Addressing Denim's Impact: What Does a Career as a Conscious Denim Designer Entail? [CFC Member Spotlight]
With CFC Member Jacqueline Schumann
Author and interviewer: Stella Hertantyo
Jacqueline Schumann is a freelance denim designer who works with conscious denim brands. While her studies at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, in California, taught her traditional fashion industry skills, her own explorations into the fashion industry were what showed her the harms that fashion inflicts.
After wrestling with finding her place in the fashion industry, Jacqueline decided to pivot and pursue a path of changing the industry for the better through freelancing with conscious brands. She niched down on denim, because it’s one of the biggest offenders of conscious fashion, but also the most worn fabric in the world.
I interviewed Jacqueline in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership as part of our Member Spotlight series, where we highlight the incredible work our members are doing.
Below are some of the highlights from the conversation about her journey pivoting into freelance and developing ways to decrease denim’s impact.
What led you to work at the intersection of fashion and sustainability?
When I was younger, I didn't think that I’d end up in fashion. I wanted to be a veterinarian. At one point, I thought about being a psychologist. But then, when I started working in fashion retail when I was in high school, something clicked. That’s when I got my first taste of what it meant to work in fashion and work with garments.
When my husband and I moved to California, I heard about the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising online. I was curious. After some thought, I decided to apply and — thankfully — I got accepted. I’m so glad I took the risk, because I had a blast there.
I was taught every traditional industry skill for fashion. I majored in product development, which is a marriage between the technical and creative sides of fashion.
Now, looking back, I find it so sad that they didn’t say a single word about sustainability. Perhaps things have changed since I was there from 2013 to 2015, but at the time I didn’t even know the term “sustainable fashion”.
I was taught to make garments cheap, produce fast, and source as cheaply as possible, because that results in more profit for the brand. So this is the approach I had to adopt when I first got into the industry, because it’s all I knew from school.
After graduating, I moved back to Utah and took a break from the fashion industry. I had two kids and ended up working in a hotel. This job was a total segway, but it opened my eyes up to the reality of the waste crisis. There is so much waste in hospitality — constantly seeing this waste left a mark on me and it’s something I could no longer ignore.
At the same time, I was trying to get my foot back in the door with fashion. I was reading books, and listening to podcasts, and I re-watched the documentary called “The True Cost”. I’d see images and read about the massive waste crisis in countries like Ghana, fueled by the fashion industry.
Everything I was learning about fashion made me uncomfortable. I felt like I shouldn’t be a part of the industry. I sat in this discomfort for a while and tried to figure out what I should do with all this information and how to navigate my career.
Eventually I decided that I do still love the industry. But I didn’t love it enough to participate in its harms. I realized that if I was going to be a part of the fashion industry, I had to commit to making it better — for the people in fashion’s supply chains and our planet. I haven’t looked back since.
Can you tell us about one of your projects working with denim that you are most proud of?
At the moment, I’m working with a client who wants to reduce the impact of the jeans they’re producing. At the same time, they want to significantly improve the fit of the jeans.
We’re starting from the drawing board, which is the best place to start from. This is also why I love working with smaller brands, because big brands already have so many processes in place that they become hesitant to start from scratch. Bigger brands are often so stuck in their ways that they see changing anything as a potential loss of money.
It’s much more exciting to work with smaller brands who are more open to reimagining their supply chain. When we start from the drawing board, it’s so much easier to reduce impact, because we can look at each stage of production from concept design to sourcing.
So we’re currently relooking at every denim piece that the brand creates and considering what the end-of-life options are, where the fibers are sourced from, and whether they can biodegrade. We’re rethinking the stitching, the trims, the fabric, the manufacturing, and how many countries are involved in production. The more countries the garment has to pass through, the greater the carbon emissions from transportation are.
The reason we are simultaneously rethinking the fit of the denim is that if you have a garment that fits you through many seasons of your life — such as weight gain, weight loss, and even pregnancy — and your changing sense of style, then it stays out of the landfill for longer and can be handed down to many people. The longer a garment is in circulation, the better.
You’ve said that you take traditional skills and alter them to fit circular design processes, rather than the traditional linear take-make & waste business models. Can you expand on what you mean by this?
Here's a funny story: In one of my technical classes at FIDM, there was a topic I didn’t understand. I didn’t get what the instructor was saying either. I went up to the instructor to ask about it and in response to my question, she said, “You don't have to reinvent the wheel — just accept it and take it at face value.” I probably caught her on a bad day, but I walked away feeling so embarrassed for asking. I thought to myself, “Maybe I question too many things.”
