Monday mornings started right! This morning the Stories Behind Things team had the pleasure of attending the premier for ‘Fashionscapes: A Circular Economy’ created by acclaimed director Andrew Morgan (@andrew_morgan) and Livia Firth (@liviafirth).

This new film brings together some of the brightest visionaries for a conversation about how to bypass the lies told by fashion brands, transform the way we make clothes and begin to build a truly circular economy. In defining true circularity, the film exposes faux circularity and how fashion products based on continued use of plastic, trap us in a linear, fossil fuel economy. Our team of experts reveal the smoke and mirrors of ‘semi-circularity’ that’s being promoted right now.

“We need to deepen our storytelling of one specific kind of story” says Livia Firth, “Namely a story than can allow us to imagine a future filled with possibility. The kind of story that can elbow its way in front of dystopian visions. When I say we need to become better story tellers, I mean that we need to become wiling and skillful tellers of visionary stories of how things turn out ok and work back from there”. 

“This film was incredibly special to create, as over the years as we’ve travelled, documented and campaigned about the issues in the global fashion industry, we’ve heard the same refrain from big businesses about reaching a magical place where we have a circular economy and it being the solution, says Andrew Morgan.

This idea has been used to allow big corporations to put a recycling bin in a store for example whilst continuing to use supply chains that wreak havoc on the natural world and the phrase has been used as a marketing tool and to encourage greenwashing. It is a privilege to have spoken to people who are being affected firsthand and those who are pioneering incredible solutions to tackle this”.

“Whenever activists or environmentalists point to the ecological nightmare that is the modern-day fashion industry, brands respond by telling us not to worry. We are told there’s no need to slow down our runway consumption. This story – hugely financed and largely unchallenged – gives brands permission to continue producing more than 100 billion garments every year, most of them cheaply made and quickly thrown away.” – Livia Firth (@liviafirth)

Link here to watch the full film.