Fast Fashion and Sustainability: Exploring Environmental Justice in West Africa

What can fashion teach us about sustainability, culture, and justice?

Join Grace Toléqué - Stanford lecturer, researcher, and fashion designer - for a compelling look at fashion, environmental justice, and sustainability in West Africa.

Drawing on West African sartorial traditions, this lecture explores how custom-made clothing, reuse, and women-led cultural practices have long embodied principles of sustainability. Against this backdrop, we’ll examine the growing influx of second-hand clothing flooding West African markets - and what it reveals about Western consumerism, textile waste, and environmental inequality.

From local responses to emerging grassroots initiatives, this talk asks what sustainability really looks like on the ground - and who bears the cost when fashion moves too fast.