plastic bottles they just did and if if we can have fashion production that is run on renewable energy without greenhouse gas emissions with organic inks and without chemicals and pesticides and fertilizers and processes in that production and manufacturing and sewing with a fair wage in a labor run on renewable energy and gray water recycling black water recycling rainwater harvesting ambient water harvesting any and every possible production and manufacturing process that we can that is nudging more towards regeneration in renewables and towards those futures that do no harm leave the planet better than we found it without creating this ripple effect down the line and say but we need people to buy more so we're going to produce it as cheap as we can with the worst type of things and we just turn it out and then whatever doesn't sell then we throw away or ruins our world I think it's virtually impossible if we do the good production way to to churn out a bad product a bad product for the environment bad product for humanity and so I actually think that why are we made responsible and have to consume less because of the shitty producers of fashion and so that's kind of the debate I wanted to get in is why instead of saying instead of consuming shitty products or consuming less why can't I put the onus back on the producers who are producing that to say you know I don't I don't want that in me or I don't want you to produce it anymore it's your job it's not my job to recycle it that's why I pay you want you to do it right in the first place and so I don't know if you understand kind of fully yet what I'm trying to get on a debate but I'd like to get your opinions or your thoughts on on there yeah so I mean the bad actors the guys that make a lot of money by using you know shitty production methods they're in it for themselves so there's there's there's no appetite from those big players in the industry who really curve their carbon footprint they're interested in being able to say they're curving their carbon footprint so they can sell them off was but you know yeah what we really need I guess is government regulation you know we want if we want the worst players in the industry to change we can't sit around and expect that they'll do it themselves there's no motivation you know they don't have that self-motivation because they're looking at their profit margins and they're looking at their bottom line you know I had a conversation with the sustainability head of sustainability at H&M and he was like we are trying to you know H&M does a lot of work in this space trying to become more sustainable but at the end of the day they produce billions of garments every year and until they stop doing that they're not going to they're not going to curb their carbon footprint so when I put that to him he said what we're trying to do is decouple economic growth and our production from raw materials so what you know what he means is they are basically looking to looking forward to a world where they can continue producing this much but they're only doing it from recycled materials look and it's sure I'm like on board if you can use green energy to recycle the amount of garments you're putting out there into the world and have a truly neutral carbon footprint sure I'm on board how realistic is that when at the moment I think the stat is it's like 200 billion garments a year and what they're recycling is like 145 million or something so it's a really tiny tiny fraction of the I've got those numbers wrong but it's a tiny tiny fraction of the overall amount and that is because you cannot guarantee that somebody is going to give you back the t-shirt when they're done with it so as long as you're putting out the garments you can without a proper system for collection you have to assume that those garments are going to end up getting disposed of in a way that means those resources are lost there is one company I know who has created a recyclable sneaker which is on a subscription service and this is a truly circular model so you pay $30 a month and they send you your first pair of sneakers and you run in them and you wear them and once you've worn them out you email them and you send in another pair they send you another pair and you send your old ones back and they are working towards amazing right a system where every sneaker yeah I'm a huge fan I can't get on the subscription service because they don't offer it in Australia and I'm really annoyed but um yeah but that's that's realistic right because the sneak is made from one type of plastic so they can shred it they can melt it down there's a little component that can't be recycled but yeah okay then you've got a system where you're guaranteeing you're getting the product back you're capturing those resources and you're turning them into something new with the H&M model there's no incentive for customers to bring back their clothes I think maybe at one point they maybe they offer some vouchers if you drop them off at the store but they are offering you a voucher so that you buy something you know something else new that's not made from the recycled materials I don't want to say that they're not going to get there because they have a lot of money and I want to believe and I we need the big players if we want to transform this industry so I don't believe in trying to cancel H&M and trying to cancel Zara because I would you know love to see those kind of great minds that figured out how to turn around you know Paris runway designs into you know cheap high street fashion in a matter of weeks really truly take on sustainability and help us transform the industry you know we need a wide tent a broad tent whatever the saying is so so yeah but