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Collecting clothes
It is important to start collecting clothes made from Fairtrade cotton as soon as possible, as your fashion show will be rather empty without it!
Take a look at our guide to finding Fair Trade fashion for suggestions on how you can get hold of clothes for your show, including where you can buy Fairtrade cotton if you plan to make your own! Here you can also find out how the Wear Fair campaign has teamed up with cutting edge ethical designer Annie Greenabelle and Emma Watson for People Tree to make it simple for you to borrow items for your catwalk.
Running your show smoothly
When it comes to planning the details of your Fairtrade cotton fashion show, we’ve designed an great week-by-week guide to planning a Wear Fair Fairtrade fashion show so that nothing gets forgotten! What’s more, if you’re in a hurry the guide shows you how you can get it all planned in under a month!
You might also want to take a look at the Environmental Justice Foundation’s guide to organising an ethical fashion show for practical hints and tips to ensure your show runs smoothly from beginning to end.
Entering the competition
To enter the competition you must let us know how you’ve met the three competition areas by which your show will be judged. You will also need to provide evidence that you have succeeded in these three areas, in whatever way you like. You can find these areas on our entering the competition page.
Raising some cash for People & Planet!
Your fashion show is the perfect opportunity to have and even greater impact by raising money for People & Planet’s Wear Fair campaign. We need students to raise funds for People & Planet so that we can continue campaigning for Fairtrade cotton in schools and colleges, and together have a bigger impact on the lives of farmers in the developing world.
There are many imaginative ways you can raise money, here are some ideas:
- Charge for tickets to your show
- Selling some Fairtrade snacks and drinks during the interval
- Design your own clothes from Fairtrade cotton and recycled fabrics for the catwalk and auction them off. You could even simply decorate your own Fairtrade cotton t-shirts to sell.
- Using a free venue (perhaps somewhere at your college/sixth form)
- Get some items donated to raffle e.g. boxes of Fairtrade chocolate (the co-op will often donate to help Fairtrade events if you write to your local store)
It may be helpful to allocate one person to be in charge of the money on the night of your show, who will also send the money to the campaign after the event at. Send a cheque made out to ‘People & Planet’ to:
Wear Fair, People & Planet, 51 Union Street, Oxford, OX4 1JP
Get Inspired
Great catwalks: Filton college
Opening a Fair Trade fashion show at Bristol Cathedral, Douglas Alexander (the Government’s Secretary of State for International Development) congratulated students from the College who were modelling their own Fairtrade cotton designs on the catwalk. The group of 16-18 year olds had been working for the past few months designing and making clothes from Fairtrade cotton, which were showcased for the first time at the fashion show.
“The fashion show is a great example of how cotton is now an important part of the Fairtrade market. Consumers in Bristol now have even more ways of using their weekly shop to help farmers in developing countries make a decent living.”
Zanne Andrea, Student at Filton College
Take a look at these Fairtrade fashion shows organised by P&P groups in schools, colleges and universities around the UK for some inspiration:
