How Kowtow Is Building An Ethos For The Future Amid Fast Fashion, Greenwashing & ‘Sustainability’
In their Wellington HQ, the Kowtow team talk to Viva about their latest project, questioning “sustainability” and building an ethos for the future.
This summer, Kowtow’s office kitchen was home to an experiment.
Two tomato plants were planted side-by-side. Both soaked in sun but each was given a different fuel. One was potted in soil – business as usual. The other had a substance called biochar added to its roots.
The New Zealand fashion brand’s head of product and sustainability Tessa Bradley says both were fruitful. But the plant with biochar - a substance made from organic materials heated at very high temperatures and turned into a type of charcoal - grew so tall, it broke.
Founder and figurehead Gosia Piatek, usually based in London, has been back in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington to witness the harvest.
Piatek – charming, staunch and fast-moving – points them out to Viva during a tour of Kowtow’s HQ.
She’s hoping biochar could be the answer to fashion’s sustainability problem.
There’s also a workroom out the back, where head designer Dayne Johnston works in the future (pinning threads of a 2027 collection to a cork board). Among the main cluster of desks, a visual designer is stitching a leaf with cotton thread to align two sets of branching veins. One corner is lined with racks, holding garments reclaimed from customers, waiting to travel to their next destination.
Piatek knows the destinations garments should avoid.
Textiles mountains catching fire in the Chilean Atacama Desert. Sites of waste colonialism, like the Kantamanto market in Africa. One of the metaphorical garbage trucks of clothing being landfilled or incinerated every second.
There is havoc to dodge closer to home, too. Mindful Fashion estimates Aotearoa New Zealand consumes about 74,000 tonnes of clothing a year. In 2023, Redvale Landfill in Dairy Flat - a 30-minute drive from the city centre - said it alone received 70 trucks of clothing each week.
There is no national system to deal with clothing at the end of its life. Piatek says there must be one at Kowtow. So how are they building it?
Product stewardship is key to the ethos, managing director Emma Wallace says.
The environmental management strategy demands a company take ownership for the entire life cycle of its product. For Kowtow, previous milestones include making garments 100% cotton and plastic-free, offering in-house repairs and establishing a take-back programme.
Wallace wants more customers to get onboard, so the scheme is being re-launched under the name “Regenerate”.
“Regenerate is the playground for innovation,” says Wallace.
Wallace acknowledges the ethos isn’t shared enthusiastically by the industry. As Vogue reports, H&M removed its Conscious Choice label and ASOS dropped its Responsible Edit following accusations of greenwashing.
“Globally, sustainability is going off the agenda a little bit in fashion,” Wallace, who also sits on the Mindful Fashion board, says.
“Companies are slashing and burning sustainability departments. We’re very fortunate to have a founder who has embedded it in the company because there is a huge cost with this.”
It doesn’t mean Kowtow is unaffected.
In the launch of its plastic-free clothing in 2024, the company halted production of its bestselling leggings because they contained elastane (made with synthetic fibres). Supplying factories – based in India, Hong Kong, Germany and Italy – have slowed their machines to accommodate cotton thread.
However, there is also an opportunity in restriction. Johnston says while the workroom will scrap a pattern that demands too many offcuts and is bound to a single fibre, there is real excitement designing for Kowtow.
“When I first started here. I was like, ‘oh my God, have we only got cotton to use?’ I kept on calling every single fabric ‘cotton’. But there are different qualities. We do twill weaves, we do basket weave, we do a heavy industrial canvas weave. We can do whatever we want with it.
“You actually almost have to make your designs work harder, because the texture and the manipulation of the cotton requires more craft and more techniques to make it kind of look elevated.”
He’s also excited about developments at the other end of the clothing’s lifespan.
Bradley has been pushing the biochar project forward since 2024. She was chatting to a friend at a wedding about his work in sustainability. He mentioned he was working with biochar and soil. Bradley has been thinking about putting clothes back into the earth for 10 years, so biochar piqued her interest.
