Australian Fashion Conference set to take fashion sustainability to new heights in 2018

Australian Fashion Conference set to take fashion sustainability to new heights in 2018 with the country’s internationally acclaimed experts collaborating for the first time.

The unforeseen changes to sustainability and waste recovery for a first world country have never been more interesting. For the first time ever, Sydney will host the largest sustainable fashion conference dedicated to fashion’s biggest business leaders.

With much planning taking shape during the last six months of 2017, twelve of Australia’s most knowledgeable and internationally acclaimed Experts are ready to embrace some of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Australia’s in a extremely fortunate position to tackle responsible fashion practice given the Northern Hemisphere has been learning and researching the topic for at least the last five years.

Cameron Neil, Graham Ross, Clara Vuletich, Andrew Sellick, Maureen Taylor, Edwina Huang, Lisa Heinze, Fabia Pryor, Måns Carlsson-Sweeney, Julian Lowe, Blake Lindley, Ollie Milliner, Patrick Duffy

The event to be held on March 22nd 2018 at the Sydney Masonic Centre 2018. It’s a prime time to embrace greater market awareness and for fashion retailers to exponentially grow their current spending market.

The fast fashion fad has waned and shoppers are ready to embrace the uptake in conscious fashion. Two of the country’s largest fashion events, Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival (VAMFF) and Fashion Exposed Now (FEN), have noted that many of their attendees have been seeking more information on ‘how to’ implement sustainable practice into a fashion brand and what does digital advancement in the fashion sector mean going forward. For example tech and digital startup ‘To Me Love Me’ are working directly with retail companies and sharing data collected from customer feedback, which is directly correlating to the quantity of styles they may produce for one particular garment. The results from beta testing have shown the retailer how an item is performing or under-performing, in which case they can alter the quantity of units being put into production and potentially investing in less materials and significantly reducing the number of unsold units or customer returns.

FEN are running one hour seminars during their Sydney two-day event educating all different types of members from the fashion industry on ‘Five steps retailers can take towards supporting sustainable + responsible fashion.’ VAMFF are holding numerous Ideas Programmed events during the 18 day festival communicating the various aspects of how sustainability impacts all levels of fashion.

Hearing the nation’s call for more action on responsible and sustainable fashion, for the first time nationally, lead Australian experts in the Fashion Sustainability sector will come together under one roof for a very candid discussion with business fashion leaders at ‘The Australian Circular Fashion Conference’ (ACFC). Heralded as a crucial topic for the industry and extremely timely, 2018 will become an exciting time to embrace innovation, collaboration and building a smarter and more responsible local fashion industry.

The ACFC has been earmarked by numerous multinational companies as one of the most significant events for the year to embrace how we lead the country during the next five - ten years in curating the process for all textile related business.

2018 will be the chance to ditch the ego and get down and dirty with fashion retailer companies in discussing the most effective outcomes to provide sustainable fashion in a circular model, through the whole vertical — R+D, processing, manufacturing and life-cycle-assessment. Numerous corporate businesses have already begun engaging with in-house sustainability management to plan for change and implementation over the next five to ten years. Our largest shopping destinations and proportionate land holders, Vicinity, Westfield, Frasers and AMP Capital are connecting with professional consultants to become leaders in educating their retailers via workshops, webinars, joint venture partnerships and building new CSR pillars for greater evolution.

With the support of Inside Retail, Council of Textile + Fashion, Good On You and a number of other Australian and International businesses, ACFC will be pitched directly to the fashion retail sector, targeting business leaders. Run as a one day conference, Expert’s will focussed on education and awareness, to establish better collaboration within the Australian fashion industry. Keynote speaker Clara Vuletich, PHD doctorate and Ted X Speaker, has over ten years experience working in Europe and the UK educating on social and environmental impacts of the fashion and textile industry; including consulting to H&M and VF. Corporation. Fellow corporate ESG Expert and working with the likes of Wesfarmers and Woolworths, Måns Carlson-Sweeney has travelled to China and Bangladesh to research numerous pivotal points needed to improve offshore manufacturing and international relationships.

ACFC will cover numerous angles of the fashion industry as our Expert’s introduce better tools and resources for creating economically viable businesses for the future. Attendees will learn in more depth from Australian experts what sustainability means and what responsible practice looks like.

To improve the current model of traditional business practice, we need to associate the importance of environmental change. The Northern Hemispheres fast progression into sustainable practice has left Australia to adapt or die - ACFC’s plans for representing the importance of a profitable business model transformed to reflect responsible practice.

The mission is to see what we can do to support closed loop innovation by incorporating what we currently have available right now, right here in Australia, with sectioned planning over the next five-ten years. The event will be hosted annually and as growth in the fashion sustainability evolves, I believe recycled textile products and waste recovery processes will lower in cost and become a more accessible, competitive market. There's much to be explored shared in this space.