NEW YORK — Sustainability is a hot topic in fashion and one that Heron Preston and other executives took on during a panel discussion at the Depop Live pop-up in SoHo over the weekend.
Everybody World cofounder Iris Alonzo took the claim further, using T-shirts as an example. “A T-shirt is half a pound, so in theory that’s 800 million T-shirts.”The hourlong session, entitled “Can Fashion Save the World,” was hosted by the peer-to-peer shopping app and was intended to raise awareness among the Gen Z audience, whose members account for the majority of Depop’s 13 million active global users — 5 million of which are in the U.S.
The London-based Depop recently raised $62 million in Series C funding to expand in the U.S. Raga said the plans are in their early stages, but she sees a possible return of Depop Live. “It has the potential to go to other cities in the country, but we have to see how it goes,” she said. “The biggest problem is in the production of your clothes,” he explained. “Once you start to scale and sell a lot of T-shirts around the world, you really want to start to challenge what kind of cotton am I really using? We can say we’re using organic cotton, but is that organic cotton that’s being grown and mixed with conventional cotton?”