Transcript - Timo Rissanen

Joshua Williams: Retail Revolution is a special, limited podcast created specifically for "Retailing and Service Design," a unique course that is part of the Fashion Management graduate program at Parsons School of Design in New York City. Each episode features in depth conversations with guest experts in omnichannel retelling with myriad perspectives: technology, consumer engagement, data analytics, merchandising, and more. We pay special attention to the short- and long- term challenges and implications of COVID-19 and potential opportunities to rethink retail's future. Retail Revolution is produced by Joshua Williams and hosted by Christopher Lacy; both are Assistant Professors in the School of Fashion at Parsons.

Christopher Lacy: Welcome to another episode of Retail Revolution. We are very excited today to have Timo Rissanen and with us today. He is an educator, a scholar artist, designer, and he has a focus on sustainability and fashion systems. Currently, he is Associate Dean of School of Construction Environments at Parsons School of Design.

It is my pleasure to welcome Timo to the show today. Hi Timo. 

Timo Rissanen: Hi, Christopher. Thank you so much for having me. 

Christopher Lacy: It is a pleasure. So, Timo, will you tell our listeners a bit about you? 

Timo Rissanen: Sure. So, I am originally from Finland and as you might hear a little bit from my accent, I moved to Australia back in 96 to study fashion design and graduated, and then worked in the industry in Australia, had my own brand for about three years in men's wear. And then 17 years ago I've started teaching part time, and taught part time for a long time, about six or seven years. And at the same time started my PhD, which very much focused on fashion and sustainability, and sort of through that transitioned to full time academia in 2009. And then in 2010, I moved to New York to take up the position at Parsons in fashion design and sustainability and, I just had my 10th anniversary at Parsons and I'm about to leave and move back to Australia in a week or so. So, here we are, but yeah, fashion and sustainability has been my work for the last 15 years or so. 

Christopher Lacy: When we talk about sustainability, your name comes up so often as really one of the foremost thinkers in this space, which is why I'm really excited to have you on today. I've looked at the work you've done, I've talked to people who've done work with you, and they always talk about like how you have this brilliant mind. And you do! 

So, I want to talk about the fundamental reasons, why fashion is not really effectively or efficiently moving towards sustainability. We've been talking about it for so long, but it does seem to be moving at kind of a snail's pace. 

Timo Rissanen: Yeah, in many ways, I would say that it is.  And by the way, thank you for the kind words, earlier, too, it's always humbling. But I think that the challenge for fashion and for many other industries as well, is that while the amount of knowledge that we have today about sustainability and, you know, different issues to do with environmental impacts, but also social justice issues which, for me, I inseparable. So, when I talk about sustainability, I actually have social justice embedded in there, which is not the way that everybody thinks about it. But, based on all of the work that I've done, I can see that you can't really separate them. But, the challenge, I think that we have is that while the knowledge has improved, and also a lot of activities have improved and increased in scale over the years, the overall scale of the industry has grown. And the sustainability efforts have never caught up with the overall growth of the industry and the overall growth of the fashion system. And so for example, just over two years ago, you know, a number of media outlets, including the New York Times were reporting that, H&M had $4.3 billion worth of unsold inventory. And at the same time H&M is one of the brands that constantly gets celebrated for their efforts. And I'm not mentioning H&M in any way and pick on them, but I think their kind of emblematic of the kind of tension between the efforts to do good, and at the same time, growing really for growth sake. And, and I think that's where there is a challenge that I don't think can actually be overcome, but we can talk about that challenge more as we, continue the conversation. 

Christopher Lacy: I think it's great that you brought up the growth of the system in and of itself, because it grows so fast and it's interesting, especially from a retail perspective, when you are store line and you look at your sales numbers come through year over year, and you're always projected to do more, always projected to do more, which means there is more product that needs to be created. And so, it's always this need, and not even growth in a way that it's a single digit growth year over year, we have companies that are expecting huge double-digit incremental growth year over year. So, you're looking at 14% growth, 17% growth, which how long can an industry move in this direction, growing like this, and they're not be cracks in the system? Right? 

