Tonlé, Contemporary Design and Activism

Fashion Consort News Bytes

Joshua Williams: Welcome back Sass. Who are we featuring this month?

Sass Brown: We're talking about Tonlé. They're a Cambodian brand that does a contemporary collection,

Joshua Williams: This is such an interesting brand, because they really are involved in so many different things. But at the core, they are a womenswear brand led by founders who are very activistic in terms of how to approach design and how to be part of the world as global citizens.

Sass Brown: Absolutely. Rachel Faller, who's the founder, she's based in California. The brand itself is produced and operated out of Cambodia, which is where she splits her time with. And she is very impressive in terms of, she really understands the place that the fashion system has played in neo-liberalism, colonialism, the whole sort of white savior type mentality. And she really is extremely conscious of that and sees her role as developing a brand and a company out of Cambodia as an honor; that she is able to give back, that she is able to enable the population, to show their capabilities instead of continuing a rather long and messy past between the U.S. and Cambodia. So, she's very much aware of the role that she plays.

Joshua Williams: Can you talk a little bit about her design aesthetic, how she approaches her work?

Sass Brown: It's a very contemporary, wearable, easy wear collection. They're very relatable clothes. They are at a median price point, so they're quite accessible.

A lot of the collection is made out of jersey, although they utilize a number of different techniques. One of the things that is really quite special about them is their focus on worker training. First of all, all their workers are full-time employees. They don't do piece work. They don't subcontract. They encourage their employees to train, to upskill, to learn, which is quite the reverse of your usual sort of workshops, factory setting, particularly in a place like Cambodia that does significant fast fashion production, where it's all about the de-skilling of workers and the underpaying of workers. She does the complete reverse. She operates in a lean manufacturing model, which means workers work in a circle. They don't work in straight lines, looking at the back of the person in front of them. They're encouraged to learn new techniques, to try new machines. They are paid to up-skill They're encouraged to progress employment-wise towards managerial positions and so on. So it's much more of a humane model, or an ethical model of production, if you will. And in a country that's renowned for fast fashion and the reverse of that.

Read the full transcript at FCNewsBytes.com.

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