PORTLAND -- Brittany Sierra, the woman behind the premier fashion conference in Portland, Ore., planned to plow ahead with the Sustainable Fashion Forum’s fourth annual conference despite growing concerns about COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus, sweeping the country.
However, in light of the growing number of cases in the Pacific Northwest and across the world, she and the two-person team she leads in planning the conference decided to make alternative plans for the 2020 SFF, scheduled for April 25 this year.
“We are doing our part to maintain the health and safety of our team, volunteers, attendees and members of the local community by not holding the Sustainable Fashion Forum 2020 in-person,” wrote Sierra on the SFF Facebook page on March 18. “Instead, we are hard at work creating an exciting opportunity with the support of a few pillars in the community who have stepped in to help us create a truly unique SFF experience in a different form.”
Created as an opportunity to bring together figures in the fashion industry and those in the Pacific Northwest who are interested in fashion and sustainability, Sierra started the conference in 2017, bringing in panel speakers, independent vendors and people in the fashion industry to mingle and network over a shared love of fashion. In the years since, the conference has grown, expanding from simply being Sierra’s passion project to taking the form of a global community that has brought together dozens of brands as event vendors and hundreds of influential members of the international fashion community. Fashion editors from New York, as well as fashion and lifestyle brand managers from as far away as Edmonton, Canada, were just a few to attend last year’s conference, as well as designers and directors from fashion companies as diverse as Adidas, Mara Hoffman, Ace & Jig and Conscious Chatter, among others.
This year, speakers from Vogue, Nordstrom, Eileen Fisher and thredUP were scheduled to be on the roster. However, with the number of confirmed coronavirus cases progressively increasing (reaching 82,000 cases as of March 26 nationwide, resulting in 1,000 deaths), Sierra and the team re-thought the decision to hold the conference in its traditional form, despite previous efforts earlier in the month to host it as scheduled.
The pandemic’s effect on the conference is just one manifestation of the worldwide effect seen by designers, retailers and other fashion brands. Speakers scheduled for this year’s conference talked this week about near-insurmountable challenges faced by their colleagues in the fashion industry at large, said even larger retailers are cancelling orders from smaller brands, leaving independent designers and manufacturers without the income to support their businesses.
“COVID-19 is really affecting the fashion industry right now,” said Kestrel Jenkins, founder of the fashion blog and podcast Conscious Chatter and speaker at this year’s SFF. “Manufacturers are cancelling orders because factories aren’t getting paid for completed orders. That will eventually trickle down to garment workers.”
The conference, according to its website, is now going to have videos and live streams of panel discussions and keynote speakers.
“The impact of coronavirus on SFF has been huge,” Sierra wrote on Facebook. “We are deeply saddened by the circumstances but are excited for the opportunity to adapt with innovative creativity and forward-thinking exploration.”
As of March 27, the planners of SFF didn’t reveal how the conference would still go on this year sans a physical gathering. March 30 is set to be the day Sierra updates those following the 2020 event on how she and her team would host the conference remotely via online technology. With previous conferences featuring fashion shows, shopping available at vendor tables and opportunities for event-goers to connect in-person, the barriers to holding a similar event with everyone attending online are visibly challenging. With no announcement yet regarding how this year’s event will look, one can only guess as to how she will pull off something that brings people together in quite the same way.
“While the ways in which we come together are changing, nothing can stop us from connecting (even from afar),” wrote Sierra. “The growing public health concern and rapidly developing circumstances surrounding the coronavirus have prompted us to reconsider how we gather.”
The Sustainable Fashion Forum isn’t the only event to be affected by the global pandemic. Other events in Oregon, including the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival in Woodburn, was cancelled, and organizers of TechFestNW, a regional technology industry start-up event, announced they would postpone the tech fair until August. In Washington, Seattle Shakespeare Company, The Pacific Northwest Ballet, Seattle Repertory Theater and the Washington State Fair, among other organizations and groups, has cancelled or postponed all events originally scheduled for March and April. Very few, if any, of these other events will take the form the Sustainable Fashion Forum will take this year.
“I was at the event last year, and Brittany really creates a conducive environment for connecting with people,” Jenkins said. “She creates environments that are beautiful and makes you want to hang out.”
The remote version of the SFF, according to Jenkins, will be an attempt to bring people together in a format that’s just as engaging and interactive as the physical event.
“She’s creating an online space where people can connect,” Jenkins said. “I’m curious to see how she rolls it out.”
For the Pacific Northwest states, restrictions limiting gatherings or banning events altogether came down the pike the weekend of March 14, manifesting itself as a ban of more than 250 people in Oregon and in Washington. Schools in most states were shut down as a result of COVID-19, affecting millions of families who are now forced to both work from home and homeschool their children for the remainder of the school year.
While these developments certainly have their own effects on the fashion industry, Jenkins sees the pandemic as an opportunity for parts of the fashion industry that have long since broken to be exposed as people pay attention to the havoc wreaked by the novel coronavirus. Jenkins plans to talk about how this pandemic affects the fashion industry, especially in the Pacific Northwest, during her speaker session at this year’s conference.
“There’s a lot of brokenness in the fashion system,” Jenkins said. “Being the eternal optimist that I am, this kind of exposure exposes the inequities in the fashion industry.”
This story was published in an issue of PacNoW, the fashion and style magazine I developed as part of a publishing class project I completed as part of my Master's degree in Fashion Journalism. Photo courtesy of The Sustainable Fashion Forum.