How Fashion Impacts People and the Planet
In 2007, after a career in fashion public relations, Kelly Drennan founded Fashion Takes Action, out of her desire to create a better, more sustainable future for her then, two young daughters. Her role at FTA is to remove the barriers to sustainability that exist for the entire fashion system – for those who make, sell, buy, wear, care, repair, reuse, collect, rent, resell and recycle clothes.
In 2014, Kelly created the annual World Ethical Apparel Roundtable (WEAR) Conference, hosting hundreds of industry experts in Toronto in an effort to motivate and inspire brands across North America. The last WEAR conference took place in 2023, and in its place Kelly and her team are producing a Textiles & Apparel track within the Canadian Circular Economy Summit. Kelly is a sought-after speaker herself, having given hundreds of presentations to industry, academics and citizens, including a TED talk (Technology, Education Design) as part of the Global TEDx Countdown on climate action, and twice a speaker at Elevate Festival.
Kelly oversees the Fashion Takes Action youth education program My Clothes My World that she developed in 2014 for students in grades 4-12 — delivered to more than 35,000 students in classrooms across Canada – and which is now available both digitally and in-person. Her current role is to expand the program further across Canada as well as internationally. As such she is a member of the UNESCO Greening Education Partnership, where she positions fashion as a means to engage and empower young people on broader climate related issues.
Kelly is passionate about collaboration and bringing together multiple perspectives in an effort to take action. She has collaborated with many national and international organizations, such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and Fashion for Good, and has co-authored several reports related to textile circularity and greenwashing. Kelly co-leads the Canadian Circular Textile Consortium with over 120 members across Canada’s value chain, who collaborate to advance textile circularity, through a number of projects, from policy recommendations to textile recycling.
Kelly continues to bring her sustainability expertise to Toronto’s Fashion Industry Advisory Panel, and to various fashion colleges and their curriculum committees. She regularly contributes to government discussions on transparency, human rights, greenwashing and the circular economy.
In 2017, Kelly was the recipient of the prestigious Clean 50 award given to Canada’s climate leaders, where she was recognized for Education & Thought Leadership, and was the first recipient of the award for the fashion industry. In 2022 Kelly won the Sustainability Award given out by the Canadian Arts and Fashion Awards. She resides in Toronto with her husband and two daughters.