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How Racism Shapes Fashion’s Approach to Sustainability

What can we do to dismantle structurally racist approaches to sustainability? If we’ve benefited from race, class, or gender privilege: what are our implicit biases? How have we built these into our sustainable fashion solutions, policies, and institutions?

Kim van der Weerd
JUST FASHION
10 min readJul 17, 2020

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Recent protests around the world speak to the ways white privilege is deeply ingrained in policy, institutions, and economic systems. As many white people seek to educate themselves on how they might have unwittingly perpetuated oppressive systems, so too must the fashion industry pause to re-consider how white privilege has shaped its approach to sustainable fashion.

What implicit racial biases do sustainable fashion advocates have?

I’m a white, female, millennial with Dutch and American parents. About five years ago, I went from a bleeding-heart liberal with a degree in human rights to a garment factory manager in Cambodia. I thought if I wanted to be effective in sustainable fashion spaces, I needed to better understand production.

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JUST FASHION
JUST FASHION

Published in JUST FASHION

Radically reimagining the fashion industry with equity and justice for all. We are writers and industry professionals discussing not only why the fashion industry needs to change, but how to do it.

Kim van der Weerd
Kim van der Weerd

Written by Kim van der Weerd

Co-host of Manufactured podcast, sustainable fashion advocate, former garment factory manager.

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