Livia Firth
Founder and creative director | Eco-Age
Livia Firth is the Founder and Creative Director of Eco-Age – an ideas consultancy company, which powerfully aggregates global thought leaders and influencers to address the compelling issues and opportunities of our day by delivering solutions, through ethical and sustainable values.
Eco-Age has market leading track record as a brand sustainability consultancy, addressing sustainability issues across complex supply chains, in broad industry sectors, for the mutual benefit of people and planet.
Founded in 2009, Eco-Age clients include leading fashion and jewellery brands including Chopard, M&S, ERDEM, Stella McCartney, Gucci, Christopher Kane, Disney, Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana and the Kering Group as well as non-fashion companies such as Welltower, the FA, C40 and Wembley stadium.
Firth is also the driving force behind the launch of the Green Carpet Challenge ® (GCC).
The world-renowned GCC is a dynamic project, pairing glamour and ethics to raise the profile of sustainability, ethics and social welfare. The GCC has catapulted sustainable style into the spotlight at the world’s most high profile events. From the Golden Globes to the Cannes Film Festival, the GCC has collaborated with all of the iconic design houses in the world, winning widespread critical acclaim and international media attention.
In May 2016, following her acclaimed speech in 2014, Firth retook to the stage at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit. Attended by more than 1,200 key players from the fashion industry, she challenged the sustainability claims made by fast fashion brands, urging them to do more. Firth also gave the key note speech at The World Economic Forum in June 2016 on the power of connectivity and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The talk highlighted the fear that the Fourth Industrial Revolution could spell a social crisis on a scale not yet witnessed.
In 2015, award winning film director, Andrew Morgan shone a light on the dark side of the fast-fashion industry with his documentary The True Cost. Firth worked with Andrew on the film as an executive producer (together with Lucy Siegle). The film explores the desperate and devastating lives of garment workers enslaved in the fast-fashion cycle. It has sparked an international debate and hopes to ignite much-needed meaningful change in the global fashion industry and its shameful exploitation of people and planet. The film is available to watch on Netflix.
After her first trip there in 2008, Firth visited Bangladesh once again in April 2015. She went back to witness the devastating effect of the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse and what happened in the 3 years following the tragedy. She found that many fast fashion brands still hadn’t met their safety commitments and many workers were still suffering from poor working conditions, inadequate wages and a general infringement of their human rights.
Firth is now working with the Lawyers’ Circle (as part of a powerful women’s advocacy group, The Circle founded by Annie Lennox) as a first step on an international study that will set out the legal argument for the living wage as a fundamental human right, the duties of companies and governments to uphold this right and the justification for the development of a global standard for a living wage. The report will be launched in 2017.
As an Oxfam Global Ambassador, Firth has travelled to Ethiopia, Kenya, Bangladesh and Zambia, connecting with the people at the beginning of the supply chain. She is also a founding member of Annie Lennox’s ‘The Circle’, a powerful women’s advocacy group.
