Aditi Mayer

Aditi Mayer @aditimayer, is a sustainability activist and visual storyteller who examines the intersection of style, social justice, and sustainability. Through her work, Aditi Mayer challenges the fashion industry’s colonial practices. Amplifies marginalized voices, and explores ancestral wisdom in the Indian handloom industry.

IRK: Aditi Mayer tell us your “Why” 

My journey into sustainable fashion began almost seven years ago during the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh. Rana Plaza framed one of the biggest industrial disasters of human history. An eight-story factory collapse that killed more than 1,132 workers and injured over 2,500. The collapse was not an unpredictable disaster. Structural cracks were identified the day before the building’s collapse. However, due to pressure from upper management, workers were called in to work the next day to finish orders for brands.

Like many in movement spaces, my work began in response to tragedy and loss. Together with the awareness of a fashion system that had long extracted and exploited the global south. But what has kept me going is redefining me work in relation to my love for beauty and culture.

The project of fashion is one of disposability. From the land and labor behind our label to the end garment itself. The response, then, is one of rooting and respect. My work in the fashion space today has been a return to culture, to community building, to personal identity.

IRK: What are you most passionate about with respect to taking care of people and the planet? 

Engaging in movements of reimagination – a reimagination of how our dominant systems can, and should, operate.

IRK: What are some conscious actions you implement in your daily life?

Aditi: My mission as a sustainable fashion blogger is to reorient who gets to lead this movement. Diversifying the voices of sustainable fashion isn’t just to elicit the cosmetic role of “inclusion,”. It is also to diversify the modalities through which we understand what sustainability looks like.

Beyond just talking about the plight of garment workers globally. I decided to draw my efforts to support the resistance of garment workers in Los Angeles. A largely undocumented workforce, whose immigration status is often weaponized in order to prevent them from speaking out.

Beyond just sharing the next ethically made must-have of the season. I decided to create content about opting out of a culture that makes you feel like you constantly need to buy more. Whilst understanding your personal style beyond trends.

And while I still work with luxury sustainable fashion labels, the majority of them are BIPOC- owned. Addressing the need to create solutions that understand the context of regional issues and can present aesthetics that honor cultural craft.

IRK: Aditi what’s your hope for the future of the planet? 

Aditi: I’m often asked what an ideal future of fashion looks like to me. To which I say: Decentralized. ⁣Rooted in regionality. If you follow my work, you’ll know that I argue that our dominant fashion model is colonial in nature

Power is Centralized. Among the world’s richest billionaires are fast fashion CEOs. While their workers, and the landscapes they produce in, continue to suffer.⁣ ⁣ Fabrics and fibers are homogenized. Approximately 60% percent of the fashion we see in stores today is made of polyester. A product of the fossil fuel industry.

Fibers are grown in one country to be shipped across seas to be processed, shipped to another to be cut and sewed. All based on an artificial, man-made, subsidized construction that is the “cheaper” way of doing it. Without paying head to emissions that suffocate our planet. (Reminder that the fashion industry emits more carbon than international flights and maritime shipping combined.)⁣

That’s why one of the key examples of what equitable and resilient systems can look like is decentralized & localized.

Imagine within a 150-mile radius, you have local fibers growing, that are then dyed by native plants. Then constructed by local artisans, and then brought to you, the consumer. It’s a localized system we’ve seen grow in popularity for our food systems, but not so much fashion systems. ⁣ ⁣

The project of fast fashion exists to alienate consumers from what they consume and where it comes from. Which is why decentralization and localization are incredibly important in making supply chains more intimately linked.

IRK: What Sustainable Development Goal do you align with the most? https://sdgs.un.org/goals 

Aditi: SDG 13: Climate Action.