A conversation with Brittany Dickinson

What to do about Fashion in an era of climate crisis? This is a complex and nuanced question. 

Many people have been working on solutions for the past thirty years, but inevitably attitudes have changed. We have learned more about the impending crisis, while at the same time, the fashion industry has swollen – fast fashion is predicted to grow from $25.09 billion in 2020 to $39.84 billion in 2025 at a compound annual growth rate of 7%. 

But what if you were someone who once adored Fashion? When confronted with facts that you can’t ignore, where do you stand now? It is a long and frightful journey from Fashion lover to activist, and something I have thought a lot about. How can you find a space to still celebrate your love of clothing without being complicit?

This week I interviewed Brittany Dickinson, who has traveled this road; from designer to educator, she now works with second-hand clothing. I stumbled across Brittany’s work on Instagram, where she was sharing Atomic Essays, a 250-word, single-idea essay published in a visual screenshot, on the intersection of sustainability, fashion, and education. They were searingly honest, bitesize nuggets that drilled to the heart of these problematic issues. I felt a lot of synergy with Brittany, so I was fascinated to hear how she had gone from being a designer at J.Crew to the Manager of Sustainability at Goodwill. 

Included throughout the interview is a selection of Brittany’s Atomic Essays. To read more, go to her Twitter @brittanyinbrief.

Shonagh Marshall: Brittany to get started, I want to ask you about your relationship with fashion as a young person?

Brittany Dickinson: I was interested in fashion from such a traditional mindset. I was in middle school when I started announcing that I was going to be a fashion designer. I loved drawing, and I especially loved drawing people wearing different types of clothing. I found that I was designing the clothing, all through illustration.

In my senior year of high school, there was a new class: an elective called Needle Arts. I was thrilled. I told everyone, We're going to learn to sew and knit; I was so excited. I learned how to sew in that class, and that's when I decided to enroll in the fashion design program at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP) in Ohio (I grew up in Dayton, Ohio). 

I loved fashion for – for lack of a better term – superficial reasons. And I don't mean that in a totally negative sense. Maybe I say that now because I know so much about the negative implications of the fashion system, the social and environmental impacts, for example, so it's hard for me to think of fashion in that same really positive light. But at the time, I loved it purely for its aesthetics and self-expression. I also loved the craft. And then in the DAAP program, I had a very traditional fashion design education that taught all the technical aspects of fashion: textiles, sewing, pattern making, machine knitting, and tailoring. It was a five-year program, and it was structured to prepare you for a traditional clothing design career by learning how to conform to the industry in order to get a job. 

Shonagh: And you did get a job. Upon graduation, you went straight into working as a designer. During that time, there was a shift from the excitement you described. What changed? 

Brittany: I moved to New York and started working pretty much right away as a clothing designer. I was doing exactly what I went to school to do, and I felt so lucky. I was lucky; it was 2009, during the recession, and I assumed that I wouldn't be able to get a job. But I did, and I started working at J.Crew right away. 

I loved it for a while; I was there full-time for five years. But there were parts of the job that bothered me. I remember being increasingly concerned with how wasteful the process was, for example. Some parts annoy you in any position though, so I accepted this as the way things were; there are pros and cons in any industry. 

Eventually, I had to take a pause. For one thing, I knew that I always wanted to teach, so I decided that I wanted to go back to school. That was a primary reason for taking a break from clothing design. But on another level, I knew I needed to take a step away; I had this feeling that I wanted to do more, that something was missing. 

So I went to the School of Visual Arts to study for a master's degree in Design Research, Writing, and Criticism. That program changed my life. Without being too cheesy about it, it truly did! I feel like everything meaningful I’ve done in my professional career is a result of that program. This is because less than a month into grad school, I had an epiphany about the fashion industry and my role as someone who was directly contributing to many problems in the world by being a clothing designer. 

