The founder of It's Not Sustainable is working towards environmental transparency and accountability within the fashion industry

The Ibiza-based brand strategist, sustainability expert and editor-in-chief Tiffanie Darke cut her teeth in the UK&rsquo;s tabloid and broadsheet press before going on to launch the wildly successful - and much imitated - Sunday Times Style magazine, which she edited for 12 years. Darke is a co-founder, along with fashion director Daniela Agnelli, of Ibiza&rsquo;s resource-friendly shopping emporium, the Agora, and has recently launched It&rsquo;s Not Sustainable, an online platform to elevate the conversation around fashion sustainability.
You once described your former life in fashion and features journalism as &lsquo;a blizzard of glamour, a whirlwind of social events and a packed calendar of travel.&rsquo; What made you want to step away from all that?
My career actually began on the fashion desk of Il Globo in Brazil, where I was living in my twenties. Later, I worked at the Express, the Telegraph and the Observer before I was asked to launch a glossy weekly fashion supplement for the Sunday Times. I took it on a little bit reluctantly actually because I was enjoying working on the Sunday Times news review desk. It was around 2001, so I was there when 9/11 happened and that was a phenomenal time to be in news because there was a real hunger for information. This was pre-internet and newspapers were really important. There weren't any other alternatives and there was a great responsibility to do good reporting and to be balanced and fair. Anyway, I took the role of editor-in-chief at the Style and it ended up being enormous fun and we got up to lots of mischief. Style was unique in that we were talking to an audience that wasn't necessarily fashion literate - we were quite literally decoding the fashion world - and for the first five years we had no competition whatsoever. We were distributing one and a half million copies. It was a roaring success commercially and then of course, 2008, it all came crashing down because the smartphone was invented, the economy went through the floor, newspaper audiences dwindled and everything began to go digital.&nbsp;
Was there a defining moment when you realised that the focus of your career was going to switch from fashion to sustainability?
Absolutely. Once I left Style I started an agency making content for brands. I moved my family to the States for a few years &ndash; we lived on the Upper West Side on Central Park and my kids went to an American school, which was brilliant. And then my partner in the American project came back to the UK to be CMO at <a href="https://www.harrods.com/en-es/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Harrods</a> and she asked if I would join her as editor-in-chief of the Harrods brand. The scope was huge and it was a fantastic opportunity. I relaunched the entire online platform and opened an exclusive social media feed for the personal shopping department. Dealing with the ultra-high net worth private clients was eye-opening. At Harrods they have the Penthouse, which is the private shopping department for the rich and famous and then they have a bit that nobody knows about, on the top floor, that is reserved for the Royals. You can only go in there if you are invited and if you are with a Royal family. So, we'd have the Sultan of Bahrain and the Thai Royal family in there. It was extraordinary. But then the pandemic happened and that - coupled with the level of excess that I was exposed to at Harrods - was a real moment for me. I decided to leave and learn about sustainability, because I realised that the world was on the tipping point and that if we were going to survive, sustainability would have to be a big part of it.

Tiffanie Darke (second from right) in her former role as editor-in-chief of Harrods

What was the focus of your course and how did it change your mindset regarding the fashion industry?
The course was at the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership and it is affiliated to Cambridge University. It was one of the most eye-opening things I&rsquo;ve ever done. It was very rigorous and I did it with people from all over the world who were C-suite types from every industry - there were toothpaste manufacturers from Indonesia and oil drilling executives from Venezuela. I realised very quickly that I knew nothing. I specialised in fashion and began to learn about the situation that we are in with supply chains and over production, harmful materials and the non-existent circular economy. It was just mind-blowing. I started talking with my friend Daniela [Agnelli] about it. She and I went for a long walk in Regents Park one day in the middle of lockdown and decided that we'd do something about it together. With her visual styling skills and my copywriting and sustainability ideas, we knew we could come up with something.&nbsp;
How did your ideas come into fruition?
Daniela and I realised that we were both storytellers at heart, but with two decades in the fashion industry our contacts were not insignificant. All the people that we&rsquo;d started out with in the early noughties were now the CEOs. So, we could call up Stella McCartney, call up the CMO of Gucci, call up the MD of Chlo&eacute;, because we knew them all. They were all old friends. We had an idea to create a store that was going to be all about a sustainable approach to fashion, but we were going to treat it as a live magazine. We were going to tell stories. From this seed, the <a href="https://www.instagram.com/agora.ibiza/?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Agora</a> was born. We still say to every single brand when they come on board, &lsquo;don't think of us as a sales platform. Think of us as a storytelling platform.&rsquo; Very quickly we had super brands involved &ndash; Chlo&eacute;, Loewe. We also knew that local craft in Ibiza was amazing and we found seven or eight brands that we thought were absolutely fantastic and we took them in the store. Within about six months we'd started the Mercado Artesanal, which is a craft market for Ibiza-based artists and makers. It all flowed very organically.&nbsp;

