Hot Buttons is a show about the future of fashion and culture on a changing planet. Each week, Christina Binkley, Rachel Kibbe, and Shilla Kim-Parker unwind the breaking news, industry moves, cultural trends, and tech breakthroughs that are shaping sustainable fashion. The fashion industry is one of the world’s biggest polluters. Can we change it?
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Synthetic biology, clean chemistry, and beauty, oh my!
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This week we look at the role of biotech in the beauty industry. It promises the ability to program and design molecules that can be less toxic, more sustainable, and customizable in everything from moisturizer to perfume. Our guest this episode is Dr. Sunil Chandran, chief science officer and head of R&D at Amyris, a company using the tools of syn…
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Gisele Fetterman to the rescue! Mom, founder, firefighter and thrifter
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We wanted a minute of Gisele Fetterman’s time to hear about her advocacy work, how she champions thrifting and vintage, and what she learned from last year’s bruising campaign on behalf of her husband, Senator John Fetterman. But we got so much more! Gisele gave us the inside scoop on the culture of Capitol Hill, her work on behalf of those in need…
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The truth about vegan leather, organic cotton, and cow farts
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This week, we’ve decided the best way to understand claims of sustainable textiles and leather is to step outside the fashion universe and go straight to someone who lives at the source: in food, agriculture and climate. Tamar Haspel is the host of our sister podcast here at Post Script Media, Climavores, and is one of the more delightful people yo…
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Finding hope for sustainable fashion in 2023
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Happy New Year! We’re back with our review of 2022, and predictions for 2023. But first, we have to say goodbye to Dame Vivienne Westwood, and take a few more shots at Balenciaga for what can only be described as a rather cowardly approach to repairing their brand. There was a lot to like about climate and sustainability progress in 2022, and we’re…
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It’s beginning to look a lot like over-consumption season; the predatory side of women’s fashion; and… compostable underwear?
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It’s the end of the year, and our listeners have been asking questions: What does it mean that menswear is often made with better materials than womenswear? How do we kick the overconsumption habit when it’s so baked into our culture? And is underwear compostable? Lizzo blows up Twitter wanting to know. Have a question for Christina, Rachel and Shi…
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Charles Conn, Board Chair of Patagonia, on the company’s past and future
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This week, Charles Conn, Chair of the Board of Directors at Patagonia joins us to share his story of how the company made the landmark decision to “make Earth its only shareholder.” This was news not just in the apparel industry, but everywhere. Patagonia had been private its entire existence, and as its founder Yvon Chouinard looked to step away, …
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DressX has designs on fashion's digital future
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We want your feedback! Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 Patagonia gift card. This week, we’re setting our news feeds aside and spending our time with Natalia Modenova of DressX, a multi-brand retailer and innovator for Web3. If you’ve followed digital fashion at all lately, you’ve definitely heard of DressX. Since 2019 they’v…
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Balenciaga makes a bad move worse, Raf ends his label’s run, and COP27 mostly disappoints
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We want your feedback! Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 Patagonia gift card. First, we have to talk about Balenciaga. If you type “Balenciaga child porn” into Google right now, you get 2.6 million hits. That is not good and they have only themselves to blame for an ad campaign that posed toddlers with bondage-themed plushie b…
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“Fast furniture” is clogging up landfills, Leo likes vegan shoes, and fashion is a bummer at COP27
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It’s COP27 week, so we look at how well the fashion industry is doing keeping its promise to dramatically reduce emissions. A recent report from Stand.earth gives most major brands a failing grade and shows how much work they still have to do to clean up their supply chains. We also look at how some luxury brands are embracing the digital ID as a w…
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The latest food group is the micro plastics we’re wearing — and digesting
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This week, we’re talking about microplastics and what they’re doing to the environment and our bodies. We’ve heard plenty about the giant plastic trash island out in the Pacific and beaches across the globe littered with plastic bottles and bags. But we’re talking about plastic microfibers, the ones that make up the majority of apparel produced tod…
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Made In the USA: American Giant’s Immortal Hoodies; Canceling Ye; Amazon Does Resale
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This week, we’re talking with Bayard Winthrop, CEO of American Giant. Bayard’s journey as the founder of an apparel company obsessively committed to sourcing domestically has resonated with the industry and with us. We talk with him about his journey over the past 11 years, what he’s learned about sustainability in this market, and where he sees op…
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Treet CEO Jake Disraeli joins to talk Shein Exchange; and Shein's labor practices exposed
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It was a busy news week in sustainable fashion, and Shein once again sucked all the oxygen out of the room. From being fined for a data breach to suffering a damaging investigation into its treatment of workers to announcing a peer-to-peer resale platform powered by Treet, the fast fashion powerhouse popped up everywhere. We talk with Jake Disraeli…
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Walmart is getting serious about apparel made in USA
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We don’t always talk about haute couture; this week we’re taking a look at the new deal between Classic Fashion and Walmart, which will exclusively supply Walmart with cut-and-sewn apparel from a new production facility outside of Los Angeles. It’s a positive sign in a market that has spent too much energy offshoring garment work. We also take yet …
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Is sustainability in menswear any different?
