Do you ever wonder about where your clothes came from? Were the women who stitched them paid a living wage? What was the environmental impact of the manufacturing and shipping process? Will your clothes fill up landfills or pollute the ocean? If you are a fashion lover who cares about the environment and believes workers should be paid fairly, you need to know about Remake. Founded by Ayesha Barenblat, Remake is a movement to hold fashion brands and policymakers accountable when it comes to both sustainability and human rights.
Ayesha Barenblat is an educator, activist, and social entrepreneur. She has worked across the public, private, and society sectors; Prior to founding Remake, Ayesha led brand engagement at Better Work, a World Bank and United Nations partnership working to ensure safe and fair working conditions in garment factories around the globe. Ayesha previously served as head of consumer products at BSR, advising brands such as H&M, Levi Strauss & Co., Marks and Spencer, The Walt Disney Company, Pou Chen, and Nike on integrating sustainable business practices and protocols.
What sparked your interest in fashion in general, and garment industry practices in particular?
My interest in the garment industry really comes from my background and where I grew up. I am Pakistani-American and grew up in Karachi, which is a big manufacturing hub for the garment industry. Ever since I was little, I saw firsthand how this is really one of the biggest gender justice issues of our time.
In the early days, when clothing production started moving overseas to my home country, India and Cambodia, there was this hope that it would uplift a generation of women working on the factory floor. And yet, what we saw is that fast fashion is essentially trapping these women in a cycle of poverty. They are just not making the kind of wages that can give them a life of dignity.
When I moved to the US, I attended UC Berkeley, where activism is alive and which is home to United Students Against Sweatshops. What I saw in the classroom was that sustainability and ethics were being taught with a colonial Americanized lens without an understanding of the importance of centering workers.
I really love fashion. For so many of us, it's an expression of who we are. It's how we share our mood and how we're feeling out in the world. And as an industry, I want fashion to match my values. What if we, as women, citizens, fashion models, and garment makers, locked our arms in solidarity and asked this multi trillion dollar industry to treat people fairly? Why can’t we pay women what they're worth? And that is the founding story of Remake.
Earlier in your career, you served as a consultant advising manufacturers and helping them implement more sustainable practices. How receptive were they to those recommendations and what kind of an impact were you able to have in that role?
Right after grad school I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. One of the really good pieces of advice one of my mentors gave me was to understand the industry before you try to change it. For seven years I worked in the area of business for social responsibility. I worked for one of the largest sustainability consultancies in the world and was really able to see what the working conditions were like. We had Gucci, Gap, Levi's and Nike, as our clients.
Companies are not monolithic. Even though we may want to paint them as the bad guys, there are some incredible people on the inside, trying to do what's right. And so, there were times when we did make inroads. I even worked on a project where we taught companies to invest in the health and well being of garment workers. And there was another project where they were looking beyond the factories at the middle level to improve working conditions.
But at a meta level, after almost eight years on the inside, I realized that as a consultant, and especially as someone who's paid by the private sector, you're only going to make so much progress. At the end of the day, especially for publicly-traded companies, it's all about maximizing profit, growth and shareholder value. In the absence of regulation, a lot of the sustainability promises and commitments just go out the window. I really walked away with a more jaded view of companies. What we need is better policy. That’s why our current focus is on the accountability and advocacy piece of the story.
Tell me more about your work at Remake. What are some of some of the successes that you and your team are most proud of?
Remake is a movement for women and by women and we are really focused on making fashion a force for good. We are here to make sure that women in the fashion industry – especially garment makers, who are fashion’s most essential workers – are paid fairly.
We do that in three ways.
It all starts with education. We launched awareness campaigns in colleges and also started welcoming more high school members of our community. We are even testing some middle school curriculum. All of our free education resources are on our website and are there to help people understand the intersectionalities. Do you care about the climate? Do you care about women's rights? This is how these issues connect to fashion and here’s how you can get involved. That’s the heartbeat of our work.
Outside of education, we publish an annual accountability report where we are rating the top 60 brands. Why the top 60 brands? Because they control 90% of the profit. We rate them on their environmental record and on their human rights record. It's a way for us to dialogue with companies to push them to be more sustainable. It's also a way for our community to see how spending your money with the smaller local brands is a lot better. When you shop from a luxury brand, High Street retailer or fast fashion brand, you know a lot of them are just baked with this exploitation model.
The final piece of our work is really around advocacy. We push for smart policy reform. The last year has really been an incredible year for us. It has been a very hard year with COVID raging on and growing inequities, but we’ve also seen some big wins. It has been one of life’s great honors to help with the Garment Worker Protection Act here in California. It supports the 45,000 predominantly Latina women who made our masks and protective gear during COVID. They now make $14 an hour instead of just $5. There’s power to that.
