Japanese fashionista Ayumi Nishigawa is opening the first sustainable fashion school in Manila

(Japanese Translation)日本語の版の記事をご希望の方はこちらをクリック
Translation provided by Akira Kamakura

JAN 2021 — Starting from the mid 1500s, Filipino identity slowly transformed into being tightly coupled with western influence. Just take a look at the way Filipinos greet each other with a simple handshake as opposed to the Japanese bow. How about the embracing of Philippine folk dances like Cariñosa, a Panay Island original initially introduced by the Spaniards and similarly compared to Mexico’s Jarabe Tapatio?

These are just some of the memories that Ayumi Nishigawa, a 25 year old Japanese backpacker from Kobe Japan, remembers as she was venturing across the Philippines. From her first trip to the nation rich in natural wonders, she immediately fell in love with the warm and relaxing Filipino culture—quite different to the Japanese way she was used to. She loved it so much that she spent the past three years going back and forth throughout the country, staying for three months during her last trip. But her experiences were not just for good weather and pretty beaches.

*Ayumi Nishigawa, Founder and CEO of coxco Inc. (including DEARME fashion and coxco Lab)*

In her professional life, Nishigawa-san has big dreams to create a world where sustainable fashion is considered the industry standard. Utilizing her sustainable fashion expertise and business grit, she plans to help lift children in the Philippines out of poverty. In December 2019, she founded a Japan based clothing company called coxco Inc. In partnership with Yagi & Co, a textile trading company that sells leftover fabrics at warehouses, coxco utilizes extra fabric pieces that fast fashion brands throw away to create dresses, pullovers, and other items that she sells online. In addition to selling those clothes online, she was able to raise funding through crowdsourcing to extend her business to the Philippines under the name coxco Lab, where Manila’s poorest kids get to wear her pieces and feel inspired to better their own lives through eco-friendly fashion. To date, she has completed seven fashion shows in Manila. Nishigawa-san says that “coxco is a fashion brand that supports sustainability and other social issues happening around the world. The Philippines still lacks a lot of the opportunities that we have in Japan, especially quality education. That’s why I founded the non-profit organization DEARME so I can connect my fashion brand to the Filipino community.“

The Filipino Carbon Footprint

Why should Filipinos start thinking about reducing their carbon footprint? Aren’t there more important issues to look into? It’s important to first understand to what degree the Philippines contributes to the global climate crisis. A public report called the Ecological Footprint measures the amount of biologically productive land and sea area that a country needs to produce the resources it consumes, provide room for its infrastructure, and absorb its waste. One estimate puts the per-person Ecological Footprint of the Philippines at 1.3 global hectares (gha) in 2008, within the limits of the world average available biocapacity of 1.8 gha, and one of the smallest-footprint nations in the region. For comparison, Australia and Singapore are in the largest footprint categories with a range of 5-7 gha. However, in 2008, there was only 0.6 gha of biocapacity per person available in the Philippines, indicating that although consumption levels are relatively low, the demand exceeds the country’s biocapacity. As 61% of the report is calculated based on food sector, critics argue that a major lacking datapoint in the above report is solid waste management, which still remains as a prominent challenge in urban areas like Metro Manila. With World Bank estimating that solid waste will go up 165% by 2025 due to urban population spikes, improper waste disposal, inefficient waste collection and lack of disposal facilities are among the dominant concerns in the country’s solid waste management.

In the Philippines, a third of all Filipinos throw away clothing after wearing it just once. According to YouGov, the reasons vary but a large chunk are related to fast fashion: 21% say they throw clothes away because they’re “more than a few seasons old”, 18% say they have “now become unfashionable”, and 14% say they do so because they’re “bored of wearing it”. As the Filipino fast fashion continues to rise with increased population, rapid economic growth, and industrialization, wastes generated by throwing away clothing and textiles per person will continually rise and contribute to health hazards and serious environmental impacts such as surface water contamination, flooding, and air pollution. These concerns deeply fuel Nishigawa-san’s passion to form change both in Japan and the Philippines.

*5 million tons of fabric are disposed of around the world annually. (Photo courtesy of coxco)*

“Sustainable fashion, an overused trendy term that often gets added to branding campaigns with little true meaning or accountability.”

