Interviews

Dr Laurie Parsons is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His new book Carbon Colonialism explores the murky practices of outsourcing a country's environmental impact, where emissions and waste are exported from rich countries to poorer ones; a world in which corporations and countries are allowed to maintain a clean, green image while landfills in the world's poorest countries continue to expand, and droughts and floods intensify under the auspices of globalisation, deregulation and economic growth. Parsons in conversation with texfash.com.

A trade event is as much about products and services as it is about exhibitors, visitors and communities. With sustainability at the heart of it, the Berlin edition of Denim Première Vision gets under way today. texfash.com speaks to two exhibitors about what they would be doing here, and of course the backdrop to their presence.

It's one of the very few companies in the world that are on track on their circularity path. Denim leader Isko plans to produce 85% of its entire fabric production with recycled materials by 2023. It's more or less there. Isko would be present at Denim Première Vision - Berlin later this week. Baris Ozden, Product Development Manager and Daniel Merino, Project Manager (Circularity) talk about trends and recent events.

Since 2018, Denim Première Vision has been touring Europe’s capitals. Come Wednesday--31 May, the denim community will converge on Arena Berlin. A key person making all this happen is Lorenza Martello, Denim Product Manager at Denim Première Vision. Martello talks fabrics, trends and innovations with texfash.com.

It's difficult to predict the future with certainty, but Colombia has the potential to become a more robust exporter. Abundant natural resources, a growing manufacturing sector and measures by the government to improve the country's competitiveness, make it easier for companies to export goods. However, the success of these efforts will depend on multiple factors, Craig Dempsey, Chief Executive Officer of the Bogotá-based Biz Latin Hub tells texfash.com in the concluding piece of this WireFrame series on Colombia.

Spearheading the promotion of the textiles & fashion industry of Colombia is ProColombia, under the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Tourism. The organisation's expansive mandate includes boosting international tourism, foreign investments and non-traditional exports. Carmen Caballero, ProColombia's President, tells texfash.com how the country is working to ramp up its textiles & fashion industry.

Commodity prices have a direct bearing on farmer incomes, as do the prices that garment manufacturers are willing to pay for raw materials. Tamar Hoek, Senior Policy Director (Sustainable Fashion) at Solidaridad Network, disentangles the threads that make for these intricate relationships.

Can market forces help prevent tragedies such as Rana Plaza? Not really, say Professors Vinod Singhal and Brian Jacobs as they explain that in terms of sourcing strategy, most firms are going to continue to search for the lowest costs even as the larger idea of responsible sourcing has gained traction following an increase in activists and watchdogs as also the ubiquity of 24/7 news and social media.  

The Rana Plaza disaster of March 2013 exposed many faultlines in the fashion ecosystem. That tectonic day threw up a whole lot of issues that were furiously debated the world over. One critical issue was the seemingly confrontational interface between business and human rights. In this freewheeling conversation, Salil Tripathi, Senior Advisor at the Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB) and Sanchita Banerjee Saxena, IHRB Research Fellow and Director at the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, talk about the lessons for business and human rights.

As a leading international trade fair with participants from 129 nations, Heimtextil 2023 was a global stage where textile sustainability was holistically mapped — with products and innovations that have shown that scalable and sustainable innovations are not a contradiction in terms. Olaf Schmidt, Vice-President (Textiles & Textile Technologies) at Messe Frankfurt talks to texfash.com