Welcome to the first Responsible Fashion Summit! It is part of the Responsible Fashion Movement, a meaningful development project which focuses on being responsible, accountable and keeping fashion clean! The Responsible Fashion Summit is the first thought leadership summit, which fuels the fashion movement with knowledge that gets converted into action. Knowledge-To-Action is one of the key pillars of The Responsible Fashion Movement.
The Responsible Fashion Movement kicked-off in 2017 with the first knowledge workshop conducted by the MAS sustainable team to teach the design fraternity of chemical effects which led to the launch of Sri Lanka’s first fashion hackathon called The Making Of the Green Tee, where four student design teams were given the task to create t-shirts using two kinds of material choices, one was factory waste and the other was totally ground up creation using innovation. The results of which are being presented today at the Summit. The design teams followed 08 impacts defined by the Responsible Fashion Movement to come up with the innovative t-shirt. The idea was to start with the most basic piece of clothing which is used every day, and cover the entire wardrobe with this thought process, (co-incidentally even the smallest piece of clothing can have considerable impact on environment).
MAS Sustainable team collaborated with the Responsible Fashion Movement in conceptualising the first hackathon. The second hackathon with other leading manufacturing partners will soon be announced. This will be on-going throughout the year.
We have defined 08 impacts which are unique to South Asia, but also relevant to the global fashion industry and a solution to its issues. These impacts will dictate actions and bring about consciousness across all the stake holders in the fashion supply chain. The 08 impacts focus on design, craft, communities, fabric, production, logistics, retail, consumption and disposal.
There is also special focus on creating a body of “Future Green Leaders and Thinkers” which involve universities, our vision is to create a generation of designers who are green conscious and are responsible by nature.
The Responsible Fashion Summit will take place twice a year as part of the movement that aims to create a “new” normal in fashion and showcase Sri Lanka as a destination for creating, manufacturing and sourcing clean and responsible fashion, and its best practices to be open sources for others in the region to follow. Sri Lanka has followed strong ethical practices since last decade is an example to the region.
This first summit has a strong panel of world renowned international speakers and practitioners like the global icons Bibi Russell and Lynne Franks, and an impressive panel of leading Sri Lankan leaders like Sarinda Unamboowe, Dr Anush Samarsinghe, Nikhil Hirdaramani, Anusha Alles. The summit is endorsed by the founder of the global movement Fashion Revolution Orsola De Castro and also Katherine Hamnett and Sybille Sorondo.
I wish to thank MAS, Beira Group, Brandix and Hirdaramani group for their support, their involvement and their ‘buy-in’ of this development focused initiative, and also special thanks to Ajay Amalean for understanding the vision and the future prospect of this movement and its potential in showcasing Sri Lanka.
Ajai Vir Singh
Founder
The Responsible Fashion Movement