You spoke about how sustainability and your inclusivity measures really go together. Like, you can't have one without the other, yet the industry always talks about them separately.

Why do you think it's important that it's a conversation that happens together? 

Timo Rissanen: Because, generally often when there is an environmental impact, for example, there is, often some kind of, social justice impact as well. And we've seen it many times over. So, for example, when it comes to textile dying, Greenpeace in particular has done a lot of work over the last decade focusing in China, but also in other countries, of the environmental impacts of textile dying, but then also the human health impacts that that has because, often the effluent from dye houses ends up in different river systems on which millions of people depend on for their drinking water, for food and for irrigation. And I think the simple kind of thing that we've often forget in this conversation is that we, as a species are also part of the planet systems. And, yet we often act like we're sort of transcended from those systems and, and we're not.  And we're seeing that now too, with Even things like microplastics entering of our food chain. So, we are actually ingesting plastic through our food. And some of the plastic comes from polyester garments nylon and acrylic garments. So, it's a reminder that we are very much part of earth systems. And, the more that we remind ourselves of that fact I think the better, because, I think that's been part of the problem is that we've kind of been in this like really disembodied way of thinking, where we don't see ourselves as part of earth, we see ourselves as separate. But, there's, there's the environment as something separate out there. But, in fact, we're an essential and an intrinsic part of the environment. And, and I think that that kind of thinking has been part of the challenge as well. 

Christopher Lacy: I would agree with you on that, thinking there's no repercussions to what we do, right? Because, we don't see it immediately happening. And I think that's, it's a weird way for people to think quite often, they're like, if something didn't happen right away based off of something we did, then something bad might not be occurring. Right? 

Timo Rissanen: Yeah.

Christopher Lacy: And it's, it's like those things take time. One of my concerns when it comes to  the conversation around sustainability and social justice is, as we continue to go through this, COVID-19 pandemic and we're coming through it, and we have many manufacturers and companies and producers realizing that they need to diversify where items, garments, anything is being produced. And we start looking at economies, and really understanding that of the top 50 fastest growing economies, 38 of them are in Africa. So, we know that China is investing lots of money into the infrastructures of Africa, which is amazing. So, better roads, better streets technology, with the idea of manufacturing happening there. What is your concern and what should really be top of mind for these emerging economies so that they don't fall into the same pattern that we saw happen with production in China and the production in India, with, with that amount of waste?

Timo Rissanen: Yeah, that's a, it's an excellent question because there is an opportunity for those developing economies to leap frog some of the problems that we have created and lived through, even when we might've done so in, and when I say we, we in the global North, when we outsourced much of manufacturing to places like China and India and elsewhere, and also outsource the, a lot of the environmental problems to other places as well, I think there's an opportunity to skip all of that. I mean, it's gonna require intentionality on everyone's part. And, I think it also would require re- calibrating the underlying value system completely. Because part of the challenge has been that we haven't really, haven't really valued, to the extent that we should have, because we tend to think that we, I'll say it again,  we often think in a way that we've supposedly transcended earth and we're no longer dependent upon it. And yet we are, and the climate crisis is one example. And we are starting to see, how we might be impacted by something that has been created or, you know, a problem that has been created over many, many decades, that we still haven't actually addressed.

But I think the opportunity in this moment in time is that there is a lot of knowledge that didn't exist even 15, 20 years ago. And, I do hope that as those economies are emerging, we make that knowledge available and really support support everyone in making the best use of that knowledge so that the problems can be avoided. Because the worst thing that in my view that could happen is that those economies simply model their ways forward on how we have developed over the last say, 50 years. And I can't even, I don't even want to think what that would actually look like, because it gets really frightening.

And I get at the same time that it's really challenging, for us to say like, yeah, this is how we lived over the last 50 years, but by the way, you can't have that because we kind of screwed everything up already. And so, there is this kind of like challenge. And I think that that's where we need to also ask completely new kinds of questions about wellbeing. What does it mean to have a great life, and fashion has a key role to play in that. but I, I think we also have to be boldly imaginative in thinking about the kinds of futures we want for ourselves and fashion's role in those kinds of futures. 

