Unraveled: The Loose Threads of Fast Fashion x BIBI

Speech given by BIBI for the Columbia Science Review on April 13, 2023 addressing her experience in sustainable fashion and the threat of the fashion industry to our world and its peoples. Filmed at Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, New

Footage courtesy of Delia Tager.

“Hello everyone, very excited to be here tonight. My name is Aishah Bibisarah Bostani, also known as BIBI. Just to give you some background on who I am, I am an Afghan-American Artist, Activist, Architect, Anarchist as well as a fashion designer and founder of my own sustainable clothing brand, BIBI STAR. 

I’m originally from Las Vegas - which tends to surprise people - but it has in many ways contributed to my design philosophy and radical perspective. In 2018, I moved to New York to pursue my degree in Architecture here at Columbia, and graduated from my program in 2021. 

Throughout the program, I came to understand that architecture is a great medium for not only observing the world, but problem-solving through its obstacles. As part of my studies, I focused specifically on colonialism and environmentalism, and took full advantage of taking courses that allowed me to engage with this type of discourse. It allowed me to look at the existing conditions by which we live through a more critical and compassionate lens in order to approach socio-environmental issues with better care and consideration and offer truly sustainable solutions. 

That’s part of the reason why I was so excited to hear that the Columbia Science Review wanted to highlight sustainable fashion and organize this event today, and I’m truly grateful for the opportunity to contribute by speaking tonight.

So, tonight I’m going to be sharing a bit of what I’ve learned over the years, both through my own experience with sustainable fashion, as well as the broader context that surrounds it. I’ll be speaking towards issues like capitalism, colonialism, and globalism - as well as the ways we can overcome the collective challenges these issues pose.

Though I started BIBI STAR in 2020, the dream behind the brand was many years in the making. I remember when I was around 12 years old, I had this binder filled with designs I drew up on white copy paper, and I would organize them by category. I would spend hours drafting up names and logos, but never could have imagined I would be able to bring them to reality.

I wasn’t aware of it then, but my interest in sustainable fashion began in those years as well. Coming up in a low-income family meant we had to do nearly all of our clothes shopping in thrift stores. Let’s just say the culture around “vintage” was not as celebrated back then and it proved to be a very humbling task. After many years of this, and with the added pressure of judgemental middle schoolers I became experienced in rummaging through the racks and finding the most interesting patterns and quality materials. I gained an appreciation for what these stores could offer someone looking to curate their own unique taste from the hoards of waste, and began to develop my own eclectic and experimental collection of pieces. 

I was frustrated by the fact that we still had to fight for issues around equality and the survival of our planet, and was simply tired of feeling helpless. 

What pushed me to finally take the leap and start BIBI STAR was a combination of things. It was the start of COVID, which meant I was stuck back home in Vegas sleeping on my parents couch. The government just sent out our stimulus checks so I had some extra money in the bank. And all over the news I would see protests for social justice and climate change take place around the world. I was frustrated by the fact that we still had to fight for issues around equality and the survival of our planet, and was simply tired of feeling helpless. 

I decided that if I didn’t have the money or power to make a change I could use what I did have at my disposal, art and design. From the onset I made sustainability a central driver - doing extensive research on finding the right wholesaler for me, and putting down the extra investment despite my incredibly low budget. Eventually, I was able to find a US based sustainable t-shirt manufacturer that aligned with my values and my aesthetic. I came up with a logo that I had been using as a tag for street art, wrote out my tagline “ETHICAL. SUSTAINABLE. RADICAL”, ordered my first set of labels, and from there BIBI STAR was born.

So in that unique moment, I had the time, the money, and the pressing urge to take action, and had finally wrangled together all the variables required to start a brand. Though I still had to focus on school, I dedicated as much time and energy that I could towards my dream. I would make trips out to Queens to buy pounds of clothing waste, that I would then use to painstakingly make my own yarn, and create quilted bags, tops, etc. I taught myself how to sew, making pants and tops out of bed sheets and whatever other scraps people left behind. And through the sales of my t-shirts and donation match funds I was able to raise thousands of dollars towards causes I believe in, like helping Afghan refugees or supporting indigenous organizing across the US. Recently, I’ve launched my BIBI Blog which allows me to disseminate the values of my brand and relevant knowledge, and have been fortunate enough to expand my team of writers to other passionate activist journalists.

In a lot of pretty obvious ways the fields of both fashion and environmentalism are lacking in diversity. Not because the passion for it isn’t present in these communities, in fact quite the opposite. But just like with everything else, there is a pretty clear power imbalance and control over the market. 

Aside from the impact it enables me to make, one of the most important values to me in starting my brand is spreading a message. Anyone involved in the practice can tell you, storytelling is essential to the power of design. My identity has given me a very strong critical perspective, which only became more enhanced as I studied more about the history of the world and sought out the answers to questions my identity left me asking. 

In a lot of pretty obvious ways the fields of both fashion and environmentalism are lacking in diversity, not because the passion for it isn’t present in these communities, in fact quite the opposite, but just like with everything else, there is a pretty clear power imbalance and control over the market. 

