What is Slow Fashion Festival?
Slow Fashion Festival is a volunteer-led arts organization and community festival celebrating fashion as art and sustainability as cultural practice. Since 2022, we’ve produced six seasons, supported hundreds of creative workers, and reinvested every dollar into artist-centered programming that builds belonging, education, and cultural change.
Ok, but what is slow fashion?
Slow fashion is a collective movement and way of life rooted in sustainability, justice, and care. It challenges systems that prioritize profit over people and the planet, while encouraging us to value quality, creativity, and stewardship in every action. Slow fashion goes beyond mindful consumption, it’s about repairing, reusing, sharing knowledge, and building community so we are less reliant on extractive industries. By embracing slow fashion, we choose fairness, collective responsibility, and a fashion system that uplifts artists, workers, and communities while protecting the future we share.
See our show archive here.
Slow Fashion Festival Timeline
We kicked off our first-ever Slow Fashion Festival with a 3-day extravaganza in Austin, Texas, featuring panels, a fashion show, a vibrant marketplace, and an art gallery. Over 300 attendees joined us to celebrate the beginning of a movement that puts sustainability and ethics at the forefront of fashion.
Our first Spring Fashion Show + Zine Launch brought together over 270 attendees. The event highlighted new slow fashion collections and introduced the inaugural edition of our Slow Fashion Zine, celebrating the community’s creativity and passion for sustainability.
We went national! Invited to curate a fashion show at the Hollywood Climate Summit, this marked the first time Slow Fashion Festival took its ethos beyond Austin. With actors from Netflix's Never Have I Ever as emcees, we reached new heights and made a lasting impact.
We hosted our second annual 3-day Slow Fashion Festival, once again featuring panels, a fashion show, a marketplace, and an art gallery. With over 350 attendees, the event was bigger and better, continuing to educate, inspire, and connect the slow fashion community.
Voted in by our community, we proudly became part of the official SXSW programming, hosting a Slow Fashion Meetup. We also held an unofficial happy hour, ensuring everyone in our community—whether they had SXSW wristbands or not—could join the celebration.
Our second annual Spring Fashion Show + Zine Launch sold out a week in advance! Despite a smaller venue, we welcomed over 220 attendees and introduced a panel discussion, further deepening our educational outreach and engagement.
Our third annual Spring Fashion Show + Zine launch was one of our largest spring events to date! Over 300 guests attended! Our theme focused on water and we opened the show with a panel discussion.
A week after our Spring 2025 Show, we popped up with 13 slow fashion makers & artists on the roof of the The Contemporary Austin - Downtown Jones Center.
The TCA x Slow Fashion Festival Maker’s Market brought together sustainable designers and community members at The Contemporary Austin for an afternoon of intentional shopping, conversation, and hands-on creativity. The event highlighted low-waste fashion practices and celebrated independent makers working toward a more ethical and community-centered fashion system.
As an inaugural VIBE Downtown grant awardee, Slow Fashion Festival activated Downtown Austin as part of the city’s newest cultural festival. In partnership with Future Front Texas and the Downtown Austin Alliance Foundation, SFF presented the ATX Mending Lab, a hands-on public activation centered on garment repair, reuse, and storytelling. The experience brought slow fashion into the public realm, engaging new audiences through creativity, care, and community connection.
We held our third annual 3-day festival at RichesArt Gallery in Austin, Texas. Over the course of three days, we held a variety of programming featuring 10 designers, nearly 90 models, nearly 20 speakers, 25 artists, 15 vendors, and more. It was our largest event to date, welcoming over 400 guests from Texas and beyond!