Week 0: Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Summer Linial, and I’m excited to start my senior project this upcoming week. For this project, I will be exploring the sustainable sourcing practices of women-led small fashion businesses in Brooklyn, and how that influences local consumer purchasing decisions compared to large fast-fashion brands. I became interested in this topic after watching a documentary that opened my eyes to the environmental impact of brands I had personally supported. After this initial realization, my interest grew and I decided to take a fashion course at Vogue in which I learned about the industry’s history, and the pollution and waste produced by environmentally damaging brands. That experience helped me understand the larger global problems within the industry, but it also made me curious about how these issues show up on a smaller, local scale. For this project, I want to focus specifically on Brooklyn and its community of independent designers. I will be conducting interviews with designers and observing their interactions with consumers to better understand how sustainability influences both business practices and consumer behaviors. I will be working with designer Liv Reinertstein as my on-site advisor at her storefront By Liv Williamsburg. My final product will be an in-depth research paper analyzing my findings and reflecting on how small local fashion businesses contribute to more sustainable shopping habits. If you want to learn more, click on my Senior Project Proposal!