Christopher Lacy: Boldly re-imagining, we have knowledge, we have a system that needs to reevaluate the value chain, which brings me to, when I started at Parsons, I have to say, I discovered so many cool things from the textile programs that, I have to say, I didn't consider things like onion die and students doing amazing things with weaving seeds into fabric and the fabric could grow and, just brilliant projects happening around sustainability.

So, when we consider your statement boldly, reimagine, what we're doing in the future, if we ask researchers and we say students, who are doing these experimentations in school, can they really be applied in the fashion business model? To be accepted and executed? 

Timo Rissanen: It's a, it's an excellent question. And I do think that when done appropriately, yes, they can. But, I do think that there's some aspects of the system , in the way that we know today, that probably isn't tenable going forward, like this kind of what I would call a hyper-centralization of the global fashion system where, we have this sort of centers of intense fashion activity, like New York City is one example. And then, almost all of the manufacturing is actually outsourced to other places at massive scales. And that has kind of become the dominant model that we, we think of the global fashion system now. I think partly, you know, COVID-19 has highlighted the immense fragility of that system, the fragility of concentrating and centralizing things to the scale that we have. And that fragility is coming through in  multiple ways, including the suffering that is currently being experienced by millions of garment workers in Bangladesh and elsewhere, as a result of brands in the United States and a few other countries. But I do think that those kinds of things, like you mentioned dying with onion skins, which is a part of the practice of what is called natural dying, which is dying with a plant and some animal materials as different from dying with industrially produced chemicals, which has been the dominant way of time fabrics for the last 150 years or so. Whereas before that, actually all textile design was done using plants and animals, because that's what was available.

There are examples, like there's botanical dies based on the West coast, but they work with a number of brands across the United States and elsewhere, I'm sorry, they're called botanical colors.  They work with Eileen Fisher and a number of other brands on doing natural, dying at scale. It might not be the scale of hundreds of thousands of units, but it definitely is at the scale of thousands of units.

 And so I do see like cleaner, of other ways of doing things to how we might've been doing them over the last couple of decades. And so I am hopeful, but it's going to take a lot of work and it's going to take some time. 

Christopher Lacy:  When I think about sustainability and the new ways of creating, of getting products out to consumers, the one thing I always consider though, is we talk about fast fashion in this way of, of how much it, it breaks down the environment. But, we also have to consider that sustainable products or products made from vegetable dyes and things that are quite conscious for the environment, are also quite costly to the consumer.

Timo Rissanen: Yes.

Christopher Lacy: And you go, okay, well if you consider a mom, maybe a single mom or a family that has multiple children going through school, sustainability really can't be top of mind, right? Because if we look at what the average household income in New York was five years ago, I think it was $27,000, was the average household income in New York state. So, sustainability can't be a top of mind, but they're also the ones that are needing to buy clothes that are, resilient. And so they're having to kind of go into this process as a consumer in the wheel of this fashion system that we've created.

Timo Rissanen: Yes.

Christopher Lacy: What I would like is for sustainability to kind of bridge this gap.  People who are shopping in the luxury space , they could afford sustainability, but there's another group that can't. And do you see us being able to get to that point where sustainability is affordable for everyone?

Timo Rissanen: Yes, but I do think it requires, a kind of, a recalibration of how we think about the ways in which we acquire fashion, because conventionally and for most of the history of fashion in the modern sense, we think about it as buying garments. You know, we are on a podcast about retail! That is the dominant model, but I think there's opportunities and there's already many examples of other ways of acquiring or other ways of provisioning fashion to people. I mean, there's the the rental models, which actually are at least as expensive, at least the large players. You know, they certainly don't solve the affordability issue. But, there's other ways, like I know a few networks in the UK and Scandinavia, where people have set up these online networks, where they swap clothing, for example, and I guess the main function that, that fulfills is the desire for variety in your wardrobe. And, so creating variety without constantly buying new things, which is part of the problem. 