look at the moment with the way that H&M is operating the the current practices are not matching up with the long-term intentions because if they really wanted to be circular they'd stop producing blends and they'd just make everything out of mono materials and you know that would be that would take them halfway there yeah it's about how they produce and it's it's really to them it's in their hands hands to do it and their model won't suffer for it there'll still be the demand for the products and they've already got the market so if they switch I know we're going to be 100% good for the earth and for everybody then it's just it's a win-win but it's a it's a hard it's a hard sell and I I agree on that I lean more towards I think if we do it with a better production standard so we do it to 100% the way it should be the way maybe I don't know if it was intended that way when we first started making clothes but the way it should be done right regenerative fashion I think we could have them down that's it I think you could if you wanted to hoard clothes and buy a bunch of stuff because it wouldn't hurt anybody because you know if you throw it away or wouldn't hurt our environment wouldn't hurt our world in the process of making it it wouldn't create emissions and that and so I think that that would be the better way but anyway the companies like Pantagonia Carrying and LVMH you know they're they're just working with farmers supply chains to transition to this regenerative agriculture Pantagonia what they've done I love what Vaughn from from Pantagonia has done he just basically said our only sharehold is mother earth our only shareholder is earth period it doesn't matter what the bottom line is and there I mean he's not seeing anymore CEO anymore he's given it over but what a mission what a what a process to say don't buy our clothes buy reuse let's get take it and fix it up and do different things and I really think we we need to use a different operating system in fashion and everything we do to make that change and you really address it and you also speak about Pantagonia in the book I don't know if that's the best example but I liked it I like this story quite a bit and can you tell us kind of why you're seeing this trend and and also I guess one last little nudge in there to throw in an extra one do you think regeneration as a trend or has it been around forever we just been blind to the fact of regeneration yeah so um so definitely regeneration's been around forever uh indigenous communities have been using I don't want to speak about indigenous communities like they're monolith there are indigenous communities around the world who have been using regenerative farming techniques and working like take care of the landscape um forever for sure absolutely um and it was actually also something that um western farmers were doing up until the industrial revolution so you know Andrei Wasan who is um one of the um uh like he was similar to savory I think savory drew on some of his techniques um when he was developing his um regenerative grazing method his French you know so it's not just uh it's it's all of us there was periods of time throughout um humanity where we worshiped nature and it wasn't until kind of the enlightenment and things started to change that we we put God is we put man as God as opposed to mother earth as God and so um we it's not that long ago we can get back there because I think it sounds like a much happier place to be for sure um and Yvonne Chouinart is kind of a great example of somebody who worships mother earth you know his story is um is pretty amazing and inspiring you know started out just he started out just wanting to surf and and climb and be in nature um and literally Patagonia started because he didn't like the um little pistons that were available um for mountain climbing he didn't like that you left them in the rock face so he wanted to invent one that you could take out and reuse and and he did it himself and then started making them out the back of his car and then you know slowly expanded and um was just selling them and surfing and sleeping you know under under trees and these kind and that kind of stuff that you know for most of his 20s and then it wasn't until um they started kind of entering into clothes because he was I think he was on a trip I haven't um read his book for a while and he discovered um you know this kind of canvas short they call it the stand-up short and he was like this would be great for mountain climbing and then he started importing rugby um rugby jumpers and other things and so Patagonia really was this organic beginning of somebody who just wanted to make things that allowed other people to be close to nature and to experience how wonderful and beautiful it is so what do I so I guess you know that being the basis for the Patagonia company and then his kind of approach as a businessman this kind of rogue um let my people go surfing is his company is the company motto so the idea is that you can come into the office whenever you want as long as you get your work done and that also means you can go and surf when the when the water's good the waves are good um and I think uh you know that's a really beautiful sentiment and uh you know they've always invested a portion of their profits into um wildlife um preservation and he's had some really unique kind of special business practices one of my favorite lines from his book is every time we chose to do the right thing over the cost effective thing it ended up saving us money in the long term and the example that he's talking about in in that instance is um deciding to put a child care center on the main campus for Patagonia's um head office so that uh they would