It was a night of enlightenment, discussion and hope on Nov. 7, when Ampleen held its Fashion Evolution: Consumer Power event at Scandinavia House in New York for a crowd of more than 100 attendees. The event examined how today’s fashion design is increasingly being driven by consumer concern for environmentally sustainable business practices, and it featured a keynote address by fashion executive Amy Hall followed by a round-table discussion with six fashion professionals. Enthusiasm for becoming a bigger part of the conscious consumption movement was definitely in the air.

Shoko Sekiguchi, the founder of Ampleen, started off the event with the story of how she began noticing a lack of information about clothing — how it was manufactured, who made it and where it was made. While she was looking for her voice on this issue, the Bangladesh clothing factory collapse occurred and took the lives of over 1,000 workers. The world was shocked and outraged by the fact that the Bangladesh catastrophe was strongly connected with today’s modern consumerism and “throwaway culture.” As a result, an urgent need arose for dialogue on the topic of conscious consumption. This set into motion the creation of Fashion Evolution and the tone for the event.

Keynote Speaker: Amy Hall, Director of Social Consciousness at EILEEN FISHER

Amy Hall, Director of Social Consciousness at EILEEN FISHER, next spoke and began her keynote speech with a series of shocking facts, such as “less than 3% of clothes purchased in the U.S. were made here” and “12 million tons of textile waste are generated each year.” In her role at EILEEN FISHER, she has led the company’s commitment to social consciousness – including environmental sustainability, human rights, and support of women and the community – over 20 years.

Amy explained in her keynote about the corporate-wide effort to reduce the carbon footprint that has been made by EILEEN FISHER since its founding in 1984. Utilizing the latest practices and newest technologies, the brand has been successful in achieving an 18% reduction in its carbon emission from 2010 to 2011, and by the end of 2012, the brand further decreased this by 11%.

She also introduced a new EILEEN FISHER initiative called Blue Flower Collaborative. It’s a values-based, women-centric fashion innovation zone in the south Bronx that envisions a predominantly women-owned and -run values chain with transparent and cooperative governance and a worker-owned economic model.

Workers are integral in assessing impacts, developing processes and making decisions, and community projects focus on empowering women and girls.

Amy’s speech left a strong impression with the audience  that EILEEN FISHER is a forward-thinking brand whose social and environmental values are embedded in every product and service.

The last segment of the program was a panel discussion called Fashion Evolution: Consumer Power that included Sasha Cohen, a sustainability consultant, moderating a panel of five sustainable fashion leaders.  The panelists represented a broad range of fashion industry areas:

• Telicia Bunch, Director of Technical Design for Productions of global fashion house;
• Manuela Fassbender, founding partner and Creative Director at MBF Trend Consulting;
• Naomi Gross, Professor and Assistant Chairperson at Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT);
• Faizun Kamal, a social entrepreneur and founder of SourceFK, a clothing collection partnering with Asian women artisans that connects them to global markets and training
• Gia Machlin, founder and CEO of EcoPlum, an online boutique specializing in eco-friendly fashion products and original content on green living.

Panel Discussion

The panel discussed various topics, from the power of storytelling to the technology driving today’s retail industry. In particular, the panel focused on the latest innovations to bring transparency and sustainable practices to the fashion industry. Afterward, the panel received many questions from an enthusiastic audience.

At the networking cocktail hour following the event, we heard repeatedly from guests that they wanted to know more about the issue of conscious consumption, and they could not get enough of the stimulating conversations among like-minded guests.

Ultimately, at the end of the evening, we discovered that this discussion just opened the beginning of a larger conversation about conscious consumption, and that we will be back with a new set of interesting topics to continue the examination of this issue very soon.

If you attended the event, what were your takeaways? If you couldn’t make it, what interests you the most about conscious consumption movement and achieving greater sustainability in the fashion industry? I would love to get your thoughts.