There are some skills that I refer to as the “traditional industry standard skills” that we do have to carry over when we work towards a conscious fashion future. For example, computer-aided designs. These are the designs that go into the tech pack that gets sent to the manufacturing factory. Computer-aided designs are not going anywhere. It's been industry standard for a while. It's one of the first skills that you're taught in fashion school.
But there are other new skills and processes that fashion is so slow to catch up on. This is ironic, because trend cycles are becoming faster and faster, and yet the industry can’t keep up with new technologies that will help to reduce its impact.
For example when a brand makes samples, there are several iterations of the sample that are made before the design is ready for production. Developing all of these samples takes time, fabric, materials, labor, machinery, water, and electricity. It doesn't come out of thin air. Most brands assume that this is the only way of doing business.
But there is this great new technology that can take a flat drawing and convert it into a 3D rendering. It’s called CLO. It turns the drawing into a mockup of your design so that can be communicated to the factory. Using technology like this can cut down on sampling, which cuts down the use of water, labor, electricity, and everything else that goes into creating a garment.
The reason I started with the story of asking a question in class, is because we shouldn’t take things at face value. We should ask questions and find ways to pivot our traditional fashion skills into the moment we find ourselves in now when it comes to the urgency of addressing fashion’s impacts.
What have the biggest lessons from your freelance pivot been — the challenges and the joys?
I’ve only been freelancing for a couple of years, but in that short time, I have grown leaps and bounds.
The biggest challenge in freelancing is that you are in charge of everything. You are the boss, the CEO, the employee, the marketing team — you’re everything. I thrived when I was an employee working for someone else. I enjoyed having a teacher, mentor, boss, and manager. So stepping into freelancing and having to make every decision for myself was challenging, but also exciting.
I’ve also learned that there is a big difference between thinking about a plan and executing it. You have to make your schedule and decide what is a priority and what is not.
Working from home with my kids is also chaotic. But when I’m feeling frustrated, I have to check myself on that and remind myself that I’m lucky that I get to work from home with my kids.
The flexibility of freelancing is both a blessing and a challenge.
You have many other skills — visual merchandising, retail experience, event planning, photo shoot coordination, and styling. What kinds of diverse skills are helpful for freelancing in conscious fashion?
I believe now that any working experience you have adds to your skillset and work ethic. I was so embarrassed about working at a hotel. I felt like my dreams had gone to die, and it wasn't what I wanted to be doing. But it was what was necessary at the time for me and my family, and it taught me more than I ever expected.
I went in thinking, “What could I possibly learn from working in a hotel?” And I could never have been more wrong. It taught me about communication and exposed me to the realities of waste. Strong communication skills are key, regardless of what industry you are working in.
Across all of the jobs I’ve worked, I learned how to be curious. I think this is a skill you need to nurture to be in the conscious fashion space. Somewhere between being a kid and becoming an adult, our curiosity often gets lost. I was reminded of this when my fashion school instructor was so bothered by me being curious about the question I had.
I think curiosity is essential. When you look at a pair of jeans, there isn’t much to it. But when you look closer at the denim, there is so much character to it. It begs all these questions like: How is denim made? What is Indigo? Where does indigo come from? How do they get the distressing on jeans? How do they figure out sizing and fits?
Denim is its own niche and everyone has something that they’re fascinated by. You need to lean into this curiosity to figure out how you can create true impact.
Why is picking a niche within sustainable fashion the key to a successful career?
There's no way that one person can know all of the intricacies and details of every fashion category. A lot of people who don’t work in fashion assume that if you work in fashion, you know everything about all clothes and footwear. These are umbrella terms and there are many specialties within them – such as footwear, accessories, denim, bridalwear, suiting, and swimwear.
So the first step would be niching down. If you try to learn everything about every category, you are just going to run yourself into a hole. You need to figure out what you want to focus on and commit to that. It’s a much more sustainable approach.
How can freelancers find brands to work with that align with their values?
It’s hard. If it was easy, I’d have been doing it for years. I firmly believe that you have to niche down and pick a category or a service.
I found Sew Heidi online and she offers a course on how to freelance in fashion. Doing this course gave me the foundation I needed. Heidi teaches you to niche down on a specialty or a service. This makes it so much easier to get connected with brands that share the same values.
When it comes to finding and reaching out to brands, it was trial and error for me. I spent a lot of time searching hashtags on Instagram for sustainable denim or conscious denim brands.
And I also researched brands on the Good On You platform. On their platform, you can search brands based on the values you are looking for or their ethics.
What resources should you check out if you want to learn more about denim and its impacts?
My top recommendation would be a book called The Denim Manual by Fashionary. Fashionary also has a lot of other great resources, such as books on textiles and sketching resources.
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You can connect with Jacqueline inside the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership: the online community for sustainable fashion professionals.