One of the other campaigns that we're really proud of is our Pay Up campaign. Did you know that at the start of the pandemic, the industry canceled a lot of orders because no one was buying anything? We were all working on Zoom screens, so maybe we were just buying tops but not bottoms. A lot of brands panicked and canceled orders, even though women had already spent hundreds of hours making the products that were already on ships headed to the US and Europe. Our community really rallied. Because of COVID, we couldn't be outside protesting. So we used Instagram and Tik Tok to raise our voices. When all was said and done, we got 22 brands to reverse their decisions. That meant billions of dollars of contracts were reinstated. And it meant workers around the world who were part of that – who couldn't put food on the table or keep the children in school – were finally getting paid for work that they had already done. And so that's two examples of advocacy and smart policy that we’re really proud of.
How can young people get involved with Remake?
You represent the future and we want to build a movement that’s really inclusive and accessible. At a very easy level, you can follow us on Tik Tok or on Instagram. Our handle is RemakeOurWorld and our community creates a lot of content. It's an easy bite-sized way to start to understand the issues.
If you are a change maker and want to be more involved, you can become a Remake ambassador. The application takes five minutes to complete. And what we'll do is essentially match young people who care about these issues with other interested folks in their city.
There are a lot of perks to being an ambassador. We've got a job board. We've got access to resources. We help you develop the leadership skills to become an activist. When we are running campaigns we create ready-to-go kits so that you can write to a brand and write to policymakers.
Those are just some of the ways that young people can be involved.
We believe that we are all citizens first and consumers second. We want to make fashion a force for good. It's not really about buying our way into a sustainable fashion future. We all have too much stuff. It's more about us coming into our power as activists and knowing that our voices matter. That’s the only way for us to get brands and the government to pay attention.
What are some of fashion lovers’ biggest misconceptions or blind spots when it comes to making more responsible choices?
The number one thing I hear is, “My pocketbook cannot afford sustainable fashion. It's very expensive, so I can’t be a part of the movement.” First and foremost, that's a myth. You don't have to buy your way into the movement. There are so many ways for you to show up.
People participate by thrifting and buying second-hand clothes, organizing clothing swaps, calling legislators, or tagging brands on Instagram during one of our campaigns. There are so many ways to be involved.
The other thing I hear often is, “I’m just going to throw away all my fast fashion and only buy good products from now on.” The truth is, the number one most ethical sustainable thing you can do is buy less and buy better. Keep the clothes you have. But make them last by washing them with cold water and hanging them on a line to dry. (Clothes dryers degrade clothes a lot!) If you really want to spruce up your outfits, organize a swap party with your friends. Shopping at local thrift stores and consignment shops is so much better than even the depops and Thread Ups of the world. It is a misconception that you have to be a purist and only buy sustainable fashion.
There’s also a lot of confusion about what makes something a truly sustainable product. This is partly because of all the greenwashing that brands do. Polyester is oil and plastic is plastic. It simply does not degrade in landfills or oceans. You hear a lot about vegan leather, for example. The term “vegan leather” sounds very good. But it's plastic. It’s not going to decompose anywhere. What we need is divestment from the oil and plastic industry.
The bright spot would be for fashion to be a service rather than a disposable good – so much more part of the sharing rental economy. And for clothes that have to be disposed of, you want them to be basically compostable. That means using natural, breathable fibers, which by the way, feel really good on your body as well.
The final myth is this idea that luxury fashion is better than fast fashion. This may be true from a volume standpoint, since fast fashion puts out far more product than the earth can sustain. But when it comes to garment workers, they are both equally guilty. As someone who has spent time in factories, I'd see the luxury Burberry coat side by side with the H&M jacket and the garment workers made the same amount of money. This idea that if I spend more money, the end maker is going to have more money in their pocket, is also a misconception.
If you could travel back in time and give your teenage self a piece of advice, what would that be? Is that the same advice you’d give me now?
When you are a teenager, you worry too much about other people’s perceptions. When you are older and have the luxury of time, you realize that everyone is just dealing with their own stuff. What matters is how you feel about you. I was a very angsty teenager. If I were to sit down with my teenage self, I would tell her that the best is yet to come. You’re going to be all right.
My advice to you? Know your power. You have so much power, even if you sometimes feel disempowered. The boomers left you guys with a hot mess, including a broken political system. As you come into power as activists, remember to have fun along the way. The future is yours to seize.
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