Meet Future Fashion Fair: the rising stars of sustainable fashion

Future Fashion Fair, originally based in Cheetham Hill, are a group who’ve made it their mission to make sustainable fashion affordable and accessible to everyone in Manchester. Through a number of events dotted throughout the year (and spread across the city), this team have begun delivering clothes swaps, workshops, markets - and they’ve brought together some of Manchester’s best up and coming independent brands. We caught up with Fergal, one of Future Fashion Fair’s co-founders, to chat about how the project got started and what the future holds…

“The whole point is basically to build a community in Manchester around sustainable fashion and then educate those people. And it’s not just people who come to the fairs, we want to branch out and include as many people and diversities as possible. The more people that know the more money people will save too from things like this.”

How did Future Fashion Fair start out?

I came onboard at the end of July 2021, literally to just do a swap shop which is all I wanted to do, having worked for Slow Fashion Movement before. So I came down and somehow managed to get roped in to running a whole event, and then Joe (Fergals business partner and co-founder) came on later in September, and we ran our first event on the 25th and 26th of November 2021.

My background is in fashion, I went to MMU and studied Fashion Buying and Merchandising and became more interested in sustainability halfway through the first lockdown. I started volunteering for Slow Fashion Movement during that time, and then it grew from there. Straight after the first event, we decided we’d run another one - a Christmas Market - which we ran in November last year, and that went brilliantly. 

We’re now looking at doing two big events per year, and making it a big celebration of everything that we do. The whole point is basically to build a community in Manchester around sustainable fashion and then educate those people. And it’s not just people who come to the fairs, we want to branch out and include as many people and diversities as possible. The more people that know the more money people will save too from things like this.

What are some of the challenges you’re facing currently when it comes to engaging Manchester in sustainable fashion?

Being where we are, there are a lot of different cultures. It’s a very diverse area to be in, and we’ve always thought that we want to bring all of those people together because at the end of the day the more diverse a community is the better and there’s a greater understanding, but it’s definitely a challenge.

We’re trying to talk to the right people and getting the right people to come down and see what we’re doing, we had a meeting with someone from a local Sikh temple who’s really interested in what we’re doing. One of the ways that we bring people to the fair is that we try and have a wide variety of clothing brands here. We had Cultureville here, they’re a great brand. So we try to include as many different diverse cultures within our fairs as possible, because we want their customers to come down and engage with other cultures and so on.

 People often seem surprised at the connection between fashion and climate change, why do you think that is?

Unfortunately some people just like ease! But I think the more we teach them, the more they’ll understand and be able to see it from other people’s point of view. One thing that I find amazing is how when it’s not in your line of sight you tend to care less about it. Seeing where a garment comes from isn’t really in our line of sight, and to compare it to the food industry, with the amount of plastic packaging for things like fruit and veg, people can see the plastic around those things and they know it’s going straight in the bin. But when you buy a polyester t-shirt, people don’t see that as plastic because it’s a form of material and people just don’t put two and two together.

How would encourage people to be more sustainable with their clothing choices?

I think that trends are constantly changing and they evolve all the time, and it’s why people buy so much more because they want the new thing. It’s out with the old and in with the new. I think making sure you aren’t throwing your clothes away is a massive thing, and selling them online or giving them to a charity or a swap-shop is a good start. And then just simply asking questions about where these things come from, because we ask where most other things come from, and the brands need to be more transparent with what they’re doing around that too. As much as it is on the consumers, a lot of brands have the power to change what the views of the consumers are, so it works both ways.

What are some of your key goals for the next few years?

We want to build up the fair to get way more people coming down. We want to branch out and help to build communities around Manchester, we’d like to start working with hotels and consulting with fashion brands to help them understand more, and building up our name and what we do. I think the next year is really going to change things. We’d also love to go into schools and start teaching kids. We actually went into a school in Levenshulme and it was crazy how much they already knew about sustainability, and the kids now are learning so much about sustainable goals. We’re really keen to go into more schools around Manchester and teach them more about slow fashion. I’m not looking to make millions or anything like that, I just want to have kids coming through who are doing what I’m doing and having the ability to live in our world without these problems.

If you’d like to learn more about Future Fashion Fair and find out what events they have coming up, head to their website here.