Interviews

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

Inspiring new products, innovative content and future-oriented themes is what Munich Fabric Start promises, even in these times of uncertainty. Frank Junker, Creative Director & Partner, Munich Fabric Start Exhibitions GmbH elaborates in this one-on-one with texfash.com.

Fifteen years ago, when Fashion Takes Action (FTA) was established as a non-profit, ‘sustainability’ as a term wasn’t in vogue. Now while some brands are clearly leaders and taking big risks and others are much slower to engage, what has worsened is that there are brands not genuinely invested in making change and are marketing to consumers as if they are. This increased level of greenwashing ultimately affects those who are on the right track. Kelly Drennan, Founding Executive Director of FTA, talks to texfash.com on their agenda for sustainability.

The Swiss textile recycling project Texcircle, which ended a month ago, showed exactly how a group of organisations can make it work together by contributing their own know-how, efforts, finances and materials. Tina Tomovic, Senior Research Associate of the project at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, which helmed the project, and Prof Brigitt Egloff tell texfash.com how the project worked, and what should be the way forward for textile recycling.