have better retention of their female staff and his accountants were like this isn't worthwhile you're doing this um and he was like well I want to do it anyway and he said in the long run because it means that they get to you know keep their staff and that everybody's happier and um everybody has a better work balance it saves them a lot of money and on recruitment and retraining and all these other things so um there's a real kind of hopeful powerful message in there but I I do need to say um Patagonia as much as they are doing really good work especially in a regenerative space um they use too much polyester and so I write about them in the context of the hemp chapter because they are working to bring hemp farming and processing back to the US unfortunately and hemp's an amazing fiber hemp um it grows really fast it's got really long roots so it's really really good for soil health it grows without pesticides fertilizers you know it's it's just it's a wonderful crop and we should it should be much more widespread it also produces a really wonderful fiber similar to linen but and it sequesters twice as much carbon as a forest when you're planted over the same amount of spacing because you can harvest it twice a year that you can effectively sequester four times as much carbon as one forest in a year which is amazing um but every hemp product on the Patagonia website has been blended with polyester and as I talked about before that blend compromises its ability to be recycled and also your experience when you're wearing it so and they're aware of that they are trying to use more recycled polyester but um at the moment recycled polyester is actually just um downcycled plastic so it's not a perfect solution and Yvonne Chouinane has said at different times that the company has gotten too big um and it's very difficult to be able to control your supply chain when you're producing that many t-shirts and that many pairs of pants and all these other things but in terms of what I was saying before about needing the big players we need the we need people who know how to make money to be investing in these solutions because we're not going to get there if we like turn our back on on anybody who's got any kind of financial cap on everybody that's got any kind of financial capital um their worn wear program is really great where they will always um where they do of repairs um for um broken Patagonia products there's a lot of good um but even when they say that they're recycling garments I found at the bottom of their 2019 financial report a little paragraph that said because we can't do textile to textile recycling at the moment actually all of the clothes are just sitting in a warehouse in storage waiting for somebody to build the infrastructure to be able to do it so look the intentions are there and I don't want to say that they're you know the devil because they're absolutely not I love the example of the company that who and I just created but I think it's important to hedge it because otherwise um you know knowledge is power there's there's there is something behind behind the curtain for sure and I I think they're probably trying to do the best they can at a point but I think there is also always more that we can do and just to step it up and I don't think um any company is perfect I think we're all on a journey it's really hard to do um the problem is is we've got to keep doing right and even um you know one one big example was the diesel gate what happened with Volkswagen but yet today they're the one they're the first car company to come out with plant-based fuels and electric vehicles and and different things um you know the first electric vehicle was 19 32 or 1832 sorry and uh just unbelievable how that's been around then they had diesel gate but now they're going gangbusters trying to do a lot of positive and so I think there is way to change and improve and and and to learn and in that process in your book you kind of give us a couple tips on how we can tap tackle climate change without shaming people without saying all the devil the damn people for as specifically the consumer for loving beautiful things who want to buy clothes and the beautiful dresses and suits and things like that what's your advice yeah look I think it's uh it's really important to embrace beauty and and especially in fashion because when you own something beautiful you take care of it you appreciate it and it really um I think it can be a really powerful tool for us reconnecting with and slowing down our patterns of consumption and reconnecting with the with things that really do bring us joy because when we want to tap out of this kind of toxic cycle of consumerism we need to do so in a way that is that still feels exciting and still feels fun and still feels sexy and and like you can still you know kind of um we need to embrace the most persuasive parts of the fashion industry which are those tools and use them in the fight against climate change so it's really uh uh important to me when I'm having these conversations that people understand I'm not talking about wearing a hemp sack I'm talking about wearing a really beautiful garment that you want to keep and wear and that you walk down the street in and that you feel really good in because I know from my personal experience that those are the garments that I keep and I wear for a really long time and then I want to reach for in my wardrobe again and again and because fashion exists in this psychological space for all of us where we um you know we want to look good we want to fit in and we want to be able to get dressed in the morning and feel comfortable and not be stressed about it if if we can kind of hit on all of those points um