Crafting the Future: Bios

Orsola de Castro is a pioneer and internationally recognised opinion leader in Sustainable Fashion. In 1997 she founded From Somewhere, a label designing clothes made entirely from pre-consumer waste: disregarded materials such as surplus and production cut-offs. In 2006 she co-founded the British Fashion Council pioneering initiative Estethica, which she curated until 2014. In 2013, with Carry Somers, she founded Fashion Revolution, marking the disaster in Dhaka, Bangladesh on 24 April 2013, when the Rana Plaza factory collapsed killing and injuring thousands of workers. Raising public awareness of the continuing social and environmental catastrophes in our global fashion supply chains, Fashion Revolution has become a global campaign with participation in over 90 countries around the world. Orsola is a regular key note speaker and mentor, Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College, as well as Central Saint Martins Visiting Fellow and Practitioner in Residence for the Fashion MA.

Rebecca Earley is Professor of Sustainable Fashion Textile Design and co-founder and co-director of the Centre for Circular Design (CCD) at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. She began researching sustainable textile design in 1999 with the Textiles Environment Design (TED) unit at Chelsea, developing design strategies, curating exhibitions, facilitating workshops and creating original materials, models and prototypes. In 2005 she curated the ‘Well Fashioned: Eco Style in the UK’ exhibition, and in 2007 she was nominated as a Morgan Stanley Great Briton for her contribution. Between 2010-2017 she was Director of the Textile Futures Research Centre at Central Saint Martins. Becky now works with organisations to embed sustainable design research – in particular circular design speeds – with clients such as H&M, Filippa K, and VF Corporation. She specialises in creating slow and systemic design solutions for fashion textiles, often using polyester as the base material. She currently works on two Swedish-based projects with Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) – Mistra Future Fashion and Trash-2-Cash – where the guidelines for circular design were first tested and are now being written in full with CCD co-director Dr Kate Goldsworthy.

Marina Spadafora gained a reputation worldwide for her own collection that featured sophisticated knits. Since then she has collaborated with labels such as Prada, Miu Miu and Ferragamo. Marina's work has always included a strong social and environmental focus, believing that ethics and aesthetics can coincide. Her motto is "Fashion with a mission." She has been Creative Director of "Auteurs du Monde," an ethical fashion brand entirely made by producers who belong to the World Fair Trade Organization. Marina has worked closely with the Italian ‘Vogue’ Director Franca Sozzani for Fashion for Development, an initiative that works directly with the United Nations to bring development to emerging economies through fashion. Marina is the Italian Country Coordinator of Fashion Revolution. Marina has received the United Nations Women Together Award in 2015 and has done a TEDx talk on sustainable fashion in 2014. Currently Marina collaborates with Luxury fashion brands to implement responsible strategies in their companies.

Tamsin Lejeune is the founder of the Ethical Fashion Forum (EFF), the global industry body for sustainable fashion, and the CEO of the Ethical Fashion Group and CO (www.commonobjective.co), a platform that helps fashion professionals to do business better. For 12 years Tamsin has been building a global movement in the fashion industry, spanning 141 countries. In 2015, Tamsin was named by LinkedIn as the most engaged woman in UK Fashion and Retail.