1,026 words, 5 minutes read time

Emerging

I’ll begin by reminiscing on a scene somewhere in 2019, when my genderqueer, crip self was flying a sign, angrily flipping off another person who screamed at me to, “get a job”. “I already have three, asshole!”. I was then what they call white-collar homeless in America, balancing a pristine working visage while sleeping in my van. If anything in the world I have tenacity and self-direction in droves. I have the will and drive I imagine so many of my sister-mothers in the Goddard program must have performed with since the 70’s when Goddard first changed its attendance model.

Where I Wound Up & Where I Landed

By the time January 6^th happened, I had started wandering through mirrored places, logic loops, and fantastical daydreams. Apparently, it’s called “maladaptive daydreaming”. I’m a super dreamer. I spent so many hours living in and imagining my very own Pulp Fashion’s™ Fashion Week changing the world, in my mind. During COVID, I poured over the start of branding documents, outlines, operations, and business plans and began several Coursera certificate courses. I have started industry-specific certificate classes like Sustainability in Fashion, and others including Transforming the Fashion Business, Improving Leadership and Governance in Non-profit Organizations, and several more. My overall learning style has been steered largely by failing forward, repeatedly. It’s brought me to some incredibly valuable spaces. I look forward to having the writing-intensive space at Goddard to fully develop these ideas critically and be held accountable for their quality, thoroughness, and completion as they relate to the ecosystem around me.

Mission

So, the magick of the desert lies somewhere in the way it looks barren on its surface and, once you kick over a rock, it’s teeming with life. In the same way, my mission is to uncover with Pulp Fashion and Goddard the components of a sustainable, closed fashion loop existing throughout New Mexico and the Southwest region. I have this deeply involved framework of a plan begging to be birthed. Its gestation is excruciating on my own, I am willing and able to explore and connect across all necessary disciplines.

This exploration begins across the Southwest and New Mexico, interviewing and listening to stakeholders from many dimensions; I’ll hear stories, gather artwork and histories from textile workers, farmers, retailers, manufacturers, and clothing and jewelry designers to unearth the sustainable loop I believe exists within New Mexico. This will inform a multi-dimensional art installation where runway models don political statements in the form of clothing, together with a conference and roundtable discussions, fighting for social justice, equality, ecology, and sustainability.

This is what I hope to achieve during my time as a Goddard student. I imagine this next project phase ending in a strong nonprofit and an influential, annual fashion week. This sustainability-focused art installation and fashion movement will bring elements from the community together to showcase their art and ingenuity. We’ll take on the task of designing sustainable futures with Pulp Fashion as a platform communicating the overall message that “Climate Denial is out of Vogue”, as Dharna Noor so eloquently put in her keynote speech (Noor, 2023). Out of this, we’ll drive new policies, campaigns, and an ongoing mission to evolve the fashion industry forward and make a lasting dent in climate change and social justice.

All my life’s work to now, and very survival, has incorporated creative strategy and an aim toward access, human rights, and sustainability. I seek to be an agent for change towards this purpose.

I have arrived in 2023 much relaxed and transformed for the better. This year of re-emerging has brought me to discover how much actually isn’t complete in all those journals I’ve obsessively written. I feel much better now as crippling anxiety has faded to the sound of a bored snob in my head and, maladaptive instincts be damned, I’ve gotten some intensely valuable work from it, but I’m begging for more structure, time, and research. I’d be honored to have some fresh eyes on my projects in Goddard’s Sustainability Program.

Why Sustainability in Fashion?

I’m driven to work with existing frameworks already showing promise to create a legacy and change.

I believe the power of the fashion industry lies in the fact that it is, from its inception, a powerful, political language. While worldwide fossil fuel emissions are at their highest ever (IEA, 2022), the fashion industry makes up a whopping 10% in world carbon emissions (McFall-Johnson, 2020).

Fashion finds within itself the most reprehensible: it is the second largest employer of slave labor in the world, and garments represented $127.7 billion worth of imports potentially produced through slave labor. More than 50 million people in the world in the world are locked in its vice grips (Walk Free, 2023).

The United Nations has gotten on board with their UN Fashion Alliance (UN Fashion Alliance, 2023) and out of Norway comes an entire RESTART Sustainable Business Model (Jorgensen & Pedersen, 2018), a framework for standards of putting social and ecological responsibility into the very operations of any company or industry wanting to create permanent cultural change.

I believe Goddard, with its student-driven low-residency model, is altogether a perfect incubator to help me develop the right skills to move my project toward a brighter and more sustainable future. I would be so honored to learn from Goddard’s faculty in Sustainability and it is my wish that my plan here has demonstrated my interest, drive, and desire to contribute to the program in an authentic, effective way.

 

References

IEA (2022), Global Energy Review: CO2 Emissions in 2021, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-co2-emissions-in-2021-2

Jorgensen, S., Pedersen L J T (2018). RESTART Sustainable Business Model Innovation, Palgrave Studies in Sustainable Business In Association With Future Earth. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-91971-3

McFall-Johnson, M. (2020, January 31). These Facts Show How Unsustainable The Fashion   Industry Is, World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/fashion-industry-carbon-unsustainable-environment-pollution/

Noor, D. (2023, July). The World We Need . Fall 2023 MFAW Keynote Speech, Plainfield, Vermont, USA. YouTube. https://youtu.be/oSgp6PBoG5I 4:17.

UN Fashion Alliance (2023). Synthesis Report on United Nations System-wide Initiatives related to Fashion. In Association With The UN Alliance for Sustainable Fashion. https://unfashionalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/UN-Fashion-Alliance-Mapping-Report_Final.pdf

Walk Free (2023). The Global Slavery Index 2023, Minderoo Foundation https://walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/