By Sarah Montague
“If you ask me, ‘are you a fashion designer?’, I’m like, ‘No, I’m a designer. And I like to find solutions to problems.”
—Carolina Obergon
“The fashion industry is really reinforcing this idea that morality and ethics is something that you can just buy.”
—Ruth Donagher
Carolina Obregon is an Assistant Professor in the School of Fashion at Parsons. Ruth Donagher, who studied with Obregon, is a dual-degree student who finished her Parsons degree in fashion design in Spring 2024 and will be in the Environmental Studies department at Lang starting this Fall.
Once you’ve heard from them, you will never think of the clothes on your back the same way, and you might even change what you are putting on your back.
If you are used to thinking of clothing as apparel, ornamentation, or just part of day-to-day life, these two women will help you to understand them as parts of complex systems; subject to a moral compass; and agents of change.
A Long Road to the Right Place
When Obregon was thirteen she came on a trip to New York with her parents, and had an epiphany:
“I was really enthralled with New York City. Back then, It was a bit more chaotic and crazy city than it is today. And It was just a life-turning moment. I saw this, and thought, ‘Oh, my God! I want to be a fashion designer.’ I don’t know where that came from, because in my family, nobody is into fashion.”
Obergon’s path was set, but the route was far from straight. There were few opportunities to study fashion in Columbia, so she started in a trade school in Boulder, but soon was at Parson’s from which she has an associate degree in fashion. For a time, Obergon was in the industry, “I had a passion, had my own line in handbags that I produced in Mexico, and then I sold in specialty boutiques in New York City.”
But, something was bothering Obergon, morally. She wasn’t happy with the industry, and the next stage of her progress took her to Finland and a degree in sustainability and fashion. That gave her a context, and a vocabulary, for things she had intuited:
“It was a very stimulating and stressful environment. At the same time, I just felt that the treatment back then of those people that would work for the brands that I worked with. was not right. So I felt that there was something there that was like kind of eating me or eating my passion for fashion and I questioned it, and I questioned more as a very personal individual level.”
The questions made Obergon realize she had to be part of the answer, as she asked herself
“ What am I doing? Is it helping anybody? How can I help the communities that I’m part of?”
Parsons is now one of those communities, and Obregon’s course, Sustainable Systems, is shaped by a core understanding that came to her during her own educational journey.
“So my interest in systems came from the masters I did in Finland [at the Aalto University School of the Arts, Design, and Architecture in Helsinki.] I had a professor who was an engineer, who worked at IBM on “systems focus.” I had never heard about systems and had really no knowledge of how systems had any correlation with the fashion industry.”
But the professor, drawing on the seminal work Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows, was really good at explaining how we live in the systems, but in industry—fashion and in other industries–we work in silos where we kind of are not permitted to move to the other systems. But we do move in those systems. It was for me the first time that I encountered a process and a toolkit to look at design in a different way.”
I asked her to talk a bit more about what exactly a “system” is. Is it, for example, a social construct?
“Yes, it’s a social construct, but it’s also an environmental. And it’s also financial. And our bodies are a perfect example.” It became clear that the concept crosses boundaries and creates a culture of analogy:
“Our bodies have different systems, that have to work in in unison and in synchronicity. So, when you think about an industry as complex as the fashion industry, it’s like a huge human body with overlapping ‘systems’. The many, many people that work in fashion all over the world would be one system.
Then you have all of these different fibers that are come from different parts of the world. So that would be an agricultural system if we’re talking about natural fibers, or we can also talk about the industrial system, because you have fibers that come from petroleum and from fossil fuels, and they are in an industrial system.”
Factories—for fiber production, dyeing, assembling, etc., are also systems, are the many facets of the marketplace.
And it’s this vast inter-connectedness, and the responsibilities it generates, that Obergon wants her students to be aware of. And to realize that they can be agents of change:
“We have to have a wide understanding of systems within the different pathways that [students] might take at Parsons: textiles; communication; design strategies; architecture; any course. So what we do when teaching “systems” is give them a wide body of knowledge, and diverse tools, that then they can apply in their own programs or in their own processes.
I call them ‘agents of change’ because in any of these different pathways they can really they have agency, and they have opportunities to change systems and processes that have always been done in the same way, the status quo.”