that's a sustainable wardrobe you know a beautiful comfortable wardrobe that where we love everything that's not that's not then you're in a state where you're not reaching for the next new cheap thing all the time um and disposing of it equally because you bought it and you regret it and you don't care about it anymore so um I do um strongly advise that we put shame around consumption to one side but also that we in that we transform the way that we are consuming and when we recognize the beauty in a garment you kind of want that beauty to extend all the way through to the source of its raw materials so when we're talking about regenerative beautiful regenerative knit made from regenerative wool we're talking about wool that's come from a landscape that is also extremely beautiful and that kind of um is where we start to value what's happening in the world and in in our environment which is really precious and really you know full of wonder and awe and also take that and that desire to protect that and apply it to you know our garments that are equally as precious and coming from you know because they're beautiful and they've come from this beautiful landscape so it's this kind of um circular way of thinking and yeah I really truly believe that if we sit in that space um we can transform the fashion industry I do believe that too you've convinced me I I I don't know how much you know about me I know you you were referred to me by Island Press and they really sung your praises highly but I have been speaking about environment and climate and agriculture and regeneration for a long time for over two decades and the biggest frustration I mean one of my one of my kind of signatures is I love to wear Levi's denim you know these these old uh uh pearl pearl button uh denim jeans I guess shirts and um I'm addicted to them and that's been my standard for a long time really because they're just comfortable and uh I don't I have struggles so much to put a thought into what's what's sustainable and in your book you talk about denim and um that it is pretty pretty sustainable overall um so I I'd love for you to touch upon that but I really wanted to say I I'm always looking where where are the sustainable fashions I want to not only talk about it on the stage but I want to wear something that's kind of sustainable so I was an ambassador for Eco Al for a while they they they recycle fishing nets and do some stuff but I wasn't really pleased with the quality of those clothes and and and the materials and then I found um and I switched which is kind of weird I found a company here locally in Humber, Germany it's called Thomas Punkt and they have a they make suits locally but they're not the suits that we might think of they're more like architect designer suits very casual leisure uh all handmade all hand sewn here I I hope they're not lying to me that most of the the fabrics and things are sourced locally are sourced from places that are well thought out they know the supply chain um from the discussions I have one's a wool suit another one's a cotton suit um a thicker kind of like a very heavy duty like workwear cotton but yeah and so I'm really happy with that but I'd like to kind of get your thing that I've never researched on the denim aspect yeah so look denims uh I love denim as you could probably tell from reading the chapter on on Levi's in my book um I it's tricky because you know when you go and look I probably don't need to tell you but you know when you go and look at vintage denim um especially denim from that era when Levi's was first starting out and he was making denim jeans from American cotton and it was all grown in America and then manufacturing in America um and there are some you know I'm in LA I'm gonna go and look at some vintage stores today and I'm really hoping to find some it the the denim is thick it is thick and rigid and and you know you can see that someone's really had to wear it in and now what we buy when we buy jeans is like you know jeans that have literally been deliberately aged you know they've been stonewashed which is like promising that we'd start or treated with chemicals to make them soft and that's not what I want when I'm buying denim I want it to be I want to feel like I'm gonna keep it and have to like really you know do my time breaking it in um so uh I don't I don't have uh citizens of humanity are actually probably the best ones just off the top of my head so they're a denim brand and they've just started a regenerative cotton project um and I know that the quality of those clothes are pretty good um but I let me have some time to think about it and I'll get back to you um because you probably have some tricks because like yeah I don't know yeah I have a sense of what you of what you probably want and I I think I have a look at citizens of humanity I feel like that's probably a good place to start but in that particular space you know I I find it really hard to go past I know it's like such a cliche to say that by vintage if you want to buy sustainable but that's where you're going to find the most exciting quality you know and the and the details that are you know probably the things that you weren't happy with with the with the other brand because they weren't blending anything with polyester you know they weren't putting fake rips in and stuff they just were making workman's clothes that had to last because you know you didn't have the resources and the production you know everything to to buy more than one pair at a time yeah yeah those those are the lines that I like the most recently like Panagonia has a workwear and and Carhart does and many others are coming out with these workwear minds so that you can actually get back and