Arts & Fashion
Female leaders
Safia Minney MBE, founder of Fashion Declares and REAL Sustainability, on why female leadership is essential for a just transition.
8 March 2023
This article first appeared in our World Environment Day 2026 issue of My Green Pod Magazine, published 05 June 2026. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
Main image: Model wears Indilisi. Credit Steve Nyman / Indilisi
Dr Safia Minney MBE is no stranger to ethical fashion; author of nine books on human and environmental exploitation in the fashion industry, she is also the founder of sustainable challenger brands Global Village and People Tree, which she launched in Japan and brought to the UK in 2000.
Last year Safia built on her experience and success with the launch of Indilisi, a new artisan fashion label boasting timeless and luxurious clothes made from 100% GOTS-certified organic, handwoven materials. Each piece is designed to withstand trends instead of adding to the cycle of fast fashion.
‘We should all be buying less, and reducing from 40 new garments a year to five’, Safia tells us. ‘If we made just one of those five garments handcrafted, and bought it through a social enterprise, we could transform the fashion industry, bit by bit. Every fashion item should empower, not exploit – and regenerate our natural world.’
For Safia, this inherent power is why fashion, when done right, can be a tool for change.
Safia, a self-confessed ‘organic farming nut’, is a passionate advocate of fabrics derived from organic processes, as they promote soil, food, biodiversity and planetary health.
‘Fashion can help communities work in harmony with the natural world and support healthy soils and biodiversity on their land’, she tells us. ‘We should listen to farmers. They are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to understanding the impacts of climate change.’
In addition to supporting environmental and human health, clothes made from 100% certified-organic cotton also feel great to touch and wear. ‘They breathe with you and wash well’, Safia explains. ‘People tell me that they are not used to ‘real’ fabrics any more; they are blown away by the fabric quality when they see and touch Indilisi products in a store.’
With Indilisi, Safia’s goal is to demonstrate that by using traditional crafts – such as organic cotton growing, handweaving, hand embroidery and hand knitting – fashion can revive artisan skills and create livelihoods for rural people. ‘For me, 100% handcrafted clothing has the power to lead a just transition in the textile and clothing industry’, Safia explains. ‘That’s what I’m trying to prove – in my small way!’
Yet Safia recognises that a skills revival alone won’t be enough to shift the dial; while providing decent, dignified work for millions of handweavers and craftspeople around the world, we must also radically curtail the production of new fashion.
‘Some people are switching to secondhand clothes, yet many are still addicted to fast fashion and ultra fashion’, she says. ‘Consumption has become a mental illness, and we need to help people gently through recovery.’
Regulation could help curb the tide of fast fashion, but the UK lacks a coherent framework to regulate fashion and textiles.
In 2022 Safia founded Fashion Declares as a way to effect positive change in the broader fashion industry, and recently launched the white paper ‘The Future of Fashion in the UK’ as a way to address the policy gap.
‘We can’t expect businesses to honour human rights and national environmental laws – if they did then we wouldn’t be in the mess that we are in’, Safia tells us. ‘We need high-street brands to demand regulation, too’.
This is why Fashion Declares runs carbon literacy training for fashion practitioners – including buyers, marketing, ops and legal teams as well as designers themselves. ‘We work with a broad range of household names – from Dr Martens to John Lewis – as well as small brands that are just starting out’, Safia tells us. ‘We also run events and conferences that are specifically designed to encourage dialogue and shift the Overton window.’
For Safia, product and systems change must go hand in hand; this is why she is determined to keep up her activism while creating beautiful, fair and ethical fashion.
‘People are jaded by luxury brands that often rely on modern-day slavery and bad environmental practices’, she says. ‘People increasingly feel duped. It’s great to see the global craft trend growing but it’s crucial that craftspeople are paid fair prices and receive living wages.’
With Indilisi you get to be a part of this change, and to wear the story of the people who have made what you wear. ’That’s very magical to me’, Safia shares. ‘We urgently need a less extractive, exploitative way of doing fashion, and I hope Indilisi will show that this is possible.’
Safia Minney MBE, founder of Fashion Declares and REAL Sustainability, on why female leadership is essential for a just transition.
Safia Minney MBE on why business and finance need to go beyond ESG.
