Tech alone won’t save fashion. But what if craft could?

Hey there! Here’s a toxic idea promoted by some powerful people in fashion: We’re simply one innovation away from fixing all of our problems. The argument goes that we don’t need to change how we shop; we simply need to wait until the next tech or material innovation saves us. Fast fashion brands eagerly advertise pilot programs and startup innovations without changing anything else.

That’s not to diss legitimate innovations; investments in novel materials, for instance, are key if we want to rely on less plastic and fewer animal-derived materials. But fibre innovations do not alone change the underlying system or our role in it. 

What could change the system? Craft, argues Safia Minney, who spoke to JD for this week’s examination of the solutions that already exist to fix fashion’s mess — if we take them seriously, that is.

Thanks for reading,

JD and Amy

Identifying fashion's problems is easy. It’s not hard to demonstrate how the industry’s exploitative model, from the poverty wages to the waste visible from space, is unsustainable. But what about envisioning an alternative? What about proposing a system that respects planetary boundaries and dignifies the artisans who stitch our clothes? The ultra-rich men who benefit from business-as-usual repeatedly suggest that’s simply too hard, too utopian, too costly. Safia Minney wants you to know how wrong they are. 

The fashion system many of us grew up with is a blip. A decades-old project in labour exploitation and cheap fossil fuel fibres that we've been conditioned to see as inevitable. 

Craft, on the other hand, is ancient. Hand weaving is India’s second-largest employer after agriculture, supporting over three million workers, the majority of them women. It's a labour model with radically different carbon, social, and economic implications than industrial manufacturing. And according to Minney, who chaired a symposium on the topic at London's Conway Hall in September, it's also a realistic vision for the future.

You might know Minney from The True Cost documentary. She founded People Tree in 1995, promoting Fair Trade fashion before the term meant much to most consumers. She's published numerous books. In 2022, she launched Fashion Declares, which calls for a 75% reduction in fashion production. Most recently, in 2025, she founded her latest brand Indilisi.

When I called her up, she was at home outside London, in a converted 1907 post office, tending to her garden between talks. Her mother had recently passed, and she was in a reflective mood about legacy, about what we're put on the earth to do.

I wanted to understand why craft keeps getting dismissed as too small, too slow, too "other" to matter. Why the solutions that already exist get ignored in favour of tech fixes that never arrive. Why the knowledge systems of the Majority World are treated as quaint while the industry burns. Here’s what Minney had to say:

JS: You chaired the symposium “Crafting Regenerative Fashion and Textile Futures” in September. For readers who might hear "craft" and think Etsy, what does craft actually mean in this context?

SM: We recognise that we're in a climate, ecological, and social emergency, and that every sector needs to change. Fashion needs to slow down production. Researchers suggest we need to cut production by 75% or more.

I've been working in this space for thirty years, with my work at People Tree, now with Indilisi and Fashion Declares, and as an author. For me, it's always been clear that craft is the way to slow down fashion, to spread income into economically disadvantaged areas in the Global South.

But it's also a massive positive because it revives traditional skills. I consider small-scale organic cotton farming a craft, too. These crafts can regenerate soils, nature, ecosystems, communities.

This notion that doing things by hand has fallen out of fashion for the last forty or fifty years? It was absolutely central to any economy before that. We need to revive these traditional craft skills.

JS: To help readers visualise what we're talking about — weaving, block printing — which crafts were central to the symposium?