Carry Somers

Fashion Revolution

Somers is founder of Fashion Revolution, a global movement which arose from the Rana Plaza garment factory disaster in Bangladesh on 24 April 2013.^[5][6][7][8] Fashion Revolution is now recognised as the world's largest fashion activism movement. ^[9] Fashion Revolution Day takes place globally on 24 April each year and since 2016 has grown into Fashion Revolution Week.^[10] In 2017, 2 million people engaged with Fashion Revolution Week, with 1000 events around the world. ^[11][12]

Somers organised roundtable debates at the House of Commons and the House of Lords on ethics, sustainability and transparency in the fashion supply chain including Fashion Question Time ^[13] in February 2015 and April 2016 and 2017, and Ethical Fashion 2020:a New Vision for Transparency ^[14] in June 2015. Fashion Revolution Somers speaks nationally ^[15][16] and internationally ^{[17][18][19][20][21][22][23]} about transparency, human rights and environmental issues in the fashion supply chain.

Fashion Revolution works all year round to highlight the need for greater transparency in fashion supply chains as a means to creating a more socially and environmentally responsible industry. In 2017 Fashion Revolution collaborated with Microfinance Opportunities on the Garment Worker Diaries project, the largest ever survey of garment workers, interviewing 540 people in India, Bangladesh and Cambodia over a year.^[24][25][26] Fashion Revolution has collaborated with organisations around the world, including Greenpeace for the first Make Something Week in December 2017 ^[27] IndustriALL Global Union ^[28][29] and with the British Council and UN India at Lakmé Fashion Week. ^[30] Somers works on research for the Fashion Transparency Index every year, ranking the world's largest fashion brands on how much they publicly disclose about their policies and practices.^[31][32] There are now Fashion Revolution teams in over 100 countries around the world. ^[33]

Pachacuti

Somers founded fair trade hat brand Pachacuti in 1992.^[34] Pachacuti was the first company to be certified under the World Fair Trade Organization Sustainable Fair Trade Management System,^[35][36] the first International certification of a fair trade, sustainable production process.^[37] The WFTO certification "guaranteed practices, procedures and processes that demonstrate social, economic and environmental responsibility throughout the supply chain".^[38] Pachacuti's products were labelled Certified Fair Trade by WFTO UK0001-2009 to 2012.^[39][40]

Somers piloted the European Union Geo Fair Trade project from 2009–12^[41] which traced products from the straw to the Panama hat weavers. 60 social, economic, geolocalisation and environmental indicators tracked annual changes. The pilot project mapped the GPS co-ordinates of Pachacuti's 154 weavers' houses in Ecuador, the parcels of land where the Carludovica Palmata grows, and the co-ordinates of the associations who harvest and process the straw.^[42][43][44]

At London Fashion Week in September 2013, People Tree Ltd. and Pachacuti were the first brands globally to launch the WFTO Fair Trade Guarantee System label.^{[45][46][47][48]}

Lectures

Somers speaks nationally^[43][49][50] and internationally on Fashion Revolution, fair trade, entrepreneurship, sustainability, fashion and certification. She lectures on cruise ships in Latin America and the Caribbean^[51] on textiles, traditional dress, artisan handicrafts, indigenous peoples and fair trade.

Books

Somers wrote the introduction to "Fixing Fashion" which looks at the impacts of consumer culture's addiction to disposable fashion, published in 2015 by New Society. She is co-author of the book Working Ethically, which aims to help business owners find an ethical strategy which will benefit their suppliers, community and environment.^[52] She contributed a chapter to the book, published in 2014, Sustainable Luxury and Social Entrepreneurship^[53]