Tiffanie Darke in London

You launched It&rsquo;s Not Sustainable in August this year. What was the catalyst for the platform and what do you hope to achieve with it?
The catalyst was the realisation that as a journalist you get one side of the story, the story that the brand wants to present to you. You can do a certain amount of digging, but you can't get very far. But once you enter into a commercial relationship with the brand, you see everything. You understand about supply chains and how things work and how things are made and who makes them and what the margins are and what the brand is doing to mitigate their carbon footprint. <a href="https://tiffaniedarke.substack.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">It's Not Sustainable</a> is a way of bringing that community together. I&rsquo;ve just launched the second, premium, phase - an event series where we will vote on things that we would like to change within the industry. We will get together and we will work out how we can get those things changed. So, whether that's through lobbying, whether that's through finance, whether that's through mentoring, whether that's through awareness. We have lots of tools because we're a diverse group of individuals with different skill sets. And if we can agree on the thing that we want to change - and it can just be something small, like no more plastic at the dry cleaner - then together we will have the power to effect that change. I also work as a journalist for the Financial Times and for various magazines so I can use my profile there as well. It's a great moment - the world is changing and we are right at the vanguard of those positive changes.&nbsp;
You split your time between Ibiza and London. How has Ibiza acted as a launchpad for It&rsquo;s Not Sustainable?
I realised through working with such amazing brands at Agora that there were a multitude of incredible stories about sustainability in fashion that weren't being told. And at the Agora we often get an extraordinary mix of people; we'll have somebody who runs a foundation, somebody who's a model, somebody who's a designer, somebody who's involved in fashion production. And quite often, a conversation starts in store or at one of our parties and these amazing ideas come up because you've got all these people united by a love of fashion, but coming at it from very different angles, all trying to solve the sustainability issue. My relationship with Ibiza and particularly the north of Ibiza where there are some very progressive and forward-thinking people has inspired me to think outside of the box. To dream about what might be possible. Ibiza is full of people who dream of doing things differently and then actually do it. If you move to Ibiza, it's because you are not accepting the status quo. You are making a change for something that you really want. Meeting and living alongside those people has been really inspiring and it's what gave me the impetus to get this thing started.

Ibiza's protected poisidionia seagrass meadows

Can you give any examples of how that has actually played out?
There&rsquo;s a guy I&rsquo;ve known for a long time but hadn't seen for a couple of years. He has a home on the island and we met again at a dinner here. I realised that he'd shifted his entire work focus into impact funding. I started to talk to him about what he was doing and it was fascinating; he&rsquo;s helping to fund, among other things, an organization called <a href="https://canopyplanet.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Canopy</a>, which is going to completely overhaul the way we make cellulose fabrics, which are made from plant material. Originally there were lots of endangered and ancestral forests being used to make viscose and rayon and all those kinds of materials. Canopy has been doing an incredible job moving that supply chain to sustainable tree plantations, therefore ending the destruction of ancestral forests. Tree plantations are of course better than endangered trees, but they're not helping with biodiversity, so now Canopy have come up with this incredible piece of technology which allows them to use landfill textiles as the feed stock for rayon and viscose and other cellulose fabrics. My friend&rsquo;s impact fund is allowing them to do that at scale.
What is the future for sustainable fashion, both in Ibiza and elsewhere? 
The problem with the sustainability world is it's peppered with loads of brilliant, small, innovative ideas. But they don't shift the dial on their own. And we are at the stage in our evolution now where it's the deadline. We are on the deadline and we need to make big changes fast. What&rsquo;s interesting is the work we&rsquo;ve done from the very beginning with <a href="https://ibizapreservation.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ibiza Preservation</a>. A percentage of all revenue, not just profits, revenue, of Six Senses Ibiza goes directly goes to Ibiza Preservation, who are very clear about the three things that they think they can do to impact Ibiza&rsquo;s environment in a positive manner. Firstly, in collecting data and understanding the issues, which is hugely important. Secondly, in sourcing food and encouraging people to shop locally. The third one is protecting and regenerating the poisidonia, which is crucial for the health and vitality of the waters. In that way, Ibiza is a microcosm of what&rsquo;s going on in the wider world because of the rigorous way that one organisation has applied sustainability thinking to the question of how they're going to improve and protect Ibiza&rsquo;s environment from the ravages of tourism going forward. Ibiza Preservation has united the sustainability community on the island. It is an umbrella that looks after all the little environmental organizations within. And that is a fabulous model for what the world should be doing at large, because anybody in the sustainability world will tell you that we have to do this together. The time for going it alone has passed. If we are to survive on this planet, we must find a way to unite. And we must do it now.&nbsp;

Tiffanie Darke: We are on the deadline and we need to make big changes fast.

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