I knew that I would focus on fashion education for my master’s thesis. I was interested in changes in the industry and changes in academia and was curious to see what drove change. Did the industry change because academia was changing, or vice versa? That's when I started reading about all of the devastating social and environmental impacts of the fashion industry. I decided to focus my thesis on how fashion schools are addressing those issues. That's where my real awakening happened, and I started to think about sustainability and systems thinking, and looking to education to unlock change. I thought, If only we'd all learned about this in school, the world would be a better place. 

Shonagh: I wanted to ask you to unpack the eureka moment you had. You had been educated for five years and then had worked in the fashion industry for five years. Do you think you had somehow been sheltered from engaging in the realities of the industry's environmental and social impact? 

Brittany: It is interesting that you use the word sheltered because I was exposed to certain things, but I wasn't connecting the dots. It's because I wasn't taught to think critically about what I was doing. I was just taught to conform and to do a good job. 

J.Crew was so exciting; we could do whatever we wanted as designers, there were no restraints from a creative standpoint. This was exciting but, in hindsight, wildly irresponsible. And I didn’t realize this until I had extracted myself from my day job and paused; the epiphany came from simply not being a participant. I was suddenly looking at fashion critically, through the lens of someone researching and writing about a subject matter. At that time, I thought I was never going to design clothing again. 

The Rana Plaza Factory collapse happened in 2013. A year before I went to graduate school. I remember reading about that in the news and being upset by it. But I don't remember connecting the dots to my work. It might have been because I was working in a large company, where things were so segmented. The production team acted as a liaison between design and the factories, so the factories were like this amorphous concept. I never met the people who made the clothes I designed. I would get emails from the factories forwarded to me, filtered through our production team, and I would reply directly to production who would convey my responses to the factories. And of course we also had a fabric research and development team who would liaise between design and the mills, which prevented me from having to think about where the materials I chose were actually coming from. I think this silo effect made it easier to stay "inspired" and "creative" and just ignorant.

Shonagh: As you mentioned, you wrote your thesis about fashion education's capacity to unlock better practices in the industry. What did you find? Is it possible to make change this way?

Brittany: There are so many things one needs to learn to become a competent clothing designer, from sewing, to drawing, to digital skills, to learning about textiles, etc.; this easily fills up a four or five-year curriculum. But in order to reform the fashion industry, there are new skills that must be added, like ecological literacy or zero-waste design. So I was looking at the tension between negotiating the demands of the industry and the skills that will be needed for the future. 

In my research, I conducted interviews with professors, students, and alumni of the top undergraduate fashion design schools at the time: London College of Fashion, Central Saint Martins, and Parsons. I also focused on two smaller schools who had a strong commitment to sustainability: California College of the Arts and St. Catherine University. I sought examples of schools that had successfully embedded sustainability principles into their program and then assessed which schools were compartmentalizing their efforts, like offering a single elective on sustainability. I was really interested in the concept of integrating certain principles and concepts in such a seamless way that a student doesn’t even know they’re learning about sustainability.

Through my research I encountered so many challenges that academics faced in their attempts to integrate sustainability into a fashion curriculum, like ​​growing class sizes, rigid curricular structures, lack of resources, and untrained faculty.

Shonagh: Did you find any examples where it worked well, and ethical practices were entirely integrated?

Brittany: Yes, I did find some good examples, which came from those who had been teaching sustainability the longest. I had several conversations with Timo Rissanen, who was teaching at Parsons at the time. Timo graciously connected me with two people who had been teaching sustainability for a very long time, Lynda Grose at California College of the Arts, who developed an elective that addressed sustainability in the late 90s, and Vibeke Riisberg at Kolding Design School in Denmark, who was one of the first to introduce sustainability in fashion education in the early 1990s when she taught at the Danish Design School. Everything I have been saying, such as not having sustainability in a silo, I’ve learned from these individuals. Those were the best practice examples I discovered. 

There was also a small school that I came across in my research called St. Catherine University (St Kate's) in St Paul, Minnesota. They have a super tiny fashion design program that is completely infused with sustainability principles. When I spoke with the Chair of the program, Anupama Pasricha, I learned that because it's a catholic school, social justice and social teaching were always ingrained in the school’s philosophy, which made it relatively easy for them to revise the curriculum in 2008 to intentionally include sustainability literacy. I was fascinated by that crossover between the principles of sustainability and the virtues of certain religions that essentially boil down to being a good person: caring for other people, caring about the impacts and consequences of your actions, doing good for the planet, and doing good generally. 

