How To
By the Fashion Revolution Global Network
Project Lead & Designer: Amelia Temple
Content Credits: Marina De Luca, Ema Jakimovska, Muthoni Ngei, Mo Jian Yung, Chelsea Maxine Agawa
This toolkit is designed for Fashion Revolution organizers, educators, and volunteers who want to facilitate textile banner workshops during Fashion Revolution Week or other community events. It includes messaging guidance, workshop facilitation steps, creative prompts, and documentation tips to help communities create powerful textile banners advocating for a transparent and fair fashion industry
Our current fashion industry is broken. Profiting from the failings of the system, overproduction and overconsumption are creating a global textile waste crisis.
Structural racism, inequality, and a lack of transparency – all lead to the exploitation of people and planet.
Everyone has a part to play in building a fair, clean and safe fashion industry, but for effective change, we must reach beyond individual actions. The most powerful solutions are already happening in communities, collectives, and local networks – so let us learn from them, not reinvent.
Hope without action sustains the systems to continue operating business as usual. Building on consciousness, connection and community, this year we call for action from the collective as a whole – sharing hope to create change. From the individual to the collective, from collective to action, from action to hope.
Following the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013, activists, designers, workers, and consumers around the world began asking a simple but powerful question: Who made my clothes?
Textile banners allow communities to visually express this question and advocate for accountability in fashion supply chains. At home, it engages with the tradition of patchwork quilts present in the history of many families, made by mothers and grandmothers as a way to reuse fabrics and extend the lifespan of materials.
Like a flag carrying strong historical and cultural significance, over time flags and banners have evolved to represent identity, belonging, struggle, resistance, and collective celebration.
These quilts were not only functional: they were affective records. Each piece of fabric carried memories, stories, and phases of life.
Rescuing this practice is to recognize manual skills passed down through generations and to value reuse strategies that have always been part of popular cultures, long before sustainability became a global agenda.
Like the quilt, a textile banner transforms scraps into meaning. It unites different parts to create something greater.
It represents diversity, collaboration, and strength of the collective. It is a manifesto built by many hands— a symbol that the transformation of the fashion system begins when we connect and act together.
Marina De Luca Fashion Revolution Brasil
Before traditionalskills are lost to time, let us standas a collective to revive our ancestralart and preserve this slow labour oflove.
Mo Jian YungFashion Revolution UAE
Creating a banner is to publicly affirm values and positions.
Gather your people - students, friends, family, or any community you can mobilize. The idea is to co-create a banner using textile scraps, transforming waste into a message, creativity, and a stance. Discarded scraps can be found in classrooms or collected from clothing factories before sending to trash.
Start With A Message
Gather your craftmates and decide on a message using the suggestions below:
Who Made My Clothes?
Who Made My Fabric?
Transparency Now Pay Garment Workers Fairly
Fashion for People and Planet
Loved Clothes Last
Gather!
Collective Action
Define collaboratively on flag size, composition and arrangement of scraps, and sewing techniques.
Display It Proudly
Finally, choose a highly visible location to hoist or display. The banner should occupy public space as a call for reflection and collective action. 1 2 3 4
Collect scraps and organize your materials:
Needles
Threads
Snippers or scissors
Thimbles
Sewing machine for fast assembly
Fabric paint for messages
Fabric glue for a no-sew option
