Consumers should buy fewer clothes to save the planet, a leading TV fashion expert has told Sixth Form students.
Six Two students Kitty and Alicia recently hosted a virtual evening with Patrick Grant, a renowned clothing designer best known as a judge on The Great British Sewing Bee, and interviewed him about his views on fast fashion and sustainability.
Mr Grant had several impassioned views about the impact of ‘fast fashion’ on the environment and advised students on what we can all do to combat this issue. He said: “In the same way that everybody knows they should probably eat less meat, we probably just need to buy less fashion.
“The simple truth is everybody needs to realise that the decisions they make about the clothes they wear have a really big impact on nature. That’s inescapable.
“For a long time we haven’t really considered the impact that fashion has on the planet but now we know an awful lot about it.”
Speaking to Benenden students from Leeds where he is filming the latest series of Sewing Bee, Mr Grant argued that the fashion industry should take a lead from the success in reducing the UK’s meat consumption.
He said: “Everyone now connects eating beef with Co2 and rainforest destruction and that’s a good thing because it’s true, but we have to also somehow make that same link between buying a polyester piece of clothing from a fast fashion store and that same outcome, which is environmental pollution, toxic waste, modern slavery, all of those bad things.”