Biochar is a portmanteau of the words biomass and charcoal. As University of Auckland professor Ajit Sarmah explains, it is created through a process called pyrolysis. Organic materials are put under high temperatures in an oxygen-deprived environment to change their composition and create biochar. Carbon is captured in the material, which can be distributed among soil.
Working with Matt Welton, of Carbon Options, Kowtow used 160kg of cotton textile waste from decommissioned Kowtow garments taken back through Regenerate to create 40kg of biochar in a retort kiln.
“I fed my worms with it. It’s in my garden at home,” Bradley says.
It is a small-scale trial but no one else in New Zealand fashion has tried it before. The product is being distributed locally, into community gardens.
Artist and professor Huhana Smith will also use the material. Smith seeks to address climate change concerns for whenua and awa through mātauranga Māori. She has been working on the health of 6ha of land around the Kuku dairy factory, south of Levin – she bought the land back from the Government in 2006. In 2021, she started putting pruned branches from her olive grove and fruit orchards through pyrolysis.
Professor Melanie Kah says the testing of biochar as an end-of-life destination for textiles is positive but it’s important to tread carefully. There’s a need to be aware of other resulting emissions (transport, for example) and consider other options for waste. She points to rigorous re-use, such as cotton cleaning rags, and the direct composting of natural fibres such as cotton, as other potential interesting options.
Kowtow is indeed looking wider. The biochar trial is categorised as “001″ – the first to be launched in their Regenerate programme.
“Ultimately, we want to be keeping those garments up in the circle a lot longer, before we put it down into the earth. Recycling is a huge, next project. I mean, this is just one solution,” Bradley says.
How do customers feel about sustainability messaging? In Aotearoa, one in four say they would pay more for more sustainable production but they’re struggling to separate fact from fiction (Future Consumer Index). According to the University of Otago, they believe government and businesses should take more responsibility for the impact of production. But, Tearfund says they continue to consume new clothing, from obscured sources.
Piatek is sure customers want solutions for wasteful design and production. She says product stewardship will remain at Kowtow’s core.
“It’s our problem. It’s not the customer’s problem, because the government ain’t going to do anything.”
With more regulation, Bradley suggests, there could be more clarity for customers and onus on companies.
“It’s forcing that ownership back on the brand rather than the customer, which I think is super important.”
Right now, it’s a fraught space to navigate.
“Well, sustainability doesn’t mean anything,” Piatek says.
“But what we’re going to do is say ‘sustainability,’ and then we’ll explain to you what we’re actually doing. Rather than, ‘We are a sustainable brand.’ What does that mean?”
The founder feels the tension between the entrepreneurial and mindful spirits at Kowtow. One branch focuses on sustainability and growth for business. Another considers fashion’s impact on the earth.
“You’ve got to tread with a lot of inquiry. Otherwise you could get it wrong. And that’s the most dangerous place, because that’s greenwashing. So you’ve got to make sure that you do all your homework.”
Piatek is planting her feet down, questioning the possibilities and how Kowtow can exist within them.
“We are in a model where we produce new, organic* clothing. We find ourselves in secondhand, and now we find ourselves making carbon.
“If we think future-future – the future of clothing is that there is no new clothing. Absolutely,” she says.
But what does that mean for the future of Kowtow? How does a clothing brand survive in a world with no new clothing? Bradley says this reality is still a long way off.
“It’s definitely big sky dreaming,” she says. “The idea would be that there would be Kowtow clothes in circulation in each various stage of the Kowtow circle (being repaired, resold and then given back to be regenerated) that we wouldn’t need to create new.”
Bradley says the “last step in the circle” would come before the Regenerate process - recycling organic cotton fibres into something new, for as long as it’s viable to do so (it can’t be recycled indefinitely).
“That would extend the life of our garments even longer,” she says. “This is the next solution we are investigating but down here in Aotearoa, there aren’t as many resources for recycling textiles so we are at the very beginning of this.”
*in this case organic refers to clothing processed according to the Global Organic Textile Standard.
The writer travelled to Wellington at the expense of Kowtow.