However, when I looked at St. Kate’s through my superficial fashion design lens, I found the program was lacking. But then for programs that pushed forward-thinking design, like Central Saint Martins, it was hard to find any virtues being taught beyond aesthetics. 

Shonagh: That's interesting to think about, virtues and aesthetics juxtaposed. When you finished your master's, you went into teaching at Parsons. In one of your twitter essays, which we'll talk about in more depth in just a moment, you said that you gave advice to your students during that time that you now believe to be flawed. How so? What was the advice that you gave?

Brittany: I taught systems thinking to fashion students, which essentially meant understanding a system and identifying its leverage points, or points of design intervention. I would say to my students that to change the system, you have to understand it, and that the best way to understand it is to participate in it. At the time, I believed in that advice, maybe because I was coming from that place myself. I was a product of the fashion system; I understood it well, understood where the change needed to happen, and tried to insert myself in those points from within. 

It was also a way of advising students on aligning their principles with the practicalities. Graduates need to find a job, and the chances that you're going to find a job right out of college that aligns with your values are not very high. So I told them to treat every job as a learning experience and a way to gain further insight into the system they want to change. 

But the more I went along in my career, the more I started to question that advice – which I repeated all the time. When I wrote that Twitter essay, I was still in the process of removing myself from the fashion industry, in a traditional sense, but I was still at the center of it. I was working as a designer for a clothing company in New York City, and I was frustrated all the time with the lack of change. 

I'm a huge fan of Rebecca Solnit. She writes about how the most radical change does not originate at the center; change begins at the margins and works its way to the core. It’s funny because I would assign Rebecca Solnit’s essays to my students at the same time that I was preaching about change happening at the center, advice I now realize is flawed. To say that you have to participate in a system in order to change it is not true. It’s bad advice. 

It’s also simply not an option for everyone. A friend pointed out that being at the center and participating in a system is also a privilege that not everyone has access to. What if you're trying to get into the system, but nobody will give you admission or permission?

Shonagh: I came across your work after reading the atomic essays you wrote as part of Ship 30 for 30. In them, you so succinctly got to the root of so many issues in the fashion industry that people have such difficulty explaining. There is very little criticality of fashion outside of academia, so I found both the content and the format exciting. In one of the essays, you write about how fashion is reactionary and not visionary. When I read it, I found myself saying out loud, Of course! Why do you think fashion has got away for so long claiming otherwise?

Brittany: I think one reason why fashion has gotten away with claiming to be visionary is that the fashion industry has historically been in this position of dictating what is cool, and what is not cool, and what will be cool in the future. This supposed ability to see into the future and envision trends is part of what makes fashion so alluring, but it also detracts from what it really is: a highly reactionary business of exploiting people and the planet to make things that people usually don’t need.

I’m speaking from my own experience, of course. I haven’t worked at, say, Céline, where craftsmanship and quality are prized and where I imagine creativity might be fostered in a way that feels visionary. 

I spent most of my career designing clothes that are relatively affordable, comfortable, and stylish for the majority of Americans. Yes, I’ve designed for the “masses,” although I hate that term as it lumps people into a muddled pool of strangers with poor taste who need “help” in figuring out what to wear. I haven’t worked for fast fashion brands, thank god, or licensees who I imagine might be a bit soulless (a brand must really not care about a product if they farm the designing out to someone else). But in any case, when designing for a large company, I think there is this false sense of being a visionary designer, when really sometimes all you do is change a pocket shape on last year’s best-selling jacket. Or, more likely, you knock off a sample bought at Zara, which of course is a direct knock-off of a designer piece. But even designer items are often so derivative. There still may be the echelons of high fashion that dictate trends, but their influence is questionable and their relevance to the 99% is negligible. I know some of my fashion friends might cringe when they read this.

