To embrace the ethos of slow fashion, we need to choose community over convenience. And, if we want to grow the slow fashion community, we need to find ways to make it accessible to different kinds...
Features
Q&A: Sibabalwe Ndlwana finds sustainable design solutions in traditional practice and nature
Sibabalwe Ndlwana is a Cape Town-based weaving artist, textile designer, and researcher. Her practice as a textile maker focuses on utilising the meditative processes of handweaving, weaving...
Practice planetary care and mindful mending at Greenpop’s Reforest Fest
We are officially living in the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration - A global call to action launched by the United Nations Environment Programme last year in collaboration with the UN’s Food and...
Explainer: What is the promise of a global agreement to reduce plastic pollution?
The flow of plastic entering the ocean is expected to double by 2040. To prevent this tsunami of difficult-to-decompose waste, experts have proposed a global treaty which could oblige all nations to...
Artist Zyma Amien Celebrates the Art of Garment Workers
“Once I was in art school, I looked back and realised that I had been living in a home of artists my whole life,” says Zyma Amien, “we didn’t become artists – we always were artists.” Zyma was 46...
Meet the Design Futures Lab 2022 Creatives
Nine teams of two creatives each have been selected for the Design Futures Lab 2022. Included in the lab are fashion designers, artists, gamers, product designers and creative technologists who will...
Low-technology: Why sustainability doesn’t have to depend on high-tech solutions
It’s a popular idea that the path to sustainability lies in high-tech solutions. By making everyday items like cars electric, and installing smart systems to monitor and reduce energy use, it seems...
South Africa to join global effort to clean up plastic pollution
Plastic waste is a blight on the environment and the planet’s oceans, taking a heavy toll on marine life. Now, South Africa has taken steps to ensure waste along the plastic lifecycle is being...
BMW brings tomorrow’s electric driving experience, today
What once seemed like a far-fetched utopian idea is now reality. Fortunately for humanity, companies like BMW have steered us away from a Mad Max scenario of driving post-Apocalyptic guzzoline (Mad...
8 African Textile Artists Stitching Worlds
Textiles have been at the centre of trade and civilisation for millennia and the connection between textiles and art goes way back too. Textile art uses different fibres as a medium of expression,...
How we can use the law to make the fashion industry fairer to women and Earth
In March 1911, in a garment factory in Manhattan, over 100 people, mostly Jewish and Italian women migrants, some as young as 14, were trapped inside and died as the factory burnt to the floor....
7 Experience Gifts For The Month Of Love
If the past two years of living between curfews and quarantines have taught us anything it is the value of sharing tangible moments. With restrictions relaxed and more of our freedoms slowly...
Tinyiko Makwakwa’s making practice is an act of care for her ancestors and Earth
Tinyiko Makwakwa is a maker. The 37 year-old, who grew up in Tzaneen, Limpopo, rejects other labels. She likes the freedom of not being defined. Language is too limiting, she says. She is not a...
The Nature of Fashion Report says fashion needs to function as an ecosystem
By now, we should all know that we have much to learn from natural ecosystems when it comes to living in dynamic balance and harmony with the world around us. Drawing on this, in 2020, The...
Explainer: Large scale chemical pollution now exceeds the safe limit for life on Earth
The production and release of plastics, pesticides, industrial compounds, antibiotics and other pollutants is now happening so fast and on such a large scale that it has exceeded the planetary...