For decolonising fashion and speaking up for labour rights
Aditi Mayer is a familiar name if you’ve been around Instagram (or more recently, TikTok). A social and environmental justice advocate, Aditi’s work crosses various mediums, including writing, speaking, photography, and more. She’s a sustainable fashion writer, photojournalist and labour rights activist. Naturally, her work is intersectional, and she sees sustainability as interconnected with social justice issues.
Focusing mainly on fashion and culture, Aditi adopts a decolonised lens, most clearly seen through ADIMAY, a sustainable fashion blog exploring the links between design, sustainability and social justice. As the creative behind ADIMAY, Aditi curates the space to be one that looks at sustainability curiously and critically, which stems from her frustration with the lack of intersectionality and inclusion in the sustainability movement.
This was especially frustrating because she knew that the fashion industry has a disproportionate effect on people of colour globally—as does the climate crisis—and so Aditi set out to try and understand the historical and sociopolitical underpinnings that enable the fashion industry to work in a colonial way, based on the exploitation and extraction of both labour and natural resources. Since then, she’s been deeply involved with grassroots activism in Downtown LA’s garment district and educating people about the importance of diverse viewpoints.
Today, she’s often found speaking on these issues in the fashion space, and on other related issues like minority representation, responsible storytelling and more. Aditi sits too on the council of Intersectional Environmentalist, an environmental media and resource hub, that focuses on making intersectional environmentalism a movement, not a moment. And to top it all off, Aditi is also a filmmaker and consultant in parallel to ADIMAY, all in pursuit of her goal of promoting a socially aware and sustainable perspective in all of her endeavours.