Megan and Gab are 3,300km deep into their walking journey through South-East Asia and joking about being stopped by the Vietnamese army earlier that morning.
They’d been trudging for four kilometres through a military base, and were reluctant about having to be escorted back to the main road.
When you’ve already walked so far, every extra step counts.
Megan O’Malley and Gab Murphy describe themselves online as “two dorks from Melbourne walking across Asia seeking out positive fashion stories.” They’ve been on the road since November, meeting the workers who make our clothes and keep the fashion industry alive.
Sustainable fashion has been a passion of Megan’s for a while now, and she recruited her uni friend Gab after realising she’d never done an overnight hike before - let alone a year-long trek - and would need some skilled company, and entertainment.
Their “Walk Sew Good” Instagram has stories of them travelling through the Vietnamese hill tribes, famous for their brightly-coloured textiles and fine embroidery; admiring the craft of Cambodian silver jewellers; trying on indigo-dyed sustainable cotton robes in Laos; and watching women weave in Thailand.
“Clothing-making is so much a part of the culture of a lot of places we’ve been,” Megan said.
“It’s not just a big factory making thousands and thousands of garments, it’s people creating clothing in really traditional, amazing ways.”
‘We don’t want to focus on negative stories’
Exploitation and environmental damage are two key issues for the fashion industry in South-East Asia.
Since Nike’s sweatshop labour was exposed in the nineties, consumers have been “woke” to the sometimes slave-like conditions in which their clothes are made and how little the workers get paid.
Now, if apps and new, sustainable labels are anything to go by, shoppers are starting to care about the environmental impact of the fashion industry. There are new stories every week about the impact of clothing dyes, plastics from garments getting into the waterways, and the tonnes of cheaply-made-and-nasty clothes we throw out. (For Australians, it's enough annually to fill the MCG two and a half times.)
But Megan and Gab want to tell the other side of the industry, the feel-good.
"South-East Asia is a region where there's a lot of negative stories coming out about sweatshops and factories polluting.
"We thought, 'why don't we go over here and tell some of the more positive stories and empower people to support those stories, rather than feeling powerless," Megan told Hack.
Can handmade products replace fast fashion?
Gab and Megan are connecting their online followers with local businesses that have creative solutions to the fast fashion problems. One example is a Vietnamese business making recycled activewear.
“A lot of the leggings and athletic-wear that you see, it’s got a lot of plastic in that material… these guys are using recycled plastic, and I think that’s such an amazing thing,” Gabe said.
By the time they complete their journey they’ll have visited 50 ethical fashion businesses and blogged about their products to people back home.
It hasn’t all been easy though, especially these past few weeks, with sickness, broken laptops, and that run-in with the military.
“It feels like this last 200 kilometres have been more eventful than the past 3,000,” Gab joked.
Megan and Gab have realised there isn’t a silver bullet solution for the fashion industry, and boutique, handmade products can’t replace fast fashion entirely.
“We think part of the solution to this great big crazy fashion problem is lots of different ideas and solutions. There isn’t just a one-size fits all,” Megan told Hack.
“But, for the minute, supporting these smaller brands is a away you can support ethical fashion and the movement towards better production.”
You can follow their journey here.