Skip to main content
EDIT

Jacobson Symposium Offers Sustainable Strategies for Fashion Customers and Creators

Jacobson Symposium Offers Sustainable Strategies for Fashion Customers and Creators

Experts in sustainability, secondhand styling, composting, and textiles shared lessons in being conscious consumers of fashion.

11.14.24

On October 24, students, faculty, and professionals in sustainable fashion gathered at the Ronald Tutor Campus Center at the University of Southern California for the inaugural Jacobson Family Sustainable Impact Symposium to discuss strategies for consumers to make more sustainable decisions when purchasing clothes and accessories.

Opening the event, Elissa Grossman, interim director of the USC Marshall Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab (BSEL), highlighted the center’s focus on social entrepreneurship and innovation.

“The current generation of students we see are more deeply concerned about social impact than any students we’ve seen before. The Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab was ahead of its time and the work that they do is so important,” Grossman said.

This symposium was born from the Jacobson Family Sustainable Impact Lecture Series, supported by Libby and Arthur Jacobson. Libby Jacobson was a part of the first cohort of USC Marshall’s Master of Science in Social Entrepreneurship (MSSE) program and is on the chairman committee of the USC Trojan Sustainability Network.

The symposium opened with a panel co-moderated by Marelle Berry, BSEL senior student engagement programs advisor, and Aliyah Perry ’24, MSSE alum. Panelists included Daisy Chen Hutton, founder at the Fixx Collective, a secondhand sustainable styling business; Madison Mavis, strategic partnerships specialist at Helpsy, a service that helps retailers recycle unsold clothing; and Stacy Grace, co-founder of Kent, a compostable underwear brand.

The panel opened by identifying the problem head-on. “The industry is very toxic,” Chen Hutton said. “I still love fashion, but I can’t promote the way the industry operates.”

The industry operates largely through overproduction and environmental waste, especially the fast fashion companies.

“Shein is one of the most profitable fashion businesses right now,” Mavis said. “They introduce two to seven thousand new styles a day.”

Grace said that her journey began when she was six-years-old composting alongside her parents. After working for sustainable fashion brands as an adult, she realized most relied on synthetic fabrics.

“Look at your underwear,” Grace said. “Ninety-nine percent of them are made from plastics.”

You are each your own brand. You can have your own strategy to minimize your impact.

— Chen Hutton

Founder, Fixx Collective

Using Better Materials

Grace dedicated herself to solving this issue by creating 100% natural, plastic free clothing that is compostable when consumers are done using it.

“Over 11 million pounds of underwear go into the landfill every day in the U.S.,” Grace explained. “These are garments that you wear daily that don’t have a clear secondhand option at end of life. You cannot donate or sell old underwear.”

Kent, Grace’s company, is primarily direct-to-consumer and provides customers with comfort, environmental mission alignment, and style.

“We have to make sure we are checking all the boxes,” Grace said. “That allows us to create the most impact and longevity.”

Materials are the next frontier to examine, agrees Alexis Zoto, associate professor at the USC Roski School of Art and Design who joined the symposium for a fireside chat.

“If you think about making a cloth, it’s very accessible. You can use anything in your house: bed sheets, dry cleaning bags, old shoelaces, wrecked jeans, dog harnesses. You can also take an old sweater and take it apart and make it into something else,” Zoto said.

In the classroom, Zoto says sustainability is a primary driver in teaching design students.

“How do you make choices? Are there other ways to do that? Designers are creative people and they are the precise people to figure out how to change the industry,” Zoto said

Recycling Excess

The Fixx Collective approaches sustainability from the angle of reducing consumption.

“You are each your own brand,” Chen Hutton said. “You can have your own strategy to minimize your impact.”

Among the suggestions she shared from her experience as a secondhand stylist, she spoke about creating a “capsule collection,” meaning identifying a minimalist collection of clothes that can be mixed and matched to create multiple outfits.

“It also comes down to be a conscious consumer,” Chen Hutton said. “Each one of us can make an impact by changing how we shop. The number one sustainable thing you can do is re-wear items in your wardrobe.”

From purchasing choices to designer decisions, consumers and industry leaders share responsibility to maximize fashion options with minimal environmental impact.

“I always thought other people were going to solve these complex problems,” Mavis said. “That all changed rather suddenly during Covid. My eyes opened to how many problems there were and how few had been solved. I learned about plastics in our clothing and once I learned that, I couldn’t go back.”

Since then, Mavis has dedicated herself to keeping as much clothing out of the trash as possible.

“We are a 95 percent e-commerce consumer base. People think you can order whatever you want and return what you don’t need. But the sad truth is, a lot of times, it’s cheaper for companies to throw out the items that are returned than return them to the shelf,” Mavis said.

At Helpsy, Mavis works directly with brands to reduce waste.

“Traditional fashion brands either throw out, donate, or destroy their unsold merchandise. Our role is to offer them incentives to not do the bad thing. If we can help them do a less bad thing, that’s better in my book,” Mavis said.

Helpsy works with brands to understand their values, goals, and challenges, and to help them sell excess inventory or build a resale market.

But it doesn’t have to be more of the same. Recycling can also breed creativity and exciting moments in fashion.

“If you think back to the pandemic,” Zoto said, “People were making all these crafts. That to me is the most interesting — things that are one of a kind. I have T-shirts that have grease stains and I’ll use needlework or heat-pressed vinyl to cover them. It’s new and cute and it’s all me.”

At the end of the day, it’s about making conscious decisions. Consumers have the responsibility to think about what they want to support, put on their bodies, and take part in.

“As an individual, you can make a difference,” Chen Hutton said. “We cannot rely on these companies to make the difference for us.”

To watch the symposium, please click here.