This autumn we are delighted to be working with Kim Polgreen, LCON member and sustainable fashion enthusiast, and teachers and students from three north Oxford schools, on a project to highlight the thrills available from creating your own fashion by shopping second hand: a second hand fashion photo shoot to raise awareness of sustainable fashion.
 
Kim is an Oxford-based freelance sustainability educator, running events for young people to enthuse them about a sustainable future. She is Youth Educator in Residence at Wytham Woods, Oxford University’s research woodland, and runs an annual summer school for teenagers at the University’s Environmental Change Institute.

The schools involved are The Cherwell School, Oxford High School and St Clare’s College and we are really grateful to the teachers who are so generously giving their time and enthusiasm to make this project happen. We are also so grateful to Janet at the Oxfam shop in Summertown who is letting us have access to piles of donated clothes, and to staff at Oxfam head office who are supporting us with resources and encouragement. And we are thrilled that the Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History has agreed to let us do our fashion shoot amongst their dinosaurs – highlighting extinction!

The shoot takes place on 6 November, the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice, also coinciding with COP26. Once the photos are taken the students will reconvene to create posters on sustainable fashion using their photos, and feed back what they have learned to their schools. LCON will help publicise the posters and messages more widely.

We hope the project will be exciting and fun, and engage a wide range of people in a growing movement to bend the trend from fast to sustainable fashion.