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Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism. This week we’re responding to listener questions, and the first ones are from men: how is sustainable fashion different in men’s and women’s apparel? How has men’s fashion evolved ove…
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Ultra-luxury resale is part investment, part sustainability
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This week, Secondhand September takes us all the way to the top of the fashion resale market: ultra-luxury. And we have questions. Is it a sustainability play? Is it an investment market akin to fine art? How do you police fraud? We talk with Sarah Davis, founder and president of Fashionphile, a re-commerce platform for high-end accessories to get …
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Patagonia’s radical business move for climate
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Secondhand September is going strong here on Hot Buttons. And this week, we’re talking with social media activist and slow-fashion advocate, Venetia La Manna. She’s a prominent voice of the slow fashion movement, and has lots to say about how we interact with fashion, whether celebrity partnerships with fast fashion brands can ever have a sustainab…
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Big brands are entering the resale market with “pre-loved” merchandise
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Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism. It’s Secondhand September, and we’re here to dive in. All this month we’re talking with experts and offering up some of our own insights into how the resale market is evolving. This w…
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In this episode, we’re loving on fashion weeks. And not just the Fab Four of New York, London, Paris and Milan. Before these even kick off, Copenhagen fashion week had everyone talking earlier this summer. The combination of Scandinavian designers, a focus on sustainability, and a mix of digital and live events made it a contender to join the big E…
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Gen Z is driving the fast fashion machine. Seventy-two percent of college students say they have shopped fast fashion in the past year, and 40% say they scroll fast fashion sites and apps at least once a day. For many, it’s an addiction. But this generation of 20-somethings is also more concerned about sustainability, climate change, and workers’ r…
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One way to curb overproduction of clothing is to keep the clothes we have longer. It’s an old-fashioned solution but a simple one: instead of tossing worn and torn clothes in the trash, repair them. Major outdoor apparel brands have embraced repairs as a way to stay close to their customers, and luxury brands have long offered repairs as a service …
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This week, we’re talking about returns. The more we shop, the more we return. And the more we shop online, the worse it gets. Retailers have embraced easy, free returns as a way to grab market share, but it’s coming at a cost to the companies and the planet. We’ll look at just how bad the data is, talk about what can be done to manage returns, and …
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Putting beauty products under the microscope
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This week, we take our first look at the beauty industry – skin care, cosmetics, hair care, and wellness supplements – and find it wanting. Kim Kardashian’s line of skincare, SKKN, got off to a bumpy start with lots of social media backlash around its packaging. And many others make claims around sustainable ingredients that don’t hold up to scruti…
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H&M has an uphill battle to be taken seriously as a sustainable fashion brand, and last week it got even worse. Quartz published an investigation into H&M’s use of an environmental impact scorecard to misrepresent the sustainability of its clothing lines, finding the company used faulty data to make claims that were patently false. Not a good look …
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Metaverse fashion is framed as a sustainability play. Is it?
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The metaverse became a household term after Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta, and Fortnite gamers started attending virtual concerts wearing Balenciaga hoodies. And now the utopian web3 vision has come for fashion. Brands are framing their digital clothes, shoes, and accessories as a sustainability play. This week, Christina, Rachel, and …
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This week, we’re talking about plastic fashion. Your Instagram and TikTok feed are probably littered with feel-good ads for clothes and shoes made from recycled bottles. But they aren’t the solution you think. Then, it’s a new world for brands doing business with China. America’s crackdown on forced labor is twisting supply chains putting brands in…
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The trillion-dollar climate gap in fashion
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Last fall, the Apparel Impact Institute and Fashion for Good mapped out what it would take to cut fashion’s carbon emissions by half by 2030, and hit net-zero by 2050. Those are goals identified by the UN fashion charter in 2018. Their conclusion: we’ll need $1 trillion to get there. This week, we’ll ask: where will that money come from? Then, as s…
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Unpacking fashion’s complicated impact on the planet
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For the first topic of our first episode, we are asking a simple question: what is fashion’s actual impact on the environment? We know the environmental impact of fashion is vast. But has it been properly quantified? It turns out, no. And that’s a problem for figuring out how to fix it. Then, we turn to the most visible problem in the fashion indus…
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Trailer: Is fashion fit for the future? We need to talk about it.
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There’s no turning away from today’s reality: the demand for sustainability has come for the fashion industry. Christina Binkley, Rachel Kibbe, and Shilla Kim-Parker are here to talk about it. Hot Buttons features weekly observations and lively debate about the future of the fashion industry as it reckons with its impact on the climate, natural res…
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