Educational fashion content is coming for school children.
The Red Carpet Green Dress campaign was founded by Suzy Amis Cameron in 2009. The for-profit company RCGD Global, which spun off from the campaign last year, is partnering with Fashion Takes Action in a video series that aims to make young people aware of fashion’s global impact on people and planet.
The news is timely considering nonprofits like Greta Thunberg’s youth-led Fridays for Future are relentlessly championing for change, and Thunberg herself was recently released after being detained during a climate protest against a German mine.
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Since 2014, Fashion Takes Action has accomplished similar aims in its program “My Clothes My World” having educated 30,000 students (fourth grade to 12th grade) across Canada. Just this past November, RCGD Global partnered with The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in a sustainable style code to get stars to dress more sustainably in red carpet moments. The company has been piloting a number of content forms, including an app, aiming to spread awareness on sustainable fashion consumer practices.
The free video series is designed for elementary-level to post-secondary school children and launches Wednesday on Fashionimpacts101.com.
At launch, the educational capsule consists of six short videos that are five to seven minutes long, providing an overview of the key sustainability issues in the fashion industry and how to address them. These include “Introduction to Sustainable Fashion,” “Fashion’s Waste Problem” and “How Much Pollution Are You Wearing?,” among others.
Samata Pattinson, chief executive officer of RCGD Global, captures the project’s importance as “educating future leaders.”
“FTA has been educating youth about the impacts of fashion in Canada since 2014. The need for teachers to talk to students about the topic of sustainable fashion feels more and more necessary as social media is influencing kids to consume younger and younger,” added Kelly Drennan, founding executive director of Fashion Takes Action, in a statement.
Pattinson and Drennan star in the educational videos and will be joined by guest speakers in each episode, which includes a mix of industry experts, influencers and celebrities. Guest speakers include Eva Kruse, group senior vice president of Pangaia (and formerly CEO of Global Fashion Agenda), Remake founder Ayesha Barenblatt and youth sustainability activist Maya Penn, among others.