Sustainability has become a fashion industry buzzword, no doubt, but not all brands are as committed as others, with some jumping on the environmental bandwagon for marketing purposes rather than working behind the scenes for real, meaningful change.
Nobody could accuse Madre Natura of cynical greenwashing. In fact, the new label out of Sydney’s Marrickville may have one of the most exhaustive and all-encompassing approaches to ethically produced fashion in Australia.
Designer Jackie Galleghan graduated from the prestigious Fashion Design Studio at Tafe NSW in Ultimo in 2011, but it wasn’t until an unfortunate series of events – including losing her job because of Covid-19 – that she was inspired to finally launch her own line, a dream she’d been harbouring since 2017.
Having spent the past decade working with both high-end and fast-fashion brands in Sydney, Galleghan was aware of how much fabric dead stock was lying around in Australia’s best design studios. A few years ago, she began reaching out to friends and cold-emailing designers she didn’t know, and began gathering a collection of dead stock to eventually upcycle into her own designs.
Madre Natura – Italian for “mother nature” – uses 99 per cent dead stock, creating subtle riffs on classics such as wide-legged cotton trousers (in a ’70s-inspired palette of browns) and soft button-down shirting in navy and cream.
Garments are gender-neutral and seasonless, designed to be kept and worn for years. Each piece comes with the promise of three kinds of complimentary mends: pant length, button repair and zip repair. All packaging – such as swing tags, string and printing slips – is made with recycled paper and eco-friendly ink, and each order comes with a detailed care guide so your garment lasts as long as possible. In the event you do outlive your Madre Natura piece, the brand encourages you to send it back to be upcycled into their next collection.
“I knew that using dead stock fabrics wasn’t enough, so I had to source biodegradable materials for all the garment trims,” says Galleghan, who is singular and uncompromising in her view that the fashion industry needs to drastically change its practices.
“For example, all the thread we use to sew the garments together is 100 per cent organic cotton or 100 per cent tencel thread, and the buttons started their life as fruit seeds that were processed into the shape of a button. Most conventional fashion brands use polyester thread and buttons, the problem being that those materials take 200 years to break down in landfill – that’s without even considering the amount of carbon emissions they create.”
As with any genuinely sustainable brand, cost becomes a tricky factor. When you’re refusing to use cheap, exploitative labour, or inexpensive, synthetic fabrics, your costs go up dramatically.
At Madre Natura, a silk shirt retails for $320 and a striped boxy tee will set you back $100 – the idea, of course, being that investing in quality items with longevity will save you money down the line.
In comparison to other sustainable brands, Galleghan’s model is quite competitive, in part because she trims her own profit margins to make the brand more accessible.
“Our focus isn’t to become monetarily successful, it’s to change the fashion industry and help the planet,” she says. “I feel like it’s only the beginning for us.”
