Matteo Ward

I started working for a company in the fashion industry in Milan. I was doing well, but then something clicked: one day I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered what I was doing. After the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh in April 2013, which is considered the most serious fatal accident in a textile factory in history, I realized that by working in this industry, indirectly, I was part of this disaster. I had forgotten who I wanted to be, so I quit my job. It is like I started a journey that never ended and took me step by step to find the synthesis between what I wanted to become at a younger age ( a politician)  and who I wanted to be. In the end, with my friends and my team, I was able to do politics through fashion, using it as a medium for change.

Yes, there is too much data, too many numbers. These help because they inform, but at the same time they create emotional detachment. Also, to arrive at that number there is the processing of that data, which tends to create some scepticism: people wonder where that data came from, how it was processed and what the criteria were used, thus creating further distance. What I do, ultimately, is translate that data into something emotional, I humanize it to make it easier for the public to understand.

Yes, that’s right. A television product that reports the impact of fast fashion through images, voices, and experiences of those who suffer the consequences of this system. You can find data in the docu-series, but they are always contextualized in the human experience. It is not the numbers that inform us, because we are not all scientists, but we all have a heart and a head.

Meeting a mother orangutan in the Indonesian jungle, where all you could hear was the incessant sound of chainsaws cutting down trees. We went there to see the animals, to clearly show the connection between the creation of certain textiles and the destruction of biodiversity. At one point, the mother orangutan with her baby appears. There was no spoken dialogue, but in her eyes, I read the desperation, fear and sadness of a mother whose home we are destroying to make T-shirts.
Another image is the mountain of garbage at Old Fadama in Accra, Ghana: that’s the closest image that we get of Hell as children. You have the heat, the stench, the screaming, the noise, and the death, but at the same time, you have life striving for survival. We often hear about organic textiles or material innovations – which are extremely important to reduce impact – but the real problem is overproduction and overconsumption.

There is a KPI that is the value-action gap, that space that occurs when an individual’s values or attitudes do not correlate with his or her actions. More generally, it is the difference between what people say and what people do. Between intention and action there is a delta, which today stands at about 69% for the fashion industry, this is because buying a certain type of product at a low price releases dopamine and activates the reward system, creating addiction. Today, we are all addicted to something, and it is difficult after a while to control yourself until someone tells you that you are overdoing it.

For fashion, there is a lack of legislation to intervene and limit this kind of communication that induces the overconsumption of products that harm one’s own health and the health of others. We have legislated many things, but we are still missing this step (the European Commission proposed a new instrument called EPR in early July. An extended producer responsibility instrument that will oblige brands to pay a fee, intended to cover the costs of managing textile waste that ends up in landfills, for every product they put on the market, ed.). We are victims of a bad communication system.

However, there is also the economic factor. And there is a problem here that has to do with the fact that systemically poverty induced tends to be the primary cause of the ecological crisis of poor choices, from the factory to the consumer.

The project started a bit by accident, as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do after quitting my job. In the beginning, it was an educational program, so we started with schools with the nonprofit division. Then it became an innovative start-up because schools were asking us about the solution. We grew and moved into clothing design, but it still wasn’t enough, so we changed our strategy. We switched it to a design and communication project. I went to marketing offices and Federico Marchetti, founder of Yoox Net-A-Porter Group, listened to us. We were no longer selling a product, but the opportunity to collaborate with us.

Today WRÅD is a creative agency with a focus on sustainability. We were born to inspire and empower people to challenge the unsustainable status quo of the fashion industry and our economic and social system in general through education, design, innovation, and consulting.

I think it must be done. It’s not easy, but I think it’s a necessary choice.

We have been working with the PVH brand for several years, and we created an educational program for the entire sales force that would enable them to understand the brand’s commitment to sustainability and convey it to customers.