The Human Side of Fashion & Lifestyle

Overview

Longevity and craft have long shaped how clothing carries meaning, through repair, inheritance and the quiet continuity of skills passed between generations. Yet in modern fashion systems, garments are increasingly treated as distant, accelerated and disposable. During my postgraduate studies, I became increasingly aware of how easily the systems behind our clothes are abstracted - and how quickly we “other” the people who make them.

The idea for Denude to host this panel began with a simple curiosity: when did it become normal to discard our clothes so easily? For previous generations, such as our mothers and grandparents, garments often carried attachment, repair and memory. Today, clothing moves through our lives far more quickly. We consume rapidly across almost every part of modern life, and fashion has not been immune to that shift. Collections move faster than seasons, garments circulate briefly before disappearing, and the systems behind what we wear are often invisible.

When Denude convened The Human Side of Fashion & Lifestyle: Longevity, Craft & Cultural Meaning, the focus was on restoring the human dimension of what we make, wear and live with. The discussion explored how fashion and lifestyle reconnect with human value through craftsmanship, repair, memory and long-term care, and how practices designed to endure can shape both communities and systems over time.

I opened the conversation with a simple but grounding question: Can you tell us about your earliest memory of clothing, or the moment you first became aware that what we wear carries meaning?

The panel brought together Madhu Vaishnav, Founder of Saheli Women, a social enterprise working with women artisans in rural India producing beautiful non-mass garments. Sanyam Kapur, Growth & Impact Lead at Econock, a circular design studio transforming waste materials into new objects of value, including bags, wine bottle holders and sunglasses cases; and Valentina Marshik, Programme Lead at the United Nations Fashion & Lifestyle Network, a platform convening industry, governments and cultural actors to advance sustainable fashion globally.

For Madhu Vaishnav, Founder of Saheli Women, clothing was never framed as industry. She explained: “Clothes are seen as festival, emotions, love and care.” In her experience, garments are passed down through generations, saris kept for years, inherited from mothers and given to daughters. Longevity, she noted, is part of culture. Sustainability, in her words, is “very simple and very easily achievable” and something practiced daily, long before it became wrapped in “fancy words.”

My own research has examined how sustainability language can sometimes create distance rather than clarity. Terms designed to signal responsibility can actually become highly technical or elitist, contributing to the same “othering” of producers and communities that sustainability aims to address. When the language surrounding clothing becomes abstract, the people and cultures behind it can disappear from view. Madhu’s perspective offered a different framing: sustainability as lived practice rather than terminology.

For Sanyam Kapur, Growth & Impact Lead at Econock, meaning was shaped through childhood visits to a shoemaker in Delhi. While large manufacturing brands were expanding, his father continued to have his shoes made and repaired by one craftsperson. He reflected: “True creativity does not need abundance. It kind of thrives within limits.” A single pair of shoes was reshaped and restored for more than a decade. For him, that memory shaped how he thinks about value today.

For Valentina Marshik, Programme Lead at the United Nations Fashion & Lifestyle Network, meaning came through making. As a child, she became fascinated by Empress Elisabeth of Austria’s (Sisi’s) star dress. With her grandmother, she spent a year sourcing fabrics between Rabat, Morocco, and Vienna, eventually recreating the dress with a seamstress in Casablanca. She explained: “Clothes are not just disposable objects. They are actual pieces of art and they carry memory, intention, craft and so much love.”

Across these stories, longevity was not presented as a trend or a restraint. It was described as relationship, between generations, between maker and wearer, and between material and memory.

Longevity and Stakeholders

As the discussion moved from memory to structure, Madhu reframed longevity through stakeholders. She stressed that we often include consumers, producers and designers in sustainability conversations, but “very easily we forget the earth is also part of our longevity.” In her words, “we need to make sure our earth will first have longevity so that it can be passed to the next generation.” In other words, sustainability cannot begin with garments alone; it begins with the land itself.

Saheli Women began with five women and a small budget in a village without electricity, running water or toilets. Over time, the organisation has trained hundreds of women. Madhu emphasised that female empowerment is central: “If you invest in the woman, she has the power to change an entire village.”

She described how financial empowerment is key, explaining that when a woman earns money, “90% of her money goes back into the family.” For her, fashion is “a very powerful tool to bring the people together” and to share culture and feeling.

One story shared during the panel was about Joti, a Dalit woman who had never attended school. She chose to train in handloom weaving, a process involving thousands of threads that requires precision and counting. After months of training, she travelled to Milan when Saheli Women received recognition. Madhu recounted that during the visa process, Joti could not sign her name and used a thumbprint. The moment reflected both structural barriers and individual capability. It also served as a reminder of how easily systems can obscure the people behind the work and how different the conversation becomes when those individuals are recognised. Transparency, in this sense, becomes one way of resisting that othering, by making the individuals within fashion’s supply chains visible. This is a key part of Denude’s work in addressing the Sustainable Development Goals within the United Nations Fashion and Lifestyle Network.

