Name: Meg Partridge
Major: Civil & Environmental Engineering
Class Year: 2014
Residential College: Forbes
Eating Club / Sorority / Extracurricular Activities:
The Sustainable Fashion Initiative, The Princeton Social Entrepreneurship Initiative, The Princeton University Tigerlilies A Cappella, Healthier Princeton Advisory Board, Cap & Gown Eating Club, Kappa Kappa Gamma, Rent the Runway Rep, Harry J. Ott Environmental Fellow with The Coca-Cola Company, Keller Center Fellow.
What does sustainable fashion mean to you?
To me, a sustainable understanding of fashion entails ensuring that the world’s clothing and accessories incorporate continued environmental improvement throughout the product lifecycle and benefit the communities touched by the design process. It also involves viewing fashion as a medium for facilitating responsible cross-cultural dialogue and exchange.
I think that fashion is an especially important platform for communication, because it is the tactile and visual expression of who we are and who we project ourselves to be. The clothes that we wear have a deeper meaning than purely aesthetic – they indicate to others our preferences and our personal values, and they can be interpreted to say where we come from, where we are going, and what we care about. Our fashion choices come with a whole host of social significance, so I view one key importance of the “sustainable fashion” design philosophy as ensuring that those of us who buy and create clothing are aware of the deeper meaning of our clothes.
As someone passionate about issues of water stress, for instance, I have a personal stake in wearing clothes that are made with minimal water inputs and toxic wastewater outputs; as someone who cares deeply about human rights around the world, I have a personal stake in making sure that my clothing supports fair labor and respects the dignity of the people involved in every step of the supply chain. Plus, it’s really fun to have someone compliment something that I’m wearing and be able to tell them an interesting story behind it!
The bottom line: sustainable fashion is all about bringing social and environmental values to the forefront of design.
Favorite eco-friendly designer:
Right now, I love the looks from Duro Olowu, Costello Tagliapietra, Gretchen Jones, Hellen van Rees, Carrie Parry, and David Peck. Each designer has a different spin on sustainable design, whether it’s the zero waste/repurposing philosophy of Hellen van Rees or the artisanal connections forged by Carrie Parry. These philosophies provide the backbone for beautiful aesthetics that tell compelling stories through tactile and visual design.
I also have to mention how much I love Awamaki Lab’s beautiful woven designs, which celebrate the Andean backstrap weaving tradition in modern silhouettes. I spent the summer as a Dale Fellow in Peru exploring both the rich cultural tradition of Andean backstrap weaving and the role of social enterprise in connecting Peruvian artisanal cooperatives with international fashion markets, so Awamaki holds a place close to my heart. I wear my AwaLab miniskirt around campus all the time!
How did the Sustainble Fashion Initiative get started?
Carm, Jenna, and I met during our freshman year and really hit it off, particularly over our many mutual interests in economic policy, social and environmental issues, entrepreneurship – and fashion. As friends and members of some of the same student organizations, we would meet frequently to bounce ideas off each other and talk about the latest things that interested us. For me, one of those ideas was harnessing the power of fashion and design to build a more sustainable and equitable world. Carm and Jenna shared a similar enthusiasm in the emerging concept of “sustainable fashion,” and in the summer of 2011 we designed The Sustainable Fashion Initiative to explore this concept in more depth with all of the stakeholders at the table. One of the things we wanted to focus on was finding inspiring fashion stories and sharing them with our college-aged peers on campus to bring them into the conversation. Only once we get the conversation started and moving in a productive direction can we do something to make inspiring fashion stories the norm rather than the exception.
How do you see SFI growing over the course of the year?
Last year, we spent a lot of time just laying the groundwork for SFI, building a strong team, and exploring what we wanted the focus of SFI to be. After having a wonderful experience with our first Princeton Fashion Week and our events with Meghan Sebold of AFIA and Lauren Bush-Lauren of FEED and Lauren Pierce Atelier, we realized that our niche – our value proposition – lies in igniting student interest in sustainable fashion and creating channels of communications between consumers and industry professionals. If we can get students excited about fashion as a platform for engaging their individual passions, then we have a really great place from which we can start working with industry actors and other stakeholders to come up with collaborative solutions.
This year, we’re focusing on that first step, of igniting student interest and shifting perspectives of fashion to reflect personal values. We’re really excited about upcoming and ongoing initiatives to do so, such as our successful “Stripe Swap” clothing swap, our Beauty Brigade cosmetic waste recycling/upcycling campaign with TerraCycle and Copper River Salon and Spa, our newly conceived SFI Magazine, and our 2013 Princeton Fashion Week. We are also in the process of linking SFI’s work to the Princeton classroom; at the moment, our team is coming up with a curriculum for an accredited academic seminar to be taught in Fall 2013 on sustainable fashion! This is especially exciting, because one of the strengths of Princeton’s campus is the intellectual curiosity and personal passion of undergraduate students driving top-notch academics. Fashion has all of the elements necessary to create an interesting academic experience, because it deals with everything from international relations and trade laws, to environmental and materials engineering, to examining personal behavior and consumer psychology. We want to give students the chance to engage with sustainable fashion in the way that best suits their personal interests.
We have also been extremely fortunate to have met with great and crucial support from people within the industry and the Princeton community. Partners like Copper River Salon and Spa, AFIA, FEED, TerraCycle, Gretchen Jones, David Peck, the NYC Fair Trade Coalition, Kopali Organics, and many more share our mutual interest in helping students explore how to live sustainable lifestyles. Partners like the Keller Center, the Pace Center, and the British Council Global Changemakers have been instrumental in helping us access the resources that we need to get our projects off the ground. And our friends, families, professors, and SFI team members have helped turn our ideas into reality, serving as a critical sounding board and voicing their confidence in our efforts to shift the way people think about fashion towards a values-based understanding. We really could not be doing anything without our superstar team, our support network, and our industry partners, and as such we intend to focus on building up those relationships this year to create a connected and engaged ecosystem around sustainable fashion.
If you’re interested in joining the SFI family or learning more about our work, visit us online atwww.sustainable-fashion.org, check out our Facebook page and Twitter feed, and get added to our mailing list (http://eepurl.com/rIPQ1).