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London Fashion Week: Grassroots green fashion deserves a good show

Defra's 'top down' guidance will help, but some of the best ideas come from rummaging around the bottom of the pile
Richard wearing the sweater he's never washed and shares with his wife
Richard wearing the sweater he's never washed and shares with his wife. Photograph: Fiona Bailey

Defra deserves a glass of celebratory eco fizz for coordinating the sustainable clothing action plan which it launched at London Fashion Week last Friday. It's no mean feat to bring together a veritable ragbag of different interest groups from mainstream corporations such as M&S and Tesco to charities including Oxfam and Salvation Army and get them to commit to specific sustainability targets.

Defra's initiative goes a little way to helping the fashion sector to think and act like it is part of an inter-connected industry. But before we get too carried away, the outlook for the sustainable fashion industry remains stormy.

Many of the actions highlighted in Defra's plan are classic examples of "top-down" thinking. They're largely the result of an influential group of clothing industry and sustainability professionals who control and direct decisions about garments and how they are made.

But if that's the only place we look for new ideas and activities, then the fashion sector is destined to continue to tinker around the edges of the many sustainability problems it faces, including - most perniciously - its sell-more-cheaper-and-faster business model.

Sustainability can't be managed or prescribed exclusively by those at the "top". Sustainability in fashion is as much about the dynamic relationship we consumers and users have with our clothes – the way we wear, care for and connect with our garments - as it is about government directives. Sustainable fashion comes alive when we fuse ingenuity, care and resourcefulness with garments. It happens in homes up and down the land and needs little in the way of money or materials, but instead an abundance of experience, creativity and freethinking.

It may be precisely because these "bottom-up" ideas and actions are so widely dispersed around the population as a whole that they are so little valued. But a new project that I'm co-ordinating called Local Wisdom has set out to recognise grassroots ideas and skills, and allowing them to flourish and inspire.

Take lawyer Richard Bailey and his Arran jumper, for example. It's a baggy hand-knitted sweater inherited from his father-in-law and gives us insight into the experience of sustainability in fashion that few brands could ever deliver. Richard shares the sweater with his wife (she wears it in the garden) and it has zero impact in laundering, because he's never washed it. He says: "I've shrunk a lot of things over the years and it would also lose its fantastic smell - a mix of fresh air and wood smoke. It's like part of the family. I could never throw it away."

Whether motivated by laundering concerns, money-saving or an outpouring of ecological and ethical consciousness, green shoots are emerging in fashion grassroots. In my hometown of Macclesfield a new shop-cum-meeting place for those who stitch, knit and craft is thriving in these days of credit crunch Britain.

Staying in to save money has led people to start honing skills in creating things instead of buying them. Skills, which according to Demos, improve people's sense of self-worth and - when they get together at Stitch and Bitch events and share ideas and learn from and teach other - their sense of belonging.

It goes without saying that these are tiny changes. Yet contrary to common expectations, big change doesn't just flow from governments or brands; for single, small actions can have big effects. I'm with Nabeel Hamdi, author of Small Change who puts it like this: "in order to do something big… one starts with something small and one starts with where it counts".

Kate Fletcher is reader in sustainable fashion at the London College of Fashion and author of Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys

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