You know, Elizabeth Kline in her book, Overdressed, which came out in, I think 2012; the figure that she cited at the time, so this was almost a decade ago and it was right at the, sort of at the back of the financial crisism an average American was buying 68 garmnts per year. And certainly I would say that, that kind of, those kinds of quantities, like there is no future of sustainability if we keep consuming at those kinds of levels. And so I think at least, you know, the issue of variety, which is where fast fashion has found a place, because you know, people can buy these large numbers of clothes, and can actually afford to do so. I think that's where things like swapping and sort of closet sharing of wardrobe sharing can be solutions alongside retail. I don't think of them as mutually exclusive, I see them as complimentary. So we, we have a more diverse landscape of clothing acquisition or fashion acquisition than we might've previously.

 I don't in any way to know that it raises some really difficult questions for the retail industry in particular, because the traditional source of revenue is selling clothes. And if that starts to diversify and also in some ways, you know, in some instances, at least be replaced by things where no money is exchanged. It, it does raise some really difficult questions. And I do think that those are the questions that we should be asking because we are facing an increasingly uncertain future. And the sooner we start to deal with the difficult issues, the better.   We've been avoiding them for a long time as well.

Christopher Lacy: We love to avoid issues because if we avoid it, then it goes away, right? 

Timo Rissanen: Yes.

Christopher Lacy: That's how that works. 

Timo Rissanen: I think we're seeing that also with what's happening across the United States right now, we're facing head on questions that have been avoided for a long, long, long time in this country. And yeah, they don't go away by ignoring them. That's the, that's the thing.

Christopher Lacy: I actually want to ask you about that because you grew up in Finland, lived in Australia, you came to the U S and across that time you've been doing research, obviously you've been, you know, in the fashion industry, was it shocking to you here in the US  experiencing or, or kind of seeing what that inclusivity or lack of, was like? Did you feel it as much in Finland and in Australia as you do here in the US? 

Timo Rissanen: It's a great question. And,  I would say there's actually more similarities between Australia and the United States, at least in some ways, there's also some big differences, but I guess the similarities that they are both country's born out of colonization, even if the history is, and even the timelines are quite different between the two countries and, and there are some key differences, like Australia doesn't have the same kind of history of slavery that the United States does, which very much shaped the history of this country and not just the history, but very much the present as well. But,  it's certainly been a deep learning experience. I was very naive as a 20 year old moving to Australia, not knowing, not really understanding the history of colonization in any sort of deep way. You know, I've learned about it at school, but it was taught to us in this very matter of fact, way that, you know, the English sailed to this continent and then colonized it and, and it was presented as kind of this historical thing, when in fact it's an ongoing process in the present when you actually start to look into it. And I would say the same here in the United States. And it's been, you know, I think there's some usefulness in being a Finn, but I've also had to dig deeper because Finland is not immune, it has its own history of colonization in that it was part of Sweden and then part of Russia. But, also within Finland there's, you know, the Finnish people have displaced the Sami people, particularly in the North. And also the way that so many people in Lapland, they experience discrimination in the same way that other groups experienced discrimination in the United States and in Australia.

So there are parallels.  I also had to learn that once I left Finland, that Finland was not in any way immune from colonization, even if the expression of it is  different, but it is also an ongoing process there.    

And so it's been, for me, it's an ongoing education because, you know, as a privileged white man, I am often blind to, you know, our society is designed to blind us from the systems of oppression. And so, it's an ongoing, self-education to look deeper and to try and understand the systems that we are all part of and how they also shaped the fashion system. Because they do shape the fashion system in, in many deep ways. 

Christopher Lacy: Very much so, and I want to ask you what you would probably advise retailers, whether they are existing or you're a new retailer coming up, because we have a very interesting consumer demographic that's happened. It's the most multicultural demographic ever on the planet. They're also extremely conscious about the environment. They are extremely caring about social issues. So from your perspective as a researcher and a designer; you are also an artist, you educate people. If a retailer was coming to you right now and said, you know, what do I need to be doing and thinking about in this next year, what would you say to them? 