Obergon has been heartened by some recent developments in the industry at both the small and large scales: the establishment of mycoworks, which promotes mushroom-based production; and Ralph Lauren’s recent collaboration with the Indigenous community. Which, as far as she’s concerned, means that parts of the industry are at last operating from a core creative mission:
“Designers look at problems as opportunities, opportunities to change those problems that have been embedded in our different systems.”
The Luxury of Less
One person who really seems to have embraced the role of “agent of change” is Obergon’s former student Ruth Donagher. A childhood love of drawing, and a growing interest in “thinking about how we adorn ourselves and present ourselves and go about the world,” made fashion design an obvious career choice. But fairly quickly it became framed by a larger context for Donagher.
“When I learned about the climate crisis and about the impact that fashion is having on our world, I realized that there was no way for me to go forward in this industry without knowing what I’m getting myself into in terms of the responsibility that I would hold as a designer.”
I first encountered Donagher at the April 2024 Dean’s Honor Symposium, where she gave a presentation based on her senior thesis—an investigation of “zero waste” design.
“Because we were assigned a zero waste design project, which is when you create a piece of clothing, and you cut out all the pieces, and none of the original fabric that you purchased is thrown away.
So none of those familiar bins full of “remnants.”
“And initially I was like, ‘oh, well, I guess this is sort of a fun, one-time design challenge.’ But slowly I began to realize that for hundreds of years, this was the norm. This is the way people always designed clothes.”
This would make perfect, practical sense In eras where resources were scarce, and even if you were wealthy, amassing goods was complex and expensive.
“And I thought, how crazy is it that we teach sustainability as this external thing, outside of the realm of normal fashion production, when in reality any designer has the ability to intuitively tap into and reconnect with it.”
The problem was one of perception—sustainability as distant concept or goal, not part of the everyday work of making. So Donagher set about changing perception in a very practical way:
“I created a curriculum for an historical sewing and a zero-waste workshop, and I presented that workshop to many different classes throughout my senior year at Parsons. It was a great combination of learning, of teaching, and also of fashion design.”
Donagher’s program was designed not only to introduce the idea of deft and unwasteful design, but to actively combat corporation manipulation, a phenomenon known as “greenwashing.”
“I conducted a lot of surveys with students that I did the workshop with. Around 84 said that it changed their view of greenwashing, which was huge for me. Especially because I think greenwashing was really sort of what I was trying to get at the heart of with this whole project, this idea that we’re selling sustainability.
It’s something that the industry in a lot of ways has taken away from people and sold back to them, stripping the integrity of ethical and sustainable production and commodifying it and making it just sort of like a sticker that we can slap onto a product.”
In a world of commoditization, a sense of what’s right becomes just another product:
“You’re also selling the idea of ethics, because a lot of the time the fashion industry is really reinforcing this idea that morality and ethics is something that you can just buy with sort of no thought to it.”
It’s a big problem to solve thread by thread, pattern by pattern, but Donagher thinks she’s left a small legacy of change during her time at Parsons:
“Perceptions among the students were changed. I think 3 out of 4 in the surveys I conducted said that the workshop would impact their own future artistic practice in some way, which is huge for me and very meaningful.”
Donagher’s imagination and resourcefulness have something to do with this, but she also thinks she’s part of a tectonic shift:
“I truly do think that the fashion industry as it’s sort of self-perpetuating right now is not compatible with a livable or sustainable future. So I think that we’re going to see a really radical restructuring of how we think about mass production”
But what about on the smallest scale? Donagher’s presentation included examples of zero-waste garments, and she had one on a dress maker’s dummy in the Starr Foundation Hall where she gave her talk.
The result? Sort of what you might get if Coco Chanel had been raised by the Amish. Sleek, and intriguingly plain.
Donagher has no immediate plans to market her work; she seems engaged enough in taking the next step in her academic career. Like Obergon, she has come to think of fashion and sustainability, design and the environment, as coterminous.
Start with a little; change a lot
In her Sustainable Systems course Obergon features a strategy called “the nudge,” derived from an experiment in Denmark that encouraged people to eat healthily by example (i.e., slice an apple so that it becomes just as appealing as a slab of cake).
“The nudge is a little push. So that people can change behaviors without not without really knowing that they’re doing it.”
Obergon and Donagher both are champion nudgers; and they would like us—the New School community, and the conflicted world beyond it–to change.