Carry and a group of
embroiderers from Peru
share the ‘I made your
clothes’ messagea bigger school uniform company, rather than a small
independent company, starts doing fair trade, organic
clothing.” It must have been hard, though? “It was,”
she agrees. “But you have good ideas, you might not
make money on all of those ideas. We just try not to
think about the huge amount of money that we lost.”
BIRTH OF A REVOLUTION
Which leads onto another of Carry’s ideas, brought
about by the tragedy of the Rana Plaza disaster. On 24
April 2013, a factory building in Bangladesh – where
workers made clothing for western consumers
– collapsed killing 1,134 people. More than 2,000
workers had died over the previous 10 years in smaller
incidents, Carry notes, but hadn’t made the front page.
This was the tipping point. “We knew that this had to
lead to significant long-term change.”
Later that week, Carry ran herself a bath. “I didn’t
have an Archers podcast to listen to. And as I lay back,
the idea for Fashion Revolution dropped into my head,
I wasn’t thinking about it at all. The name was there,
the doing something on the disaster’s anniversary...”
But she knew this was more than one woman’s work.
She phoned Orsola de Castro, founder of pioneering
upcycling label From Somewhere and well known for
her activism around fashion’s environmental impact.
“We hadn’t spent much time together, but I knew she
was the right person to run it past. Immediately she »33LIVING (^) | WISDOM