How to Raise Sustainability Standards: R&D and Art
Feb 17, 2022
Experience and network to make a sustainable change happen in the industry: Olga Pirazzi in a nutshell.
HOW TO ENGAGE YOUR COMPANY IN A POSITIVE CHANGE?
The decision to launch Between Conscious Program is driven by the mission to ease a change in the fashion industry.
BETWEEN consultancy supports the process to focus on values and integrating them into the corporate identity, and to find the best professionals with high-level team scouting.
Sometimes all you needed was some inspiration: Between Conscious Program, therefore, started a journey to show you how diverse can be the range of impactful changes that professionals are able to bring in.
Meet the professionals and discover all the possible routes in the journey to sustainability.
Hard Work and Fine Arts - Olga Pirazzi
Olga Pirazzi is a professional with strong experience in the fashion industry: she is well known in the field as a sustainability expert and is also a sustainable brand startupper.
She started by building a keen experience in the textile industry until she devoted most of her career to the promotion of fashion companies’ structures towards sustainability.
The turning point arrived in the early 2000s when she was cooperating with big multinational brands as they were experimenting with the introduction of advanced materials in their collections.
In-depth studies and on-field experience led her to grow a profound understanding of the industry, specifically on the potential implication of introducing alternative textiles in order to achieve more sustainable production goals.
Olga Pirazzi is still actively dealing with research and development of sustainable textiles as she helps brands to embrace a new business model by adopting responsible and sustainable production processes through a system of transparency, traceability, and circularity.
Change to survive
“The world of fashion was literally my daily life, but at at some point I just understood that it could simply no longer stay as it was. A strong change was necessary, both from an ethical and environmental point of view. Such an awareness led me to give an equally strong direction to my career
Over the years I witnessed and experimented with a wide variety of innovative practical application of sustainable models throughout the supply chain. This is already happening and some companies are truly engaging in a change.
Only a couple of years ago all of this was just a niche market, very narrow and far from the consumer choice. Now it is turning more and more into a trend, a lifestyle, a mission. This means that more and more companies explore different methods to innovate production processes as they have grown aware that sustainability is the only possible future of the textile industry.
As sustainable fashion becomes mainstream, it is crucial that companies don’t fall into pure marketing campaigns. Greenwashing damages the whole industry trustworthyness, while we all need to work seriously, even making small steps, but in the right direction: towards real change”.
One of a kind
“For the last ten years I have been working with Fondazione Pistoletto, a non-profit organization which mission is to inspire a responsible transformation of society through creative projects.
Bringing my technical background in such an environment, populated by artists and designers, was an enriching experience for me, while I was able to bring my active contribution by integrating the research on new materials into new collections.
In order to make the best out of this work and spread the message that change is possible, we are working together with some of the most talented professionals in the fashion industry. Each of them made sustainability the focus of their professional mission: Tiziano Guardini, Flavia La Rocca , Matteo Wrad, Fabrizio Consoli , Yekaterina Yvankova , Silvia Giovanardi and Bav Tailor.
The platform we created as a group is definitely one of a kind. We developed exclusive projects, supervised the organisation of sustainability areas during extremely popular trade fairs such as White, Munich Fabric Start, and Milano Unica, and we also cooperated with commercial realities such as Yoox.
My contribution to the workflow is based on my background in the industry. When we have to face the application of new material, for example, I have the experience and the know-how to immediately understand both how the supply chain is affected and how does it fit in with the brands’ vision and identity.
I also have the connections and the knowledge needed to support whoever intends to produce in Italy: I am able to follow all the processes and guarantee on its sustainability until ready to launch the pilot”.
Where business ends and Art begins
“With Fondazione Pistoletto, in these years we put out several art projects using fashion to promote sustainability.
These are not simple events: during a recent project (CIRCULART) we managed to involve up to 12 different companies in the industry to promote circularity in fashion. It is a big step for awareness and education.
Now with the project Fashion B.E.S.T. we gathered a collective of professionals with deep expertise in the field of sustainability: they share and cooperate on errands from real clients.
This is not just communication, this is business changing its standards”.
Circularity: a common goal
“One of the most relevant projects we are working on - and that might really help to change the textile industry - is the UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) project on Traceability, Transparency, and Circularity in the garment and footwear sector. This project was developed through the dissemination of The Sustainability Pledge and supported by us through pilot projects such as that of Vivienne Westwood implemented between 2020/21.
By working with the UN, we have the chance to cooperate with hundreds of experts, policymakers, businesses, academics and NGOs on the common goal to achieve a workable and verifiable way of ensuring sustainability in the garment and footwear sector.
Transparency and traceability on a global scale are essential if we want to achieve responsible consumption and production patterns that will enable more countries and regions to transition to a circular economy”.
Education for sustainable development
“I built my knowledge out of my hands-on experience and my personal interest. By organizing events we raise awareness and help to build conscience, but we also publish valuable in-depth content that can be used for educational programs in professional environments.
On top of that, with Accademia UNIDEE we established the very first, and currently the only, bachelor degree course for sustainable fashion in Italy. The range of knowledge is quite wide The mission is to offer a multidisciplinary knowledge oriented to sustainability, to conscious innovation, to the impact of technologies on man, to society, and to the environment.
We are doing this trough Clothing, Textile, Art: a three-year course of Higher-Education School of Artistic Planning for Business – specializing in Sustainable Fashion Design Getting to know and design fashion in all of its processes from the angle of sustainability is the basis for being able to face fashion in a contemporary way”.
Rule of Law
“The Fashion Industry is a very complex one, involving several other industries, and comprehensively being the most impactful one after oil. In order to deal with these complexities, the contribution of institutions, governments and very precise regulations is needed, both from a technical and ethical point of view.
It is also important that decisions around such regulations are as shared as possible, involving all the interested stakeholders, so that there is unity and clarity of intents from all the actors and parties involved. Only with clarity and transparency these messages can get through from producers to consumers and create the awareness necessary to influence people's choices.
If a process is clear and people understand in a simple way what lies behind the production of a t-shirt or a pair of jeans, we will once again give the right value to every garment that we are going to buy.
What we are doing with UNECE goes exactly in this direction with the purpose to define sustainable production standards. And, speaking of transparency, communication is the key. We need to deliver the right messages and fight greenwashing, as the industry needs to speak to the consumer keeping transparency as a core value”.
“I thank Between Conscious Program for having involved me in this project to promote and ease the fashion industry transition toward sustainability, which is in any case my most important goal”.
“Let’s make a difference. Together.”
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