As part of Bristol City Centre BID’s Re-Fresher Your Style day on Thursday 22 September, 13 local businesses along Park Street and Queens Road compiled sustainable shopping offers for Bristol’s 60,000 strong student population. Finisterre on Park Street offered a 20% student discount, and Mountain Warehouse and Patagonia offered deals throughout the week to encourage students to slow down their shopping, all whilst staying in style. This gave many students the opportunity to get to know their new home city and find the best sustainable hotspots for refreshing their wardrobes throughout their next few years of study.
Events
Re-Fresher Your Style with Bristol City Centre BID
Hear about our Re-Fresher Your Style events in partnership with Sustainable Fashion Week.
20/10/2022
This year, Bristol City Centre BID partnered with Sustainable Fashion Week. With events taking place throughout the City Centre, including make, mend and alteration workshops, live stylings and panel talks, Sustainable Fashion Week took over Bristol between 16 – 25 September.
A day of shopping sustainably was followed by a Sustainable Student Fashion panel discussion and live styling, hosted at the vibrant venue of The Vintage Thrift Store, on Park Street. In a treasure trove filled with hidden gems and racks of colourful and sustainable garments, all seats were filled as panellists tackled the topic of how to live and shop sustainably in a time of increasing climate anxiety.
To kick off the panel event, free food and drink was supplied by Bristol Folk House and Pizzarova for the audience to enjoy throughout, including all local and sustainably-sourced produce. Amelia Twine, Founder of Sustainable Fashion Week, launched the panellists into discussion, starting with Sustainable Fashion Week’s core value of inspiring and enacting change in the sector, and highlighting the week-long schedule of events taking place throughout Bristol.
Panellist Maria Loria, founder of clothing rental and repair service Wear My Wardrobe Out, chatted through her experience of founding, launching and growing a sustainable fashion business. Maria recounted stories to the audience of how she reclaimed otherwise abandoned material from old curtains to transform into items as good as new after teaching herself how to stitch.
During Sustainable Fashion Week, Maria offered free garment repair services at Bristol Beacon, the Sustainable Fashion Week hub. However, most interestingly, she noted that most garments that were brought to her for mending were easy repairs, highlighting that all of us with basic sewing skills can ensure longevity of our clothing.
Jess Strain, founder of sustainable accessory brand, Ovrbloom, introduced her signature product, the bucket hat bag (that’s right – it’s a hat and a bag!). In its production, Jess prioritised ensuring that all of the supply chain information was readily available to her in order that she could be fully transparent with her customers. To ensure her business remained as sustainable as possible, Jess also stressed the importance of only making her products in small batches to avoid waste and stockpiling, which means that most of her products are made to order.
Next up, Meg Cox, founder of sustainable styling business, Clothemod, proved how good preloved can look by sharing with the audience her top tips for shopping sustainably, and how to collate a killer outfit. From colour theory to collecting vintage gems not just from thrift stores, but also the charity shops on our doorsteps here in Bristol City Centre, Meg guided the audience through how to build a sustainable wardrobe to last a lifetime.
Throughout the panel event, both Maria Loria and Meg Cox selected volunteers from the audience for live styling sessions, which demonstrated that second-hand can suit everyone, no matter your style. As the panel event drew to a close, both stylists showcased the outfits they had created for their models, talking through their fashion choices tailored to each volunteer, and their process of selecting and matching particular garments.
Bristol City Centre BID are proud to have partnered with and supported Sustainable Fashion Week this year, which engaged a large number of Bristol’s population through inviting the student community to consider their shopping choices and lean more into adopting a sustainable lifestyle where possible.
