Slow Fashion - Revive, repair and re-imagine your wardrobe

Zero Waste Victoria presents the Zero Waste Festival online - a festival of hope, action and regeneration!

Our Zero Waste Festival vision is to connect a community of changemakers who are inspired, passionate and empowered about a waste-free future. We generate inclusive conversations to inspire zero-waste actions.

This workshop series will revive and repair your relationship with your wardrobe. With fashion as one of the world’s largest pollutants, Nina Gbor reveals the ugly side of fashion, and where those impulse purchases end up after just one wear. Jenna Flood re-introduces you to the forgotten hero pieces in your wardrobe, with advice on restyling old pieces and eco-fashion. Tamara Russell arms you with the skills to repair and revitalise pieces that deserve a second chance, saving them from landfill. This workshop series will remind you that buying the latest trends isn’t necessary to express your individuality, by creating a bond with the pieces you already have will rekindle your love and be much kinder to the earth.

MC: Jane Milburn, Textile Beat

Jane is a sustainability consultant and author of Slow Clothing: finding meaning in what we wear, a book about living lightly and dressing for health and wellbeing. As an agricultural science graduate, Jane worked for decades as a rural communicator before doing leadership study and establishing Textile Beat. Her forever strategy is to "use what I have to do what I can to ensure a resilient future". She leads conversations about creative and regenerative ways of living at this time of profound change. Her Churchill Fellowship study tour to investigate ways that upcycling can reduce textile waste and enhance wellbeing has been deferred due to the global pandemic. She has switched to a Virtual Churchill called ARISING from Disruption: stories about adaptation, resourcefulness and self-sufficiency.

Nina Gbor, Eco Styles

As the founder of Eco Styles and also Clothes Swap & Style, Nina Gbor is an award-winning sustainability advocate, ethical fashion speaker and eco stylist. In addition to sustainable fashion, Nina also advocates for climate action, poverty alleviation, equality and global female empowerment. She coined the phrase ‘get off the fashion trendmill’ which means individuality should be the premise for consuming clothing, not fashion trends. Nina has a Master’s Degree in International Development and teaches sustainable fashion short courses at RMIT University. She hosts sustainable clothes swaps & restyling workshops as a new system for reducing fashion waste. Nina was awarded Champion of the Year 2018 in the Canberra Women in Business Awards for social impact in sustainability.

Jenna Flood, Ironic Minimalist 

Jenna is a slow fashion stylist, Ironic Minimalist, whose main focus is educating people on issues that surround fast fashion. She advocates for sustainable alternatives such as pre-loved, vintage and clothing made with sustainable practices.

Jenna believes in slowing down our clothing consumption by curating capsule wardrobes and buying for long term investments instead of purchasing on a whim or following short trends. She hopes that in the future, more people invest in the sharing economy by renting or borrowing garments instead of owning them.

Workshop: Building a Core Wardrobe

As a Slow Fashion Stylist, Jenna is passionate about helping people create a wardrobe that works for them. Building a core wardrobe will not only take the stress out of getting dressed, but it will also help you to buy less and buy better.

During the Building a Core Wardrobe Workshop. Jenna will help you identify the hero pieces in your wardrobe, help you build easy outfits and show you how to declutter those unworn pieces responsibly.

Tamara Russell, textile artist and mender

Tamara Russell is a Textile Artist specialising in free machine embroidery, hand stitching and mending. She explores her surroundings and interpret what she see through the medium of embroidery. Her work has been exhibited in the United Kingdom and Australia and operates Kahrina.

Her practice engages with the natural environment recreating the images and shapes in her embroidered works in both 2 and 3D form. Photos are the starting point as she explores the subject matter directly onto fabric, painting with thread. In her work she is able to portray her concerns around social issues including the environment, climate change and the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia. Tamara finds textiles to be a perfect medium for expressing her thoughts using both hand and machine stitching.

Tamara has been making, altering and mending clothes since a teenager, personalising her wardrobe with visible mending and embellishment. Tamara designs workshops to teach you how to mend and revitalise clothing trying to stop them ending up in landfill. Repairing our clothes enables creativity and individuality whilst reducing impact on the environment. By mending our clothes, we create a bond with them ensuring we wear them longer.

With Guest Appearances

Aife O'Loughlin, Salvos

Aife O'Loughlin, Customer Experience Manager for Salvos Stores talks about the op-shop experience during COVID-19, what the new in-store and donation experience looks like and what Salvos Stores have done to expand their offer throughout this time.

Samson Phommachack, Hai Clothing

Hai clothing supports traditional methods of making fabric with minimal waste. Samson, one of the cofounders of Hai clothing (pictured with Courtney Foon, the fellow co-founder) will be sharing about how they do this and work with weavers, makers and textile conservationists in remote villages in Laos (located in Southeast Asia). 

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