How a Career in Textile Development Can Support a More Sustainable Fashion Future
with Anna Kalabina
Author and interviewer: Stella Hertantyo
Anna Kalabina is a textile product developer, designer, and sustainability manager with a background in textile crafts, such as fabric painting, natural dyeing, and batik. After finishing her undergraduate at Parsons School of Design, she briefly worked as a dyer and textile crafts artisan on Broadway, helping to create costumes for theater and film.
Anna is currently based in Los Angeles and works for a textile company, focusing on developing new techniques, as well as sustainability and factory compliance.
I interviewed Anna in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership as part of our Member Spotlight interview series.
Below are some of the highlights from the conversation, including:
What it means to work in textile development and factory compliance,
How conscious textile research and development contribute to cultural sustainability, and
What nuances should be considered when using traditional techniques at a production scale
What led you to work at the intersection of fashion and sustainability?
My journey is a winding one. My passion for fashion started at a young age when my mom saw me playing with all of these paper dolls and putting dresses on them. That was the moment my parents decided they should enroll me in art school. At art school, I had classes in fabric painting, traditional batik, and crafts.
After graduating from art school — which was parallel to my high school education — I moved to New York. I went to Parsons to study fashion design, even though I knew little about the industry and what working in fashion entailed.
In my sophomore year, I got a sense of different internships and it felt too corporate for my taste. I'm more of an artist and not much of an office worker — or at least that’s what I thought at the time when I was trying those different internships. Then I started wondering: What else might I be interested in, at the intersection of fashion and textiles, that doesn’t require me to work at a computer all day?
There are five or six costume shops in New York City that specialize in Broadway costumes. A friend of my mom's, who worked at a costume shop, invited me to do an internship at one. That’s how I got my start in creating costumes for Broadway.
My internship required me to sew parts of the Broadway costumes and this was more exciting to me than anything else in the world at that moment. After graduating from Parsons, I started working at the costume shop full-time.
A couple of years later, the Covid-19 pandemic hit and all theaters closed down. I was out of a job and living in New York was expensive, so I moved to Virginia to stay with my parents. I recently found a new opportunity in Los Angeles, which is why I moved here.
My new job is at a screen-printing and hand-painting company. We work with a lot of well-known brands. For example, Reformation is one of our biggest clients. We do prints for them — mostly on t-shirts and dresses — and develop new techniques that are rarely used by anyone else. I work in textile development and factory compliance.
What does your job as a textile developer entail?
My job as a textile developer is to come up with new techniques and translate them to production scale. It’s one thing to use a technique that works when one person creates a garment, but producing 200 pieces of that same garment is a different story.
What do you think people should know about textile research and development when it comes to understanding the fashion system better?
Textile research and development is an important aspect of sustainable fashion. At the screen-printing company I work at, we use a lot of inks and chemicals to apply designs to fabrics.
It's important to understand what you're using and what's inside your chemical jars, because people in the factory are working with these chemicals daily. This means it’s essential for these chemicals to be health and safety-compliant.
Plus when we wash these garments during production, these excess chemicals go down the drain. The same goes for when consumers buy the garments and wash them at home.
So from a sustainability perspective, we must become more knowledgeable about the chemicals and materials that go into our clothing. This means considering everything from the kinds of fibers our garments are made from, to the chemicals used to treat them.
This is also where supply chain management and traceability come in, because you need to know where your materials and other supplies are coming from. It’s vital for ethical and sustainable production, as well as textile design, so you know how to work with the fabric to achieve the result you want.
How can people learn about textile research and development if they don’t have an academic background in this?
It’s important to understand what you work with, and I think hands-on experience is the best way to do it. I learned most of what I know from my work and the practical experience of dealing with materials daily.
If I were just a materials scientist and I never touched these materials, I wouldn’t have as much exposure to what I’m working with. But because I’m actively developing techniques with my own hands, I get to understand the material better. It’s a trial-and-error process.
If you're not having this hands-on experience because of the nature of your work, or because you didn't have this opportunity, at least get in touch with somebody who does have this experience and can share their insights with you.
I will supplement my hands-on experience with research that I do on the internet. But a lot of reading on this topic is very technical. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. So I always suggest practical experience first.
What does your work in factory compliance entail on a day-to-day basis?
I work with compliance daily. But the work comes in waves, because the most responsibilities come in when we’re preparing for a factory audit.
We do audits because many of our clients — for example, Reformation — require us to comply with their labor and sustainability standards before they send production runs to us. They want to make sure that vendors and suppliers meet their sustainability and ethics standards. So they ask us to hire, or they hire, an auditing company.