We are all well aware of the fact that indigenous peoples are the originators of the environmentalist discourse, and yet they often remain disenfranchised and removed from the conversation. Years of assimilation, forced migration, and ethnic cleansing have distorted many of these communities' own relationships to the land – but there are still plenty of voices in these groups that deserve not only a platform, but a leading role in the movement.

In my own experience, for instance, my family is of a Pashtun tribe–an ethnic group native to the area for over 4,000 years, long before the artificial borders of today were imposed. My family has lived in the city of Kandahar, located in the southern plains of Afghanistan, for countless generations. This city was once a very vibrant node in the silk road, and played a central role in connecting many local producers from Turkmen shephards to Indian dye makers. This, among other things, made it a clear target for colonial inquisition, and along with the strong colonial resistance of my people, can explain much of the decades long conflict Afghanistan has experienced. 

My grandfather played a significant role in his community around fashion production and the trade of textiles, and worked hard to generously support others in his village - but his early and unexpected death from the war quickly put an end to that. I see his legacy live on through BIBI STAR when I think about the ways I can bring agency back to my community and bring power back to our producers.

We are so hypnotized by the advertisements of fashion that they distract us from the harm that they in fact are causing our world. To me that is pure propaganda.

Despite the rich history of fashion around the world so much of what we see today has been co-opted by white designers who profit off cultural traditions just to toss them out the next season. With Eurocentric tendencies that benefit from a long trajectory of colonialism, the top beneficiaries of fashion are all present in the western world, while most of their producers are scattered throughout sweatshops of lower economically developed nations.   

It is no coincidence that the richest man in the world with a net worth of $237.2 billion is Bernard Arnault, the head of the luxury French fashion house LVMH, better known for its brands like Louis Vuitton, Dior, Tiffany & Co, Fendi, Sephora, just to name a few. Arnault’s outrageous wealth only speaks to the sheer power and influence of fashion. Imagine if even a fraction of the wealth and resources that went into supporting this one old white man went towards something like ending world hunger, or natural disaster relief, or eradicating homelessness. The world would definitely be a better place. This number is also terrifying because fashion is one of the top greenhouse gas emitters.

Now, since this is a Columbia Science Review event, let’s talk science. Just to run off some of the environmental consequences of fast fashion; it is responsible for 8-10% of global emissions, which weighs out to 1.2 billion tons of CO2 - more than the aviation and shipping combined - and most of that comes from the use of raw materials. 2.5% of the world's farmland is used for farming raw cotton, while synthetic materials like polyester require an estimated 342 million barrels of oil every year. Fashion uses 1/10th of the world’s industrial water supply, and is responsible for 20% of global water waste, with a single cotton shirt using enough water for someone to drink for 2 ½ years. On top of this, production processes like dying require 43 million tonnes of chemicals a year and pollute waterways with highly toxic and carcinogenic fluids. Water supplies are also contaminated by microplastics, 35% of which come from polyester clothing. 

57% of our clothing is discarded and unsold, ending up in landfills. The US alone contributes 14 million tons of clothing waste each year, frequently illegally dumping this waste on developing countries that have long been crippled by a history of colonial processes. Accra, the capital city of Ghana, receives 15 million used garments a WEEK from the UK, Europe, North America and Australia. Chile’s Atacama desert is another severe example of this issue, receiving 39,000 tons of clothing waste each year that scatter the driest desert in the world in heaping, sprawling mountains. The waste is frequently burned, at a rate of one garbage truck per second, which is a clear toxic public health crisis and disproportionately affects these vulnerable communities. And on top of that, these unwanted hoards of clothing release methane as they degrade, a gas 28 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat in our atmosphere. 

All of these facts about the fashion industry are just a Google search away - and yet we each have played a role in contributing to these numbers over the course of our lifetimes. Its entire cycle is corrosive - from the planting of the seeds, to the indebted sweatshop workers, to the millions of tons of textile waste that are shipped out each year. 

The rapid pace of the fashion cycle not only runs through its producers - it pressures consumers to buy, not to think. From high fashion to fast fashion, our consumer behavior is completely illogical. We are so hypnotized by the advertisements of fashion that they distract us from the harm that they in fact are causing our world. To me that is pure propaganda. At the end of the day we need to be challenging the perceptions that are marketed to us so that we can cut through the illusions we are being fed and the culture we are supporting. 

As an anarchist, I believe in a redistribution of power that starts with our producers and collectively supports the community it is involved with. This idea of radical collectivism is essential to preserving the future of our world and combating the aggressive patterns of consumption we are currently participating in. 

In order to understand how to escape this house of mirrors, it’s important to understand how we got here. Now I’ve already touched on some of this, but the hydra of the fashion industry really evolves from a broader history of colonialism, capitalism, and globalism which each go hand in hand.    

The general driving logic behind colonialism was to extract resources from a territory, from both the land and the labor of its inhabitants, manufacture those resources in an industrialized economy, resell those goods at a higher value, and develop a market to sell them back to the colonies. Part of this violent process included creating universal models to support the means of trade, including forced education, religion, currency, governance, etc. Globalism is essentially just the modern rebrand of colonialism’s enterprise, creating an unfair disadvantage for less economically developed communities who essentially lose agency over their localized economies and use of their land, water, and bodies. to privatized companies and the bourgeoisie class of their country.   

