Common Interest
<h2>The Unmaking Of: Our contributors</h2>

The Unmaking Of: Our contributors

A project that reflects twenty years can’t be done alone. Over our history, we’ve worked with experts, artists, makers and thinkers across many fields — each bringing their own perspective to the work. The Unmaking Of brings some of these voices together, offering a glimpse into the people and ideas that have shaped Kowtow over the past two decades.

WHAT WOULD THE FASHION INDUSTRY LOOK LIKE IF IT ACTED LIKE A NATURAL ECOSYSTEM?
Lucianne Tonti, investigative fashion journalist and commentator

In the depths of a forest, the floor is covered in lichen and roots that emerge from below the ground. Bird sounds echo, marking the distance between towering trees. The air here is cool and fresh, punctuated by the alternating scents of sweetness and decay. In the forest, nothing is wasted. When a leaf falls to the ground, fungi, microbes and bacteria go to work, turning the leaf into nutrients that feed the soil and enhance it.

The same is true for most ecosystems: in the natural world resources are precious and used judiciously. But despite decades of work to make it more sustainable, the same cannot be said for the fashion industry. Since the invention of fossil-fuel-based synthetic materials, it has increasingly become so mass-produced, cheap and linear, take-make-waste feels a quaint descriptor.

Read the rest of Lucianne’s essay in The Unmaking Of.

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  • LUCIANNE TONTI

  • AMIT NARKE

  • WHITNEY BUACK

"Despite its contradictions, fashion has enormous cultural power. It can over-consume and exhaust the planet - but it can also create meaning, express identity, and build community.

This is where I want to participate: exploring fashion as craft and art, and reconnecting people with the hands and stories behind what they wear."

- Kensa Monroe

FRESH. FOCUSED. FIRED UP.

Kensa Monroe, Whitecliffe College Graduate

How do you feel about creating more clothing as a new designer? Honestly, I often feel conflicted. The scale of production today is overwhelming. Something I think about a lot 
 is how capitalism has distorted the craft of clothing. Quality, ethics, and cultural integrity have diminished. Our relationship to process and longevity has been disrupted. Clothes are consumed with fleeting consideration, and the constant cycles of newness and aggressive marketing have made our connection to them strangely disembodied. We’ve lost intimacy with what we wear – and with those who make it.

Read the rest of Kensa’s article in The Unmaking Of.

Partners in purpose: Purecotz and Kowtow

Amit Narke, owner of Purecotz

Our 2014 meeting with Kowtow felt like destiny. They approached us with a strikingly similar vision: a "win-win" model where business benefits both people and the environment. Kowtow’s belief that clothing should be able to return to nature resonated with me instantly. At Purecotz, minimising plastic was already a personal focus, inspired by my wife Monisha’s work in waste management and our time spent trekking through the countryside, where we’ve seen the devastation of plastic firsthand.

Transitioning to 100% natural inputs was a complete technical overhaul. In the sewing room, switching to cotton threads was our greatest challenge; because polyester is the industry standard for strength, we had to retrain our tailors and adjust machine tensions and speeds to ensure the seams remained beautiful and durable. While sourcing shell, wood, and metal trims was smoother, every small embellishment became a journey of discovery.

Read the rest of Amit’s essay in The Unmaking Of.

The End of Trends
Whitney Bauck, climate and environment journalist

Walking down Jamestown beach in Accra, Ghana, the sand is studded with what might appear to be brightly coloured, patterned rocks. Get a little closer, though, and they seem to warp before your eyes. One sprouts a sleeve; another, a waistband. These are not rocks, you realise. They’re clothes. 

These clothes have made an arduous journey to end up here: produced by a massive clothing company, sold to a customer in the Global North, worn a few times, perhaps, then dropped off at a secondhand shop. When they didn’t sell, they were passed along to an exporter, who put the clothes in bales. Those bales were bought by an importer here in Ghana, who sold them to a one-person retailer in the secondhand market. When individual garments didn’t sell, they were thrown out as waste, maybe ending up in the dump that borders the lagoon. Then it rained, and some part of the hill of that dump eroded and a landslide of clothes slid into the water, was pulled out by the tide into the ocean, and then pushed by a different tide up onto this beach.

Read the rest of Whitney’s essay in The Unmaking Of.

See more from our contributors

Lucianne Tonti / Kensa Monroe / Amit Narke / Whitney Bauck
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