Audits mean that there's a person who comes in and they're knowledgeable about labor laws and sustainability laws. They review our documents and walk through the factory to make sure that we have everything that we need to be compliant with the standards of the client.
Recently we had a visit from an auditing company and it's a whole day process. As a sustainability and compliance manager, it’s my responsibility to lead them, make sure they have everything they need, provide them with documents, and answer all their questions.
For example, if they ask about how we ensure workers are safe in their workplace I’ll explain that we have a person who is trained in first aid, and we have all of our safety data sheets which show all of the information about the chemicals we use.
So it’s my responsibility to keep all of these documents in place, make sure that we comply with the standards, and make sure that our people are safe. And if the auditors give us something to work on — perhaps we need more eyewash stations for people working with chemical sprays — then it’s also my responsibility to organize this.
The responsibilities may be different for larger companies where they have a whole team of compliance managers. They might have someone who’s a legal expert and someone else who’s a chemicals expert. But in smaller companies, it’s usually one person who has to know all of the compliance procedures.
This is an issue in the industry, because audits cost a lot of money which means it’s much harder for smaller production companies to be audit-compliant when it comes to sustainability and ethics.
You need to hire at least two or three people who are responsible for overseeing compliance. You need to pay the auditing fee if it’s not paid by the client. You need to pay for any services needed to prepare for the audit. It’s a costly process.
I think this is something that can be largely improved on the business, state, federal, and global scale. Smaller businesses need more access to these resources, because — at the moment — even if they want to be sustainability compliant, they can’t afford it.
Can you describe some of the traditional textile crafts and techniques that you work with?
I was mainly hired because of my background in batik and fabric painting. The company I work at is currently looking into expanding into more batik-related designs and working with silk — which is also my specialty.
One of the other new techniques that we're trying to develop right now is adding a thickener to natural dyes so that they can be reliably applied to garments, instead of using the acrylic inks that we currently use.
The thickener I use is gum arabic, which is natural and edible. It gets added to yogurt and cottage cheese to give them a thicker texture. So if you don’t add dye to it, you can technically eat it.
We want to apply these natural dyes to natural fiber clothing so that the process is organic from start to finish.
And my current project is developing a technique that lets us transition from using safe, but synthetic, materials to using 100% organic natural materials. That’s very exciting to me!
How can conscious textile research and development contribute to cultural sustainability?
Many of the techniques we work with have been taught to us by the people who work at the company. A lot of our workers are from Latin America. When they came to work at the company, they brought with them techniques that have been passed down through many generations in their families.
One of my favorite parts of working at this company is that we get to share knowledge from across the world. For example, I studied batik and traditional fabric painting, but this isn’t something that other workers have heard of. And I’ve learned traditional stamping and hand-painting techniques that I have never seen before.
We use this generational knowledge in the techniques we develop and, in that way, we help to preserve these techniques.
What nuances should be considered when using traditional techniques at a production scale?
When it comes down to techniques, it’s all about cultural heritage. These techniques need to be preserved. If they are used with respect and appreciation for the craft, they should not fall under the umbrella of cultural appropriation.
It’s the responsibility of the textile designers to make sure that the designs they send to us — the vendors and suppliers — are respectful and not culturally insensitive. If they send us an offensive design, we will refuse to use it and call it a day.
When it comes to companies like the one I work for, we are suppliers of the technique, not the design. For us cultural preservation comes in when we choose how to apply these designs to garments. We can use a traditional technique to apply the design supplied to us by the designer.
What advice would you give to other conscious fashion professionals who are struggling to find a role that is the best fit for them?
I've been incredibly lucky to fall into a job that lets me explore different aspects of what I enjoy and different aspects of my personality. I love being engaged with different parts of the business because otherwise I get bored quickly and burn out.
What binds all conscious fashion professionals is our passion for sustainable fashion. So even if you are not in a role that feels like the right fit for you, you shouldn’t forget this desire to rethink the fashion system. Don’t forget that you can find ways to do this on a small scale by exploring your interests.
Transforming fashion doesn’t have to only be a professional pursuit. It can also be about exploring your interests in your own capacity — whether that’s a side hustle, podcasting, blogging, or trying natural dyeing at home.
It's hard to force yourself to do something that you don't want to do and most people have jobs that they don’t enjoy every aspect of. But try to find one aspect of your job that excites you and do more of that. And if it's something that you have to take home, do it at home.
Try to try to do a tiny bit of something that you enjoy every day. If you enjoy doing it, I guarantee that you will find the time — even if it's five minutes a day.
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