Hi, I'm Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion, and welcome to the

BOF podcast. This week, we go back to Voices 2019, where sustainability was front of mind.

Dana Thomas's most recent book, Fashionopolis, is a seething indictment of fast fashion and its

damaging environmental and societal impact.

But she concludes with a glimmer of optimism and in fact regular listeners of the BOF

podcasts will remember that Dana and I had a conversation here last year where she described

Fashionopolis as a book of hope. Much of that hope rests on a growing group of innovators who are at the forefront of

making fashion more sustainable. And it turns out that many of these innovators are women. So here

is Dana Thomas on the women at the forefront of the sustainable fashion revolution at Voices 2019.

The summer of 2016, I began working on my third book, one I had been noodling for more than a

decade. My idea was to report and write about the backlash to globalization and the

convoluted supply chains impact on humanity and the planet.

What I didn't realize until I sat down and started was that the majority of the change

makers were and are women, like Sarah Bellows, a 33-year-old co-founder and head of Stony Creek colors, a natural indigo dye

company in Goodlettsville, Tennessee.

Natural indigo was the only indigo until the German chemical company BASF created the synthetic

version in the late 19th century.

Unlike natural indigo,

synthetic wasn't seasonal or vulnerable to blight and weather destruction.

And it was consistent and cheap.

This meant mills like cone,

cone denim,

...