Now we see industrialized nations like China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Turkey and Pakistan, just to name a few, pushing out the bulk of what we see in fast fashion, creating generic Western designs, where workers are trapped in wage slavery positions that subject them to poor and hazardous conditions just to make cents a day, while their factory owners rake in millions. Whereas, high fashion is relegated to America  and  European nations that are still riding off of the marketing schemes they hatched centuries ago over the mythological superiority of their products. 

Before this monopolistic tragedy you had organic forming processes through trade routes, producers had a greater claim over their wares, and the quality of their work was undeniable. But, in the spirit of capitalism, every bit of profit is squeezed out of the process - labor is avoided and exploited to whatever capacity it could be - and this lack of life and quality can be seen in the things we wear today. 

The current model funnels people through a pipeline, each faced with their own expectations of what roles they should play. This process happens at the scale of the individual to the entire global market system, and makes everyone act like crabs in a pot, scrambling to escape by crawling over each other when their only way out is to work together. Over the course of modern history we have been taught to think individually, our collective strength has been perverted to the point that we are contributing to our own demise.

To visualize it conceptually, our society is more or less structured like a pyramid scheme, with a linear distribution organized by class and confined by things like race, gender, sexuality, etc. Like a pyramid, the bottom tier is essential to the entire framework, has the greatest numbers, and yet it has the least amount of perceived agency. There are two pyramids we’re dealing with here though, one for the producers, the other for consumers – & the middlemen that operate between them benefit greatly from the disconnect of these two parties. Divide & conquer.

As an anarchist, I believe in a redistribution of power that starts with our producers and collectively supports the community it is involved with. This idea of radical collectivism is essential to preserving the future of our world and combating the aggressive patterns of consumption we are currently participating in. 

Most businesses are thinking in terms of economic success, even their social/cultural values are seen as tools to help their profit.

Part of building this community begins with establishing a shared value for our world and each other, which is where sustainability comes in. Sustainability is a very broad and mysterious term that can be often misused or broadcasted as a form of greenwashing, boasting misleading claims about environmental progressiveness. Obviously the processes we witness in nature demonstrate sustainability best, as we see organisms support each other through self-regulating processes and the optimization of resources in any given ecosystem. They are responding to their environmental conditions and other organisms, and they are sharing space and creating and using energy in the most functional ways they can.

For humans, the process is not necessarily as intuitive. Part of this stems from the ways we have advanced as a society, which reflects on our competing social and economic priorities as well as the ways our relationships to our environments have become rapidly manipulated.

But one of the most useful ways of understanding sustainability for me has been visualizing our own human ecosystems and creating a balance between these collective priorities. Focusing on 3 pillars, in no particular order, being social, economic, and environmental we are able to create balanced and self-sustaining systems that offer better support to people while maintaining a harmonious relationship with our environments. I’ve found this framework especially helpful in terms of structuring my own business because it helps align my focus and orient my priorities. 

Most businesses are thinking in terms of economic success, even their social/cultural values are seen as tools to help their profit. But for me thinking through a circular framework where the economic value only helps me succeed in taking better steps towards helping the environment or supporting people in need is much more fulfilling and regenerative practice. An easy way to think about it is that money is the energy in our ecosystem. It does not need to be the enemy if we see it as a means, not the end. If we make it the end then we are creating the end for ourselves.

As consumers, we are the ones who harness the energy, we are lining their pockets with capital, and it is our responsibility just as much as it is theirs to act. At the end of the day, they are supplying our demands – so what are you demanding?

I often hear this rhetoric that things won’t change until corporations stand up and do the right thing towards addressing these issues. First of all, it’s not in the nature of these companies to do that in the first place, and the reality is we simply cannot wait for them to take action.  As consumers, we are the ones who harness the energy, we are lining their pockets with capital, and it is our responsibility just as much as it is theirs to act. At the end of the day, they are supplying our demands – so what are you demanding?

It’s time we close the loop on this vicious cycle, because I’m sure you agree your t-shirt is not worth the pain it is causing to our world and innocent people. We need to keep the pressure going. After the rise and fall of the 2020s social liberation trend, MeToo, BLM, climate change, we watched movements become co-opted and watered down. But still, they changed the culture of what we expect from the market, the government, and each other. There is still a long way to go but we cannot lose hope. 

We need to change the pace and scale of our shopping - choose the craftsperson over the corporation. Value quality over quantity, hold on to your pieces longer, think harder about the things you purchase. Choose pieces that are beautiful inside and out. If fashion is an expression of ourselves then what do your clothes have to say about you? Take a look in your closet and see what stories your clothes tell. 

By changing our philosophies and spreading awareness to people close to us, we can make a great change. It is through this collectivization of beliefs and expectations that we can make a difference for the future of our world. I hope that this message I’ve shared with you today will leave you with the motivation to take that step. Choose the people, choose the world. Think sustainable, ethical, & radical.”