— Ayumi Nishigawa

Learning from Japan

Nishigawa-san believes that the most important message the global fashion industry needs to transmit is an easy way to show how sustainability could benefit the entire world. Through making approachable clothing and content on the internet, she wants to make the sustainability effort for clothing more efficient and affordable to implement for other major brands in the fashion industry. In Japan, there are two main problems with the fashion industry that coxco combats: (1) the waste produced by the manufacturing process and (2) leftover stock from unsold items.

For (1), Nishigawa-san and her team partner with the Japan Environment PLANing (JEPLAN), which recycles materials from manufacturing waste and transforms it into new fabrics that can be reused. Through JEPLAN’s BRING Technology service, horizontal recycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics is converted into new clothing. For (2), there is an annual rule in Japan that forces clothing brand stores to get rid of the fabrics that are no longer trendy (usually designs coming from the previous year). coxco frequently encourages the up-cycle of clothing, meaning that when something doesn’t get sold, the coxco team will buy those fabrics at full price (as they are completely new) and sell them in a different form.

With the Philippine fashion sector projected to reach US$749m in 2021 strongly fueled by direct integration of shopping functionality into content display online e.g. social media, It’s not too late to adopt the methods that coxco has been advocating for in the Philippines too. They may not be standard practice in the Philippines, but could be looked at as an example business model for a future with heavy weight for online fashion. That’s why it’s crucial Filipinos become educated and aware of the changes coming globally in the next few years. Seeing the confident, dazzling faces on Manila’s poorest just proves her idea even more so—it doesn’t take massive amounts of wealth to get educated and take part in the effort.

Equal opportunity for fashionistas across the globe

coxco Lab is fighting big battles that go beyond sustainability. As the Philippines ranks 34th out of 38 countries in high school science and mathematics according to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science study (TIMSS), it is unexplainable that education spending has declined from 18.2% in 1998 to 12.4% in 2005. The Philippines is the only country in Southeast Asia with declining youth literacy rates. With less opportunity via a subpar education system, students often feel stuck in their way of life, with no choice but to drown in poverty. That’s where Nishigawa-san’s Manila-based fashion school really shines. coxco Lab, the free fashion school for under privileged youth, offer two courses for children: (1) Discover Me and (2) Inspire You. Through her seven debut fashion shows, Nishigawa-san noticed how creative and confident the filipino youth are—they just haven’t had to chance to try pursue interests in their life. By teaching the kids through these two phase courses, she wants them to gain knowledge in a field they don’t know about yet, to challenge themselves and try new things in order to discover what they really want to accomplish in their future. Discover Me aims to be geared more towards a younger audience where the students would learn how to play with different colors, fabrics, and trends. Inspire You would educate kids on the real world environmental problems that are present in today’s society (especially the Philippines) to create awareness among the youth.

“I would like to give a chance for students who studied at the fashion school to work at coxco Inc. so we can complete the cycle where children who didn’t have opportunities can get a paid position in a field that they hope for. My dream is that they will get the chance to explore other countries and inspire other children through teaching their passion as I did.”

— Ayumi Nishigawa

*Large smiles during a “thank you” celebration after a coxco Lab fashion show for Filipino underprivileged youth.*

When does the coxco Lab fashion school officially open?

In September 2020, Nishigawa-san planned to open her fashion school for incoming students alongside her seventh runway show. Due to COVID-19, she had to put all of her plans on pause—even the building she began renovating to make as the school. She is currently waiting until the COVID crisis is over to resume construction of the school. In the meantime, coxco Lab distributes masks and food as a charity act for all the students that already signed up for the school but couldn’t attend.

As the international business world has currently ground to a halt and we wait for life to normalize again, it’s clear that even a pandemic won’t stop dedicated CEO’s like Ayumi Nishigawa to realize her goal of inspiring Filipino youth through sustainable fashion. If the Philippines wants to develop into a forward thinking economy and maintain their status as an Asian “rising tiger”, citizens of all ages need to start taking sustainable fashion education seriously. The diverse perspective we get from coxco Lab may be just what we need to jumpstart the conversation.