Stitching together a different fashion story

Bronte Contador-Kelsall has always loved fashion – the culture, the creativity, the community. But alongside that passion came the discomfort of knowing how much excess, exploitation and harm underpins the fashion industry.

That tension now drives her PhD at the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures, arriving at a moment when sustainability talk is loud, but meaningful progress remains slow.

What first pulled you toward alternative fashion?

Fashion has always energised Bronte. “It’s where I channel my creativity and curiosity,” she says, “and it’s helped me connect with people and learn about the world.”

But her fascination was matched by growing unease, pushing her toward values‑driven makers and brands. “This tension really compelled me to embrace fashion projects and spaces that are committed to doing things differently.” Those early discoveries now shape her research focus.

What sustainability ‘trend’ excites you and which one could disappear?

Bronte is ready to retire the wave of “sustainable collections” built on recycled materials while overproduction and labour issues continue. “Without addressing scale and wellbeing, these initiatives reinforce the status quo, even when they’re framed as progress,” she says.

What excites her instead is the work of small brands and independent practitioners, ‘doing’ fashion in more holistic and transformative ways. One example she points to is STEM, the Copenhagen-based label experimenting with zero-waste construction and pre-order models, alongside a broader vision to establish a micro-mill supporting local production and small-scale manufacturing. “They demonstrate what a more life-affirming fashion system can look like,” she says.

Understanding what helps these actors survive and what support they need is a key part of her research. “I want to understand the conditions that enable such actors to sustain alternative practices and models,” she explains, noting that the odds are often stacked against them.

Her research doesn’t position these actors as sole drivers of change. Instead, it examines the wider systems, contexts, and infrastructures that shape their capacity to persist and what they reveal about how sustainability is negotiated in practice. These actors become sites of tension, constraint, and possibility.

If you could visit any fashion community for a day, where would you go?

Bronte is fascinated by the diversity of fashion communities around the world, many of which we rarely encounter or whose stories aren’t widely visible. One place high on her list is India - to learn from craft communities reviving historic textile practices, particularly the kalamkāri artisans in Srikalahasti. “Such traditions carry generations of ecological knowledge,” she says. “They have faced near extinction and ongoing pressures from colonisation, industrialisation and climate change, yet continue to persist and evolve.”

Her friend and collaborator, Vibhuti Amin, is working with these artisans to develop climate‑resilient dyeing techniques using microbes from local soils.

Bronte sees this as a powerful example of the kind of fashion future she hopes to support. “Heritage, adaptation, agency and innovation can come together in powerful ways,” she says.

If you had a big red reset button, what part of fashion would you redesign?

Her answer: the incentive structures behind fast and ultra-fast fashion’s dominance.

“The whole system needs to be transformed,” she says. “Their dominance isn’t accidental. It’s the logical outcome of a system that rewards overproduction and overconsumption while prioritising growth and hyper-efficiency above all else.”

In their place, she would love to see the many life‑affirming alternatives that struggle to survive because of how the current system defines value and success in such narrow, extractive ways.

In her words, “a big red ‘reset’ button would hopefully enable those alternative models to flourish and more convincingly reshape the fashion system.

She adds, “We have a long way to go, and many actors and pathways will need to contribute simultaneously.”