Aja Barber: colonialism, climate change & consumerism

This is one for the clothes lovers (and everyone else who gets dressed in the morning)! Aja Barber loves clothes, loves fashion and design, and she's here to tell us how your clothes came to be, and why you should care about their backstory.

Western consumption - perhaps epitomised in fast fashion - is killing the planet, fuelling exploitation, reinforcing colonial legacies and contributing to huge economic inequality.

It is a huge privilege to welcome writer, activist and fashion consultant Aja Barber to the Radical Book Fair as one of our keynote speakers.

Her book Consumed: on colonialism, climate change, consumerism & the need for collective change, explores the exploitation and injustice of the fashion industry and the in cynical manipulation of consumer culture.

Aja reveals the endemic injustices in our consumer industries and the uncomfortable history of the textile industry, She exposes how oppressive systems have bled into the fashion industry and its lack of diversity and equality. She will also reveal how we spend our money and whose pockets it goes into and whose it doesn't (clue: the people who do the actual work) and will tell her story of how she came to learn the truth.

But Aja will also empower us to challenge this power disparity, making us question why we consume the way we do, helping us to understand why we fill the void with consumption rather than compassion, and giving us the tools to take back ownership.

Aja Barber is a writer, stylist and consultant whose work deals with the intersections of sustainability and the fashion landscape.  Her work builds heavily on ideas behind privilege, wealth inequality, racism, feminism, colonialism and how to fix the fashion industry with all these things in mind.