Beginning with What Was Discarded

Sanyam describes Econock as “a conscious design studio where we design systems that reimagine waste into objects of value and desire.” The company works at the last mile within artisan communities, aiming to embed sustainability without disrupting existing ecosystems.

He explained that the starting point was not waste itself, but what waste revealed. Materials being discarded were “perfectly usable,” yet still heading to landfill. From this observation, Econock has built a model rooted in intelligence rather than volume. He also spoke about global leather waste flows, explaining that while large quantities of leather are repurposed globally, transparency can be lost when materials move through chains of resellers into different countries. At the last mile, marginalised communities often receive mixed waste, salvaging only fractions while the rest pollutes local environments. This distance between where materials are discarded and where their consequences are felt is another form of othering, one that obscures both responsibility and the people living closest to the problem.

He stated clearly: “It’s the last mile where sustainability either succeeds or it absolutely collapses.”

Rather than commissioning new hides, Econock works exclusively with leather offcuts and existing waste, extending the life of materials already in the system. The organisation is also developing next-generation materials and building an upcycled material library, including surfaces made from thread waste, fabric waste and discarded fishing nets recovered from the Indian Ocean.

Platforms and What Is Already Working

Valentina described the role of the United Nations Fashion & Lifestyle Network in recentering craftsmanship, cultural heritage and long-term value by bringing the right actors together and spotlighting solutions already working.

She explained that the network creates a space where governments, civil society, industry and the United Nations system can collaborate and accelerate innovation and knowledge sharing. From her vantage point, she sees designers building repair and longevity into the design process from the start, artisans protecting cultural knowledge while creating livelihoods, and organisations developing tools that make circularity and accountability practical at scale. In her words: “Long-term value is no longer just a niche idea. It is gaining real-time traction.”

Repair, Dignity and Identity

The conversation returned repeatedly to repair and dignity. Repair appeared throughout the discussion not simply as a technical solution, but as a cultural practice, one that preserves skill, care and continuity across generations.

Dignity, however, raises a deeper question. Much of the research surrounding sustainable fashion focuses on materials, supply chains and labour conditions. Yet the idea of dignity also speaks to how people - makers, artisans and workers - are perceived within the systems that produce our clothes.

When garments are treated as disposable, the labour and knowledge behind them can become distant. Restoring a sense of dignity therefore requires more than improving processes; it asks us to reconsider the long-term value we place on the objects we wear and the people who create them.

Exploring that connection between longevity and human value is part of Denude’s ongoing work within the United Nations Fashion & Lifestyle Network, where conversations around sustainability increasingly recognise that one of fashion’s deepest challenges is the distance we create between ourselves and the people who make our clothes - the very “othering” that longevity, transparency and repair begin to address.

Madhu described creating a women-friendly working model - flexible hours, maternity leave, and the ability for mothers to bring children into workspaces. She emphasised that preservation is often a byproduct of giving women the right environment to grow. In this context, sustainability becomes less about distant supply chains and more about the everyday conditions in which people are able to work, create and remain connected to their craft.

She also described natural dye practices, including marigold and indigo, noting observed health benefits and environmental considerations. Speaking of indigo dye baths, she described how calmness and presence are part of the process, reinforcing that craft is embodied and relational.

Sanyam spoke about economic dignity as foundational: “The systems only last when people within them feel secured and valued.” He shared the story of an Econock artisan shortlisted for a national award, who travelled to present his work and later saw his photograph and article in a magazine. The significance was not only financial, but personal - recognition shifted identity. When the individual behind the work becomes visible, the distance that often surrounds fashion production begins to dissolve.

Throughout the panel, one theme was consistent: sustainability is not only material. It is social, economic and human.

Closing Reflections

As the panel closed, each speaker offered one takeaway.

Sanyam reflected that fashion “is about caring for people, for craft and for skills." Valentina noted that “the solutions are already out there” and that innovation across the industry is real and growing. Madhu concluded simply: “It’s possible. It’s possible to change.”

In closing, the reflection returned to care - for mother, for earth, for one another - and to the continuity of knowledge passed between generations. The human side of fashion, as discussed in this conversation, is not about nostalgia. It is about responsibility, dignity and long-term thinking.

For Denude, this discussion marks the beginning of a continued exploration of longevity, culturally, structurally and generationally - and of how fashion can move beyond disposability toward continuity. Because perhaps the real question is not how quickly fashion can move forward, but how much of its human connection we are willing to restore.