Slogue and Flip Fashion Forever

Calling all budding Viv Westwoods, McQueens and Coco Chanels!!

Actually, make that:

Calling all creative people from year 5 to year 12!

Because fashion is for everyone and you don't need to be a budding designer to know what clothes you want to wear. You don't even need to be good at sewing to make them!

All you need is to understand the true value of textiles and clothes making.

Let us explain...

You may already know the fashion industry under-pays its workers and over-produces clothes derived from fossil-fuels. You've probably seen the mountains of clothes dumped where children are meant to play on the shores of Africa.

But did you know that you belong to the generation that could turn all this horror around?

That your generation might even see the revival of Australia's disappearing textile industry AND bring sewing back into the home?

The first of its kind, Flip Fashion Forever is a pilot program that teaches 'thrift-flipping', Gen Z's viral version of 'renovating' old clothes. Look it up on TikTok or just Google it and you'll see that billions of young people are making and viewing sewing videos!

Great, right??

The best thing about re-working existing garments? Not only does it save them from landfill but it allows neuro diverse students an alternative view of clothes construction, so we can learn how they're made without complex patterns and strict instructions.

Slogue offers Flip Fashion Forever holiday camps, after-school classes and school incursions.

We collaborate with Lolo the Gypsy Caravan on circular fashion pop-ups at festivals and community events around Sydney, where everyone, young and old, can take part in circular fashion. Needlework in nature is the new 'retail therapy' in our opinion!

Sometimes we work with local councils to offer more financially accessible events, so if you're in Sydney, contact your local council to request a free Slogue workshop in your LGA.

Flip Fashion Forever Holiday Camps

For our flagship program, participants are their own creative directors, sourcing their own project starters from the event's partnering charity/non-profit/recycling centre and sharing their visions with skilled young mentors before they are guided through the seam-rips and sewing that will bring their visions to life.

We hope to create an inclusive, creative space for young people to explore fashion in a non-judgmental, open-minded environment.

Included:
- $20 Thrift Vouchers to be spent at the partnering store
- mentorship from a team of socially responsible young fashion talents, some of whom have had work featured in Vogue and at Australian Fashion Week
- full access to a studio equipped with circularly sourced sewing machines and supplies
- take-home supplies to help participants finish their projects (if needed)

ABOUT
Slogue is the third baby of former Vogue writer, sustainable stylist Jo Gambale. After years of hosting adult events while bringing up her daughters she realised that young people were missing out on not just sustainable fashion education but textiles as a whole. This, she believes, is the most urgent area of behavioural change, particularly as ruthless social media marketing is luring kids into hyper consumption habits from a very young age.

So she began attending student fashion shows, markets and Uni fashion societies as well as scrolling through TikTok to uncover some of Sydney's most passionate circular fashion talents, knowing that famously conscious Generation Z had the potential to influence Alpha right at that "pre-consumer" cusp - before the Big Bad Guys online could catch them.

Pilots of the Flip Fashion Forever program are proving her theory right.

Bringing Gen Z and Gen Alpha together - without the so-called 'generation chasm' - means Z's creativity, innovation and social responsibility are more likely to inspire Alphas to ditch the small screens and use their hands.

"Cool" is important at this age, whether we like it or not.

Jo's observation is that the 'tween' era so often involves a pivotal transition from crafts and making to an interest in clothes shopping, through which many express their evolving sense of self while unintentionally boarding the treadmill of hyper consumption through targeted influencer marketing.

"Let's help them pivot from jewellery making straight to clothes making, instead of veering off to the heartless shopping malls," she says. "And let's show them 'hey, these cool teenagers on YouTube are thrift-flipping - they're all doing it' - and show them it's accessible neurologically to more kids, because they get to 'un-do' clothes at the seams to better understand construction."

For those worried about the waste implied in cutting up clothes, we think it's a small price to pay for what could be a huge generational shift in behavourial change.

Also, did you know there are enough garments in the world right now to clothe the next seven generations?

But yes, we get it, and for our workshops we can provide pre-waste fabric for them to practice on if they're afraid of going gung-ho on their thrifts, because we want to teach them to value all existing textiles. And we will always show them the best ways to keep scrapped items and fabric offcuts out of landfill.

Our workshops present textile reuse as a form of creative empowerment, translating the word fashion as a verb that anyone can partake in, away from archaic elitist associations that leave the majority of the globe feeling left out.

Benefits:
- Saves unsellable clothes from landfill
- Teaches the fundamentals of circular fashion, a system of textiles manufacturing proposed by the Australian Fashion Council's Seamless initiative
- Bridges the creative gap between craft kits and digital fashion, guiding tweens towards hands-on creativity instead of screens and mindless consumption
- Designed to reverse the effects of fast fashion so that clothes making is better understood and valued as the next gen enters the market, causing them to question the ethics of too-cheap and disposable garments
- Empowers an unrepresented portion of school children without an existing creative outlet/whose creative needs are not met by traditional crafts and visual or dramatic arts
- Paves the way for a revival of our local textiles industry as well as domestic needlework crafts and skills
- Redefines the mainstream meaning of 'fashion' - from noun (suggests exclusivity and judgement) to verb (creativity, expression)
- A new way of learning to sew that appeals to the neuro-diverse, devoid of paper patterns and long-form instructions
- encourages a collaborative and spontaneous design process that can be applied to most curricular studies

Finally, we also offer bespoke private circular fashion events, parties and workshops including T-shirt yarn crochet and a 'Fashion Statements' collaborative project that can be customised for corporate team building.

If you'd like to know more about any of the above, email joannegambale@slogue.com.au