Published
Type
TALK + DIALOGUE
Hope in the World of Fashion
Hope in the World of Fashion
TALK + DIALOGUE / EBBF / 2026
How do we stay hopeful when the system we are trying to change is bigger than any one person, company or technology?
01 / REORIENTING TOWARDS HOPE - GREECE
Greece
At ebbf’s annual conference, Reorienting Towards Hope, I used fashion as a lens for exploring how hope can coexist with an honest reading of reality.
The industry offers no shortage of reasons for concern: extractive supply chains, vast material waste, the difficult economics of scaling emerging solutions, and a history in which the social and environmental costs of production have often been pushed out of sight.
But seeing a system clearly is not the same as surrendering to it. It can be the beginning of agency.
02 / SUSTAINING HOPE
From presentation to dialogue
A few months later, ebbf invited me back to revisit the ideas through an online interactive dialogue.
The format became more participatory. People brought questions about regulation, consumer responsibility, emerging technology and their own experiences trying to build businesses differently.
Rather than presenting circularity as a finished answer, we explored it as a way of seeing relationships more clearly: between what we buy and where it came from, between an innovation and the market conditions required for it to scale, and between individual choices and the structures around them.
Hope is agency, not certainty.
Hope does not require believing that one solution will fix everything. It begins with recognizing that each of us has influence over some meaningful part of the system, and that those actions can reinforce one another.
The work is not to carry the whole system alone. It is to see our place within it clearly enough to act.
THREE TAKEAWAYS:
01 / SEE THE SYSTEM
Move from blame to understanding.
A system is a set of connected people, materials, incentives and habits. Changing outcomes starts with seeing the conditions that keep reproducing them.
02 / STAY CURIOUS
Complexity is an invitation to ask better questions.
Where was this made? What conditions shaped it? What happens next? Curiosity can move us beyond guilt without letting us retreat into apathy.
03 / ACT WHERE YOU HAVE AGENCY
Individual and systemic change have to move together.
A person needs systems that make better choices possible. Innovations need markets willing to adopt them. Policy, business, technology and culture reinforce one another.
What sustains the work?
Crisis can make us pay attention. But crisis alone rarely sustains decades of difficult work.
Beauty, curiosity and love can.
There is joy in solving hard problems, understanding materials, learning across disciplines and watching people slowly develop a shared language for change.
Hope begins when complexity stops being a reason for paralysis and becomes a reason to participate.
TALK + DIALOGUE / EBBF / 2026
How do we stay hopeful when the system we are trying to change is bigger than any one person, company or technology?
01 / REORIENTING TOWARDS HOPE - GREECE
Greece
At ebbf’s annual conference, Reorienting Towards Hope, I used fashion as a lens for exploring how hope can coexist with an honest reading of reality.
The industry offers no shortage of reasons for concern: extractive supply chains, vast material waste, the difficult economics of scaling emerging solutions, and a history in which the social and environmental costs of production have often been pushed out of sight.
But seeing a system clearly is not the same as surrendering to it. It can be the beginning of agency.
02 / SUSTAINING HOPE
From presentation to dialogue
A few months later, ebbf invited me back to revisit the ideas through an online interactive dialogue.
The format became more participatory. People brought questions about regulation, consumer responsibility, emerging technology and their own experiences trying to build businesses differently.
Rather than presenting circularity as a finished answer, we explored it as a way of seeing relationships more clearly: between what we buy and where it came from, between an innovation and the market conditions required for it to scale, and between individual choices and the structures around them.
Hope is agency, not certainty.
Hope does not require believing that one solution will fix everything. It begins with recognizing that each of us has influence over some meaningful part of the system, and that those actions can reinforce one another.
The work is not to carry the whole system alone. It is to see our place within it clearly enough to act.
THREE TAKEAWAYS:
01 / SEE THE SYSTEM
Move from blame to understanding.
A system is a set of connected people, materials, incentives and habits. Changing outcomes starts with seeing the conditions that keep reproducing them.
02 / STAY CURIOUS
Complexity is an invitation to ask better questions.
Where was this made? What conditions shaped it? What happens next? Curiosity can move us beyond guilt without letting us retreat into apathy.
03 / ACT WHERE YOU HAVE AGENCY
Individual and systemic change have to move together.
A person needs systems that make better choices possible. Innovations need markets willing to adopt them. Policy, business, technology and culture reinforce one another.
What sustains the work?
Crisis can make us pay attention. But crisis alone rarely sustains decades of difficult work.
Beauty, curiosity and love can.
There is joy in solving hard problems, understanding materials, learning across disciplines and watching people slowly develop a shared language for change.
Hope begins when complexity stops being a reason for paralysis and becomes a reason to participate.
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