"The Eco-Friendly Fashions Podcast" With Ziyi Yuan

On June 26th 2020, Emilia Ferrara was featured on the inaugural episode of “The Eco-Friendly Fashions Podcast” with Ziyi Yuan. The discussion explored Ferrara’s career in fashion, the relationship between clothes and the environment, and why sustainability matters to the global fashion industry.

Original episode can be found here. Podcast and transcription below.

TRANSCRIPT:

ZIYI YUAN: Hi there, I’m your host Ziyi Yuan. Clothing is both a necessity and a creative outlet. But fashion is also a big polluter of our planet. Designers today want to create more durable fashions and to reduce waste. Join me, Eco-Friendly Fashions, as we explore the changing future of the fashion industry. And here’s an eco-friendly fashions consumer sharing her thoughts:

THE CONSUMER: I believe eco-friendly fashion and I like vintage. They both have classic looks and sustainable which can protect environment.

ZIYI YUAN: For this week’s show, you will hear my chat with Emilia Ferrara. Emilia is the founder and editor of Capitally Magazine, an online publication covering sustainable fashion, clean beauty and wellness in Washington D.C. She’s an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University and teaches “Fashion Journalism.” And she is also a former board member of the D.C. Sustainable Fashion Collective. This show will explore the relation between the fashion and environment.  We will cover fashion publication and industry. This is how Emilia defines sustainable fashions.

EMILIA FERRARA: One of the first definition of eco-friendly fashion is use the fashion. The most eco-friendly fashion is the fashion that’s already in the ecosystem.

ZIYI YUAN: Stay tuned for my conversation with Emilia, we talk about as a fashion journalist why she thinks sustainability is important for fashion industry, why did her family history with fashion industry affect her deeply, and how she explains the common myths of eco-friendly fashions. You don’t want to miss it, here is our conversation. Hi Emilia, Welcome to Eco-Friendly Fashions Podcast! Thank you so much for join me!

EMILIA FERRARA: Hi, Ziyi! You know I have to tell you that your name reminds me of a Spice Girls song when they sing Wanna Be My Lover. And she goes “zigazig ah” at the end of the song. So I love the Spice Girls. That’s what your name reminds me of. Oh, my gosh, I love the Spice Girls. I’m so happy to talk to you today, how are you doing?

ZIYI YUAN: I’m great and excited to talk to you today. How are you?

EMILIA FERRARA: Great. Thank you so much for inviting me on your podcast. Thank you so much for inviting me to talk about sustainable fashion. It’s my honor to be with you. And thank you so much for inviting me to have this chat about where sustainable fashion is today.

ZIYI YUAN: It’s my pleasure to have you. So, the first question, how long have you been a fashion journalist and editor?

EMILIA FERRARA: I started reporting on fashion when I was still a student in college. I had a summer internship between my freshman and sophomore year and I went to this very impressive building, the Hearst Building in New York City, and went all the way up the escalator and all the way up the elevator to Cosmo Girl, which was at the time cosmopolitans version of Teen Vogue, was there Cosmopolitans Teen Magazine. So that was my first job working as fashion journalism. I have been a fashion journalist for 13 years. My first experience as an editor was actually not in fashion. I was managing editor of The New York Observer, which is a midsize newspaper in New York City of a long reputation. And I was the managing editor for magazines and all magazine supplements. So that was my first experience as an editor. And I was an editorial consultant at Washingtonian magazine, which means that I was really sort of giving analysis to the editor in chief and that on occasion involved editing articles rarely. It more was a job that required editing the entire magazine as an experience, editing the flow of the magazine, deciding which should be in the front, in the middle and the back, sort of editing the experience of the reader in order to successfully absorb the brand and essence the brand. So it wasn’t until I was editor in chief of my own publication that I became sort of a proper magazine editor or a proper fashion editor. And that was in 2016.

ZIYI YUAN: So, what compelled you to get into eco-friendly fashions, because the fashion industry is a very competitive one under the best of circumstances?

