Wise Words from Loomstate’s Sustainability Director

Wise words from the brilliant, charismatic and engaging Rhett Godfrey, Sustainability Director at Loomstate at Saturday’s Manufacture New York Sustainable Textile Summit: Textile Lifecycle Management.

“Can we actually make sustainable clothing–I mean, really sustainable clothing? It’s one thing using dyes which don’t require water or saving energy or having fair trade and so forth. But at the end of the day are we being sustainable in terms of a systems-thinking, sustainability in term of true ecosystem–in terms of supporting peoples traditional skills and supporting cultures and communities that are resilient…

By being able to support and build our communities we are doing the most we can towards creating sustainable structures. Because it is about having personal relationships, it is about having transparency, and involvement of your supply chains and it is about building the type of resiliency that can only come through having tight communities. So that is why I am particularly excited about the work that Bob is doing with Manufacture NY because what they are talking about is creating a manufacturing ecosystem to help to grow the resiliency of the textile and fashion development that happens in New York City. This is a very exciting moment because most of us in the fashion industry don’t have community with the people that make our stuff. We ship it over here we don’t know who makes it, we don’t know who touches it. We don’t know their impacts and we probably never will. But by building community here and by building manufacturing in NYC we can create a true little ecosystem and that is the greatest gift towards sustainability. The point is that sustainability is community. Sustainability isn’t about environmental sustainability it isn’t about social sustainability it’s about the merging of those two plus the important aspects of being human– which is very simple, which is working together in a community of mutual respect for our land for other people and particularly for each other and the connections that we make.”

-Rhett Godfrey, Sustainability Director of Loomstate