Name: 300 years of fast fashion in Yorkshire
Start: 2025-11-18T18:30:00+00:00
End: 2025-11-18T19:30:00+00:00
Location: Merchant Adventurers' Hall

Yorkshire's fashion history reveals that textile sustainability issues and solutions are not new.
About this Event

Merchant Adventurers' Arts Discovery Lecture

300 years of fast fashion in Yorkshire: Using history to understand the challenges and opportunities of sustainable fashion

Fast fashion and unsustainable practices of making and consuming clothes are considered a 21st century problem, but the history of fashion and textiles reveals these issues are nothing new. This talk explores Yorkshire’s important role in the global fashion industry from the 18th century onwards through the lens of sustainability. The environmental and human impacts of making fashion can be found across the historical record, from the dye industry’s insatiable need for human urine to the development of synthetic textiles and the mass manufacture of cheap ready-to-wear clothing. These records also reveal Yorkshire’s pioneering role in sustainable practices, from innovations in wool recycling to trade unions that won improved rights and conditions. This talk examines the role of Yorkshire fashion as an agent for change – both positive and negative – and asks how this history could be applied to building a more sustainable industry today.

This year we will be holding a special session before our Arts Discovery Lecture. We have a Christmas Tree in the York Minster Christmas Tree Festival, and we would like our decorations to reflect the Merchant Adventurers’ links to the wool trade and the subject of this lecture. We are inviting all our lecture attendees to come to the Hall at 5.30pm and join us in a mass pom pom making session!

All equipment will be provided; no previous experience necessary and pom pom experts will be on hand to help! You will get to see your finished pom pom adorning the Merchant Adventurers’ Christmas in York Minster! So come and join us for a world’s first….pom pom making in a medieval guildhall.

Pom pom making 5.30pm
Lecture starts at 6.30pm

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