Shonagh: In another of your essays, you lay out a case for keeping clothing. Could you tell me more about where that thinking came from?

Brittany: I think people are seriously brainwashed into believing that they need to get rid of all their stuff – the Marie Kondo phenomenon, for example. I understand that things should spark joy; I appreciate a clean space and a fresh start, but this encouragement to get rid of so much stuff only makes room for more stuff. Unless you're a very particular personality who can be diligent about living with less, most people can't remain in that state because advertisements and Instagram constantly bombard us. Everything is continually telling you, buy this, buy that, buy this. 

Of course, if you made conscious choices every time you purchased something, you would have a "conscious wardrobe" or "conscious closet," or whatever the phrase is. (I hate the term "conscious consumer." I try to not even use the word consumer). It's almost similar to the education argument, where you might say, If only you learned about the principles of sustainability in school, it would be a more sustainable industry. You can’t go back in time though, which is something I think about more and more, and is perhaps the reason why I’ve recently shifted my career from the origin to the end of a garment’s life. 

Those moments in a garment's life, when you decide to keep it or not, or when it is circulated back into the system or sent to landfill, are the moments I am most passionate about. 

Shonagh: You are now working as the Manager of Sustainability at Goodwill; you have moved out of the space of designing new clothing. Could you tell me a bit more about your job?

Brittany: I'm the Manager of Sustainability for Goodwill Industries International, and I started in this position last summer. I still feel like I'm in the fashion industry – even though some people might disagree with that – but I am now at the very end point of the industry. I'm dealing with all of the stuff that people don’t want anymore, the stuff that I was contributing to for most of my career. It has to go somewhere. A big part of my job is developing solutions to elongate the life of these items, which is of course what Goodwill has been doing for over a century: keeping things in reuse for as long as possible. 

I feel more creative now than I have in a very long time. It's really interesting because it's not a traditional creative job – it's not a design job. But I felt so creatively stifled when designing clothing for the last several years. So it's made me think a lot about what they teach in school. If you're going to school for fashion design, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to become a clothing designer. You have transferable skills as a creative person and designer that can be applied to other industries to solve different types of problems. I think I feel so creative now because I am only focusing on problem-solving. I am not causing problems anymore, which is extremely liberating. My creativity was blocked for a while because of this. All I needed was to find a job that aligned with my values.

It makes such a huge difference to work for an organization whose goal is not to make billions by exploiting people you'll never meet on the other side of the world. It's so refreshing not to be working for a company that is trying to make more and more clothes, to appeal to more and more people, so that you can open up more and more stores – and then make more and more clothes, to fill the stores, and appeal to even more people. It's this never-ending cycle. These fashion brands are so huge; they can't just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. 

I feel so inspired and stimulated, and motivated. I cannot believe I have this job, to be honest.

Shonagh: The final question I always ask is: what would your Utopia look like? If you could wake up tomorrow in an ideal fashion world, what would that be?

Brittany: In my fashion utopia, there would be regulation. Certain things would not be optional based on one's values or the types of customers they are trying to appeal to. There would be certain things you wouldn't be allowed to do; for example, people would not be allowed to use virgin polyester, period. And there would be regulations in place to get rid of the loopholes that allow brands to shirk responsibility when their stuff shows up at a shadow factory that violates human rights. 

I know from my experience that no one will stop doing something harmful or exploitative until they are forced to stop doing it. We need to have laws and rules in place because I don't think the fashion industry will – or should – go away. People will continue to want to look good and find things that fit them, and I don’t think people should have to worry about where the stuff is coming from or how it was made.

In my ideal fashion world, everytime someone would need to buy something, they would shop second-hand first before looking for something new. And if buying something new, they wouldn’t have to worry about how the materials were sourced or how the clothing was made; they wouldn't have to do all this research. Nobody would have to worry about a brand's practices, what their goals are, whether they are greenwashing or not, what's real, and what's not real. And everything would be made with recycled materials that would be in perpetual circulation. 

And most importantly, there would be far less production and consumption of needless things.

And if I’m being totally idealistic, Instagram would be gone in my Utopia.