Our work is guided by six principles
Re-imagining Textiles
Push Pull is driven to humanise our textiles, connecting them to places, people and experiences. To do this we explore restorative methods of making, looking for ways to recapture value in the textiles and materials we already have. This shifts