ania zoltkowski

ania zoltkowski

STORIES TO TELL

I have had a colourful experience of working within the fashion and textile industries for over 17 years in Europe, the UK, India and Australia within design, manufacturing, sales, communications and now academia. 

My journey has taken me through some very interesting experiences, from working with Vivienne Westwood in her couture London studio to running the Parisian Florence Deschamps showroom selling emerging designers to the most high-end boutiques in the world to managing my label in collaboration with a fair-trade women’s workshop in northern India. I have accumulated a vast amount of hilarious and shocking tales to tell about working in fashion.

DISILLUSIONMENT

There came a point where I felt disillusioned by what I was seeing; a lack of values, ethics, minimal well-being and care toward others, the self, Mother Earth and the entire creation process. Something was missing. I didn’t know it then, but in hindsight, I can see that it was the integration of Heart and Spirit with fashion that I truly yearned to experience. It was at the same time that I began a transformational inner journey, where I started questioning the way things were in the world and everything I’d ever been taught. Naturally, I began to question my work in the industry and what I wanted to contribute toward. I wanted to let go of so much and knew I had to learn more. 

With no sustainable fashion courses in Australia at that time, I moved to London and undertook a master’s at the London College of Fashion in Fashion Futures. Here, I was introduced to fashion as part of an interconnected web of relations to all other fields. Under the guidance of sustainability legends Alex McIntosh and Kate Fletcher, I was encouraged to explore the intersection of fashion with spirituality, ecologies, economies, cultures, futuring, and so much more. I was blown open at the potentialities.

GRATITUDE
We don’t do anything alone.
My work is an emergence of the vast web of life I am a part of, continually supported and nourished by multiple relations.  

In the Spirit of Relationality, Reciprocity and Reverence, I offer my immense gratitude to all of my teachers, mentors, guides, and ancestors who have guided and supported me to be here as I am today. I acknowledge my current teachers, Luna Wood, Pilar Lesko, Layla Martin, the human and more-than-human communities I am a part of. 

I acknowledge all the places, landscapes, and elementals that have held and continue to hold me, including the unceded Lands of Naarm, Meanjin, Gadigal, Worimi, Bundjalung, and Gayemagal. 

Massive gratitude to Elizabeth Curtis-Walker and Annelijn Hooij for their photography and film magics.

OTHER WAYS FORWARD

Returning to Australia several years later saw me working as a sustainability consultant as well as teaching fashion and design students at the University of Technology Sydney and UTS College, which I continue with today. 

I love introducing my students to divergent, radical and experimental ideas and approaches to learning, guiding them toward the interrelatedness of it all. In an effort to move beyond modern separatist tendencies, which I believe is needed for true sustainability to emerge, I love blowing their minds by encouraging them to link seemingly disparate fields or ideas together as well as integrate their authentic selves into all that they do.

My work now further sees me completing a practice-led PhD project at UTS, as supervised by Timo Rissanen and Cameron Tonkinwise. I have been exploring how a fashion-textiles pluriverse may emerge and the new understandings that it could create toward a more holistic type of sustainability. Pluriversality is an upgraded and holistic approach to sustainability that centres relational, place-based, integrated and autonomous ways of being, much needed in this space where little paradigmatic change is occuring. I have been developing these ideas through theory, an active making practice, and creating social learning workshops that introduce others to experimental, embodied, contemplative and relational ways of approaching sustainable fashion-textiles. 

I previously ran the Sustainability 5.0 online fashion community and the Spirit of Design podcast and am a regular contributor for The Lissome, the most beautiful sustainable fashion publication. You can read my contributions here. 

I recently completed a 2-year Shamanic Immersion 'LuminoGaia' with Luna Wood, where I learnt how to embody vital sustainability, a path I am committed to for life. 

I am deeply devoted to guiding and inspiring others that fashion-textile practices can be regenerative, caring, loving, reciprocal, reverent, magical, beautiful, and life-giving.

You can follow my instagram for up-to-date documentation of ideas, projects and offerings. 

I look forward to playing together.