The truth about sustainability with Project Bowman

In conversation with Melbourne-based slow fashion brand, Project Bowman and their Co-founder & Designer, Amber Rigney.

January 7th, 2021

Written by FibreTrace®

A label for the modern consumer. Project Bowman is a slow fashion label owned and made in Melbourne, redefining slow, sustainable and ethical fashion without compromising on style.

For smaller brands, implementing more sustainable practices requires money and resources. Amber Rigney got honest with FibreTrace® about some of the challenges emerging designers face in the modern era of sustainable fashion and how Project Bowman is trying to overcome this.

(FibreTrace) Project Bowman is described as a “slow-fashion label”. Can you explain exactly what this means and how it is achieved?

(Amber) Slow-fashion is the antithesis to fast-fashion.

This means our approach to creating is considered, measured and purposeful, instead of quick turnarounds of trend based clothing, made en masse for cheap.

When we say we’re slow fashion we’re saying we don’t just produce for the sake of it but ensuring each garment serves a purpose. When designing we ask ourselves what does the piece itself say? Is it art? Who will wear it and where will they wear it? Most of all, we want our pieces to be worn and treasured for years to come and that’s reflected in the way we design.

Another way we operate as a slow fashion label is by not subscribing to traditional fashion seasons or calendars. We release individual garments, not collections and only when they are ready and meet our standards - we don’t bring anything out if it’s not right, regardless of schedule.

(FibreTrace) Project Bowman seeks a very holistic approach to sustainability from using natural fibres, to producing locally and ensuring your workers have fair working rights. What have been some major challenges you have had to overcome and what is your advice to brands looking to do the same thing?

(Amber) The first thing to note here is that producing new garments will never be considered 100% sustainable because you’re putting something else into the world that it doesn’t need on a fundamental level.

However, we can confidently say that our production process is ethical and sustainable as it can be at the moment. Our biggest challenge to this day is still material sourcing.

We make in small runs in a bid to limit overproduction, which means it’s rare that we need enough fabric to order it straight from the source. So to date, we’ve been using deadstock fabric leftover from other fashion houses. This is great, because it’s saving up material that’s already in rotation and would have otherwise been sent straight to landfills.

A negative of using deadstock fabric is that we can’t trace back to the source, so we don’t know how the fabric was made and in what conditions.

We’re starting to expand outside of deadstock and it’s not easy to find transparency around material production, other than a few slap dash statements such as ‘we do not use child labour’. We want to know how the material was made, start to finish, but we’re finding supply chain transparency extremely difficult, especially as a small business.

"It’s so great to see consumers empowered, but it does create an immense amount of pressure on smaller labels to be able to meet all of the needs of the consumer, but the reality is that we just don’t have the resources or access to resources that larger companies do. The expectation of being 100% transparent, ethical, sustainable and inclusive can weigh heavily on young, emerging designers."

(FibreTrace) What are some long-term sustainability goals for Project Bowman over the next 5 years and how do you plan on holding yourselves accountable?

(Amber) In the next 5 years we really want to work on three things:

• Improved transparency in the supply chain

• Making strides towards a circular fashion model, meaning a lot more focus on what happens to our garments when they’re not longer wearable

• Increasing the use of recycled materials in our clothing production 

We don’t need to have a complicated system in place to hold ourselves accountable. Only Bella and I work on Project Bowman right now and we’re unsure of the rate we'll grow so we don’t want to put unrealistic time frames on progress - that’s unsustainable from a business perspective. What we do know is that any growth without sustainability and ethics in front of mind isn’t real growth. It’s always been what our business practice has centred around and we won’t stray from that.

(FibreTrace) What has been the response from consumers thus far? Are they openly embracing the idea of slow fashion or is there still a shift in dialogue that needs to occur?

(Amber) Our customers have always embraced the idea of slow fashion, as that’s what we’ve always been about - it’s not a new concept for us.

However in general there has definitely been a shift in consumer attitudes and buying habits - especially in our neck of the woods (Melbourne, Australia). More people are committed to becoming conscious consumers and are willing to spend a little bit more on quality pieces from small businesses and buy less in the long run than they were even two years ago.

Largely thanks to social media, consumers are becoming more aware they have the power to dictate the level of change they want to see by supporting more conscious and ethical brands and asking the places they shop from to do better.

It’s so great to see consumers empowered, but it does create an immense amount of pressure on smaller labels to be able to meet all of the needs of the consumer, but the reality is that we just don’t have the resources or access to resources that larger companies do. The expectation of being 100% transparent, ethical, sustainable and inclusive can weigh heavily on young, emerging designers. It could be due to the fact they’re so used to these huge, fast fashion conglomerates with endless cashflow that they aren’t seeing that it’s only one or a couple of people behind their favourite local labels trying to do as well as they can. It’d be great to get this new found consumer activism directed more wholeheartedly at the big guns and seeing through their greenwashing, which is a whole other topic.

Check out Project Bowman via their website: https://projectbowman.com