Timo Rissanen: I would say do as much self-education as quickly as possible as you can in the short term, while committing to a lifelong education in the longterm because it's, it is education that doesn't end. Because, when you have a system that is based on literally four centuries of injustice, we're not gonna undo it with an afternoon of training. You know, if you remember when Starbucks had an afternoon to deal with an incident, like it's, it's gonna take more than an afternoon.  But in the short term, one of the sort of upsides to even the current crisis in the United States, is that there is actually a lot of information out there. You don't need to spend a lot of time looking for good quality information on what any of us can do as individuals, but also what businesses can do. And I do think that there is a kind of a threshold moment happening right now where businesses can't get away with just the simple posts of solidarity on social media. I mean, they are being called out left, right and center, and rightly so for not walking the talk. And there are some big brands that have been called out even in the last week for posting Black Lives  atter posts while it's widely known that they've done campaigns where they, for example, haven't  paid they're black models. I've seen two examples just in the last 48 hours of that. And so the work has to be real, and I actually see it as a huge opportunity.   What I see moving forward is a  fashion retail industry that is much more deeply engaged in the issues of today and much more deeply invested in the kind of collective wellbeing of society. You know, that, that's what I see going forward. Often we think of sustainability as just this like horrible checklist of, of regulations that's coming your way, but I do think that really the future that I see ahead for us, is an industry that is much more deeply engaged with humanity itself. And that's only a good thing. And so I dare to be cautiously optimistic about the future, even if, that's not in any way denying that there's huge amount of really difficult work ahead for us, to make sure that the fashion industry globally and locally is one rooted in justice for everyone and not just for the few, because that's not what it has been for a long time. That's the work I see ahead for us collectively and also individually. 

Christopher Lacy: I like that. I mean, essentially you've just said retail's future is putting people first and product second. And we've really run on a system where it's always been about product and then we consider the people. I agree with you. I think that's going to be the biggest change with retail. I know we talk about technology and we talk about all those things, but at the core of it, it's going to be, what is your business doing for people for the sustainability of life, as we see it in all, all of these aspects. 

So, you're going back to Australia, but I want you to give us an opportunity and, and tell us how can our listeners stay up to date with what you are doing.

Timo Rissanen: I try to post things, at least on my Instagram. I, I'm terrible on Twitter, I tweet like twice a month. So, I would not follow me on Twitter for anything. But Instagram. I'm pretty regular. And I am kind of in the like, many of us, sort of reconfiguring how I use the platform because it's inherently, it's a very narcissistic platform, I find.

 And so I had a long conversation with a friend yesterday about how do we actually kind of redirect that, because I was kind of moaning about the fact that whenever I post something, that's a picture of something that's not me, the engagement goes to by literally halves. Whereas, when I post a picture of me, the numbers go up immediately, and that's the kind of dilemma that I struggle with because it is narcissistic. But that's where I do post, including about my research activities.   And then the organization that I co-founded The Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion, you know, we, co-opted the name from the Union of Concerned Scientists.  We are a body of about 240 researchers and also industry people from around the world. And the website for that organization is ConcernedResearchers.org. We do post about our activities, including work that we do with industry, we have to do it in a particular way and sort of try and stay independent, but that's not to say that we can't work with industry. We do work with industry. And like I said, our membership is also made up of industry. So, that's the other place, but so my Instagram is my name, TimoRissanen, and yeah, the ConcernedResearchers.org is another good place. 

Christopher Lacy: Fantastic. Thank you so much. It has really been a pleasure speaking with you today. I'm glad we were able to get this on the books to get you in to talk to me and our listeners, for them to hear your point of view. 

Timo Rissanen: Thank you Christopher for having me. It was a real pleasure. 

Christopher Lacy: For all of our Retail Revolutioners listening, if this is your first time, please feel free to subscribe on any of your favorite streaming platforms. We are available on Apple Podcast, as well as Spotify and Stitcher. You can also go and check out all of our episodes at RetailRevolutionPodcast.com, where we also, present the transcripts of what you have just listened to. 

So, thank you so much, everyone, and have a great day.

Joshua Williams: Thank you for listening to this episode of Retail Revolution. A very special thank you to everyone who has helped make this podcast possible, our guests, our students and fellow faculty at Parsons School of Design, especially in such an extraordinary and unprecedented time. Our theme music was composed by Spencer Powell. 

Be well, and stay tuned for our next episode.