I'd like to take you all back to the late 1950s in Sierra Leone. My 93-year-old grandmother is about my age. She lives in Freetown. It is hot and she is beautiful. She goes to a market one day and she buys a yellow dress. It has stripes down it and an orange tie attached to the collar. It is also beautiful.
My grandmother Isa is married to my grandfather, Harry, and this dress is the favorite of all her dresses because it's shorter than the rest, meaning he gets to see more of her legs.
(Laughter)
She wears it a lot for herself and for him, and she brings it with her in the 1960s when she comes to England.
Flash forward six decades and I'm sitting with her in her room in the summer of 2018 and she gives this dress to me, entrusting me with its 60-year-long story. And in doing so, she teaches me an unshakable lesson about what it means to truly value what we own.
That lesson meant everything to me. It meant everything when I went to work at a second-hand clothes tech company and it meant everything when I left to start my own startup, SOJO, a fashion-tech solution that's revolutionizing the clothing repair and tailoring industry. And it continues to mean everything here today.
Valuing clothes that we own is not the cultural norm. I've grown up as part of the fast fashion generation, which is all about overconsumption and hyper disposability of clothing, meaning we buy way too much and we throw it away without a second thought.
Think, "Oh, I've worn that top on Instagram, so I don't want to wear it again." Or, "This shirt has ripped, so I'm going to chuck it and get a new one." Or, "I've got a date lined up on Friday, so I'm going to buy a new outfit." This is how we've been taught to engage with our clothes. This is how I used to think.
But engaging with clothing in this way has an absolutely devastating cost, a side we in the global North so rarely get to see. That top from that Instagram post that went to a charity shop instead of being reworn, it could have ended up as one of 15 million items arriving to the shores of Ghana each week. Or it could have ended up on the mountain of clothes in the Atacama Desert in Chile, a pile so big, it's now viewable from space.
Fashion waste levels have reached 92 million metric tons. To put that into perspective, because sometimes big numbers are really hard to conceptualize, if you took every single person that lived in Europe, we're talking hundreds of millions of people, and you brought them all together and you put them all on one massive weighing scale, they still wouldn't be as heavy as the amount of clothing waste we're producing annually. And it's growing and it's unsustainable.
But fashion waste is only one side of the coin. We are producing so many clothes that the fashion industry's carbon emissions each year are more than all international air travel.
So the question is, how do we go about generating less fashion waste and in turn reduce the amount of clothes we're producing? Well, to me, the answer is simple. When we value clothes correctly, we care for them, we repair them, we alter them to fit us, even if our bodies change, we don't just throw them away and buy more.
But how did I, and how do we all, go about changing our mindset away from one of disposability and towards one of value and longevity? Well, I'd like to take you to look at my sister's jeans. My sister loves these jeans ever since my parents bought them for her 15 years ago before a trip to Copenhagen. My sister is an artist. There's nothing she loves more than to wear these jeans when she paints. They're comfortable, durable, and she even uses them as a place to wipe her paintbrush.
Now these jeans are made of denim, which is a natural fabric. A lot of water, time and care has gone into making these jeans, the time and care of many garment workers. They have value, but their value has only grown over time as there are bits of paint on these jeans that match paintings around the world. Think, there's a bit of yellow over here that matches yellow in a painting in a gallery in Korea. Or a bit of red on this side that matches a painting in a home in Miami. How incredible is that?
My sister's worn these jeans so much that she's had to use SOJO to get them repaired twice, making them even more hers with every patch, making them even more valued with every stitch. There is so much beauty and power in repairing and caring for our clothes.
So often sustainability can be about the need to give something up. But for me, sustainable fashion isn't about losing anything. It's about gaining a deeper and truer happiness with the clothes that we own. More connection, more appreciation, and more intentional and personal joy.
I think we can all agree that my sister should not throw these jeans away. But that's just one example.
(Applause)
But that's just one example. This pair of trousers that I've had tailored to fit that I'm now wearing on the stage at TED, they shouldn't be thrown away either. Neither should that dress that I bought a couple of summers ago with my best friend on a sunny day in a Camden charity shop. Neither should that jumper that I was wearing when my dad looked at me and said he was proud of me.
Clothing can just be clothing. It can be a quick fix, a passing trend, a forgettable item that we wear once for that random date. Or it can be something thoughtful, a material, style and shape that works for us, something we want to wear over and over again and something that embodies the story and the experiences of our life.
Every single one of us is wearing clothing. So I want you to stop for a second and think. That top, those trousers. Do you know which field in which country across the world grew that amazing cotton? Which woman with what family and what life sewed your seam together? Where have you worn those clothes? What experiences have you had in them? Will you still have them in 60 years' time? Why wouldn't you? Imagine if when you were giving an item away, you saw the entire creation journey of that item. And you saw all the times that you'd worn it.
There is no denying that responsibility for this unsustainable system that we live in lies with governments, legislation, corporations and brands. But there's also no denying that we are the ones doing the insatiable amounts of buying and we are the ones doing the throwing away. And with that, there is so much power and opportunity for us to collectively move ourselves away from a culture in which what we buy is easily thrown away and instead move us to a culture in which what we buy is loved and valued more.
I've just been talking about clothing today, but really I could be talking about anything as our problems of overconsumption and waste go far beyond just the clothing industry. We need to buy less stuff and we need to look after what we buy. It will mean less global waste, less global production and a reduced negative impact on this planet. Valuing the things that we own is a climate solution. So next time you buy something --
(Applause)
So next time you buy something, maybe it's a pair of jeans for a trip to Copenhagen, or maybe you're in a market in Sierra Leone and you come across a yellow dress, I want you to think "Do I need this?" "What has it taken for this item to get here to me in my hands?" "What story can I create alongside this item?" And "Will I really, truly value it?"
Thank you.
(Cheers and applause)
