ORSOLA DE CASTRO
WE LOVE WOMEN
PHOTOS BY CLAIRE O'KEEFE
Orsola de Castro is not a woman of routine. “I'm actually quite scattered and disorganized and spontaneous,” says the activist and designer. So, when it comes to the act of dressing— “a huge moment of my time”—there can be no planning ahead. “Even if I'm going somewhere, I will wake up, and I will test the mood and wear whatever fits that mood.” She goes on: “I'll feel like wearing, you know, a dirndl, and I'll put on a tiny cardigan that maybe I have refused to mend because I love its holes. Or, another day, I will feel more inclined to be in, I don't know, maybe black.”
Orsola has clothes that belonged to her mother and her grandmother and dresses her grandchildren in clothing of her own. Every item in her wardrobe, whether bought, gifted, or thrifted, has a story. “I'll tell you the one I'm wearing now, because it is quite sweet,” she says over the phone. “It’s a tea dress.”
Tea dresses were a very particular shape of dress in vogue in the 1940s, she begins. This one, Orsola remembers buying in a thrift store in northern Italy one January with her mother when she was about 12. “I took it to Rome, wore it for years and years, and then exchanged it with my best friend. Then I came to live in London; she stayed in Rome. I remained separated from this dress, which she kept on wearing, until maybe about four months ago, when I went to stay with her and we did another wardrobe swap. I took back this dress after something like 40 years. And I'm wearing it now.”
“Everything that I have done comes from a very deep love of clothes,” says Orsola, who, now in her late 50s, is a leading global voice in the fight for ethics and sustainability in fashion. Her work began as an early upcycler in the 1990s with her brand From Somewhere, which sold thrifted finds artfully mended to highlight their wear. She went on to launch sustainability initiatives with brands, universities, and London Fashion Week, and in 2013, co-founded the organization Fashion Revolution after the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, which killed over 1,100 garment workers. Fashion Revolution has since become the world’s largest movement demanding accountability from an industry whose abuses of people and planet run deep.
“The fashion industry mirrors colonialism in its roots and in the way that it manages people and resources exploitatively. The two things are written into one another, and the reality that we live now is a direct consequence of those enormous, monumental mistakes,” Orsola explains. “We all know how cotton was born. It was farmed by enslaved individuals in the American South. It was then woven in the UK in sweatshops, and then it was distributed by the East India Company, which is the precursor to capitalism. And this was the start of the Industrial Revolution. So, this industry wrote itself to be like this.”
What’s more, the production of textiles, once a women-led craft, has been coopted by a male capitalist system, she continues. Women now make up the majority of exploited garment workers, while clothes are designed and produced in sizes that mostly just fit the male gaze. “More and more, I'm interested in speaking about women,” says Orsola. “I embrace feminism and the need to escape the patriarchy; as I grow older, it becomes stronger.”
From her defense of garment workers to the fact that she crochets, life in the world of fashion has brought Orsola closer to womenkind. And it is in these ancestral networks that she now finds new means to subvert the fashion industry, which has managed to turn sustainability into a product while overseeing the birth of ultrafast fashion. With most of the clothes produced in a year ending in landfills, Orsola turns to the individual, and to the promise of craft: “Mending is the quiet revenge of the whole story.”
“The truth is that the only antidote to a throwaway society is to keep, and hence, the humble act of keeping your clothes and giving work to somebody who can mend them when they break.” Orsola’s faith in mending is such that she wrote a book about it, Loved Clothes Last (2021) – part memoir, part guide to long-term garment care. Though her point is not to teach how to mend, or not entirely. “It's way more about reembracing a system that used to thrive in our communities and that fast fashion made us forget.”
When invited to conjure an ideal future for fashion, Orsola, a realist, rejected the proposition. She tirelessly chooses action over reverie, and over time, her initiatives have garnered true power to tackle the gargantuan evils of the fashion industry. In her search for results, Orsola’s lasting word of advice is this: “Don't necessarily do what works for me but find what works for you.” “I'm sure that somebody else would find mending the most tedious thing and the most boring starting point in the world,” she laughs. Instead, find ways to conserve clothes that you can sustain in the long run, because “This is a lifetime change.” And it starts every morning from a pile of loved clothes.