do something again and and you know as I mentioned I do a lot with agriculture and that so always I like to be outdoors I like to get dirty and so but the the other thing that I've been real fortunate of and people think I'm crazy I still have clothes from junior high school that I've had altered or changed or if something rips I fix them and and the reason I have them is they look brand new they're fabulous clothes they last forever and people like I'll throw that away and I've had that forever I've got memories from when I was in junior high school from that you know and so it's it's interesting there's a different respect for quality clothing there's a different feeling that you get when you've had a journey you've broken that in you like the way it fills you like the way it looks and people don't say gosh you look like you're out of the 80s you know so that's interesting I have two last questions for you this this next one's the hardest one that you'll have today it's the one that I ask all my guests because it has to do with our future and environmentalism and and many other things but what does a world that works for everyone look like for you not for me not for your spouse for you what does a world that works for everyone look like for you okay I um well this is a big question I actually have been thinking about this a little bit because now I'm you know I'm a writer so I'm writing all the time and I can write from anywhere so I have a lot of a lot of freedom I'm not making as much money as I would be if I you know become a lawyer or an engineer or something like that but I have a very high quality of life and obviously there's an amount of privilege in that but also there's an element of you know I live pretty simply and so I think there is this hamster wheel that we're all on where we've got nine to five jobs and we're showing up in offices and you know working really long hours and you know you know it's still very hard in this kind of economy to get ahead I do believe we need a really fundamental rethink and restructure for the way that our lives are set up and you know part of that is a return to you know being more self-reliant so being less kind of addicted to a big wage and growing our own food you know taking better care of the garments that we have and consuming less so that we're not kind of so inundated with with clutter and also having more time to spend with you know friends and family and you know slowing down and doing things that we enjoy rather than you know this kind of heavy emphasis on on career and work and the thing about the way that our economy is structured so that so much wealth is pulled at the top I do believe we for that for what I just outlined to be a reality we need a fundamental redistribution of that of that wealth and so I don't know if it's a universal basic income or you know something something similar but when the world is so abundant and there is so much to go around it's a real shame that we're all too busy to enjoy it. Is that answer that question? I love that that's no yeah there's there's a similar right answer as I've asked about 3,500 people that question and only had seven answer where I've gotten a similar answer which is very telling in and of itself but I love your answer it's very unique and and the reason it's so important is because you're what I hear is we need to get back to to live in life and I've had this discussion quite a bit as we for for decades we've heard this um and sorry it's bullshit this work-life balance there is no work-life balance there's only life and and if we don't if work work is part of life but it's all one thing it's if you're different in your life than you are at your work then you're probably bipolar schizophrenic because you're doing two different things probably going in two different directions they're all one thing and and the the life thing that keeps everything else going and if we mess that up and then it's not and so that's what I hear and I think your answer is so beautiful it's wonderful and your right on on that and that's what we're seeing everybody doing in the pandemic and coming out and moving forward in the future they want to have a good life you don't want to have to make make sure that they do it right and then it's around for next future generations and themselves to enjoy um the the last question I have is really if uh with all your experience and things that you've learned so far in this journey of life what what would you have loved to know from the start oh well this is they're so philosophical these last questions um I guess that uh uh we're not really in control so um taking the time to kind of surrender to the journey and pay close attention because the universe will it will give you the little signs along the way about you know little warnings little indicators when things are going right when you're on the right track um and maybe to just kind of relax a little bit more Lucian thank you for letting us all inside of your ideas sundressed is is your book I love it it's a fabulous book I recommend it to everybody to read it really gives you insights of what's going on in our world and some wonderful tips of what we can do to to do it better and thank you for my personal tip because I'm definitely going to look there I want to follow up because I want some more I need those good tips thank you very much and that's all I have if you there's nothing else that you would like to add right thank you so much it's been a real pleasure it's nice to have such thoughtful questions and to really go deep it's not often that I do an interview that lasts this long so so thank you for your time I really appreciate it thank you and I hope to see you again thanks bye bye