Fashion Sustainability Piece

This was one of the first large-scale articles that I worked on during my internship at FASHION Magazine. My editor assigned me the angle, gave me a contact for Reformation’s Sustainability Officer and VP of Operations, and left me to my own devices… within reason of course. During the process of the piece I completed hours of background research on fashion sustainability initiatives, dug deeper into Reformation's work on the cause and sought out other brands also in support. Additionally, I conducted my first email interview with Kathleen Talbot (Reformation), which ended up shaping most of the article's introduction. And finally compiled my outstanding findings to form the latter half of the piece.  

Naturally I experienced a few minor challenges along the way. The most prominent of which was curating a list of sustainable brands that fulfilled the certifications of true qualitative change, while also adhering to the aesthetics of the magazine’s branding. This meant consulting numerous sustainability articles previously published by the magazine to inform my final selections. Another hurdle that arose was avoiding the standard pr-trained responses from the Reformation rep. To avoid such sanitary responses I had to articulate my questions more precisely, keeping compelling question conventions for long form responses in mind. 

My overall takeaways from this article are that when it comes to writing stories on more complex topics, balancing clarity, educational content and intrigue is a fine art. Also, one must be careful with the use of promotional language to avoid a story turning a work of journalism into PR communications.