EMILIA FERRARA: You know, it didn’t really feel like a choice. It felt like a natural evolution. First of all, I don’t consider myself necessarily an eco-fashion journalist. I am a sustainable fashion journalist. But that’s because I define sustainable in a very broad way. So, on there’s a spectrum of how you define sustainable fashion. And at one end of the spectrum, you‘re looking at the earth. You’re looking at the planet, you’re analyzing stories from a biological and chemical point of view, where you’re analyzing soil, soil composition, regenerative farming, impacts on the water systems, impacts on the air. And you’re actually a sustainable fashion journalist through the lens of being a science journalist. So that’s sort of the first definition of sustainable fashion, there’s a spectrum. And when you go down that spectrum, you actually can find that being a sustainable fashion journalist also means reporting on civil rights and reporting on how it’s possible for fashion companies and the fashion industry, not just designers and fashion houses, but fashion media and the like can treat their workers in a fair way and in a healthy way. The reason that I had such an interest in fashion was from my family, specifically from my father. So my father’s family has a long history in the fashion industry of Italy specifically, and also the fashion industry of New York. The process of dyeing leather is can be a dangerous one. There are tons of chemicals involved and obviously the machinery of cutting the gloves and they were experts in this. But the factory on the Bay of Naples was set up in a particular way that they were able to sort of not be in danger from the way they did it. However, when my ancestors immigrated from Italy to the United States recreating their trade became incredibly dangerous. They were Italian immigrants rather to New York lived in New York City for a time, but actually established themselves in upstate New York, which was a very important component of fashion industry at the time in the early 20th century. And they actually helped establish a town in upstate New York called Gloversville because it was all Italian immigrant workers making gloves taking their trade from Italy and trying to recreate their lives. Now, sadly, that part of upstate New York is ridden with poisonous materials and poisonous chemicals because the process of actually dying gloves and having to recreate their craft when you don’t have a  body of water like the Bay of Naples at your disposal became very dangerous. So the chemicals in the soil became very dangerous. The chemicals in the creeks in their area became very dangerous, not just in terms of the environment and making it inhabitable land, but also a lot of family illnesses sadly in my family due to chromium poisoning. So I had no idea growing up when I was hearing these stories 20 years ago that my family was the prime example of why we needed a sustainable fashion movement. I have no idea. I had, I absolutely did not put those two things together until much later on in my career when I was working at a magazine called T Magazine in New York City, which is the New York Times Style magazine, preeminent excellent publication for fashion journalism. I realized that there’re all of these sicknesses with the fashion industry that no one inside the bubble was addressing, and that is when I discovered the sustainable fashion movement. I would say I found it to be the answer to the problems and the lack of reporting that I saw coming out of mainstream fashion journalism. But I would say the reason I got into it was because I saw the example of what my family members had gone through, and I wanted to do the work to help hold the fashion industry accountable for not making mistakes like this in the future.

ZIYI YUAN: But, now not many people know about sustainable fashion, are there common myths about eco-friendly fashions, and what are they?

EMILIA FERRARA: I would say the biggest myth about sustainable fashion is that it’s always gonna be more expensive. One of the first definitions of eco-friendly fashion is use the fashion. The most eco-friendly fashion is the fashion that’s already in the ecosystem. So if we have a fashion industry that is absolutely seamless and perfect at absorbing wasted textile and unused textile and putting it back into use, then we have a sustainable and eco-friendly fashion industry without actually producing anything new.

ZIYI YUAN: So, the clothes and the fabric can reusable to decrease more pollution in the fashion industry. However, now in the pandemic, has the crisis in any way helped or hurt the eco-friendly fashion industry?

EMILIA FERRARA: It’s definitely hurt it in certain ways in the sense that we very much rely on transparency as sustainable fashion journalists. One of my peers, who I very much look up to do is Whitney Bauck, and she is the sustainable fashion editor for fashion stuff. And, you know, my role as a sustainable fashion journalist is very very different from Whitney’s. Whitney is very much on the ground and she’s an in-depth investigative reporter. And what Whitney needs to do her job is transparency. So in a world pandemic, she cannot hop on a plane and go to Bangladesh and investigate factories that Nike and Walmart are using right? So I do believe that the pandemic has sort of shut down many journalists’ ability to report the truth and to have transparency and to give transparency to the public.

ZIYI YUAN: Emilia, thank you so much for joining Eco-Friendly Fashions Podcast. That’s for this week. Thank you so much for listening to Eco-Friendly Fashions Podcast. Thank you to Emilia for coming to Eco-Friendly Fashions Podcast for sharing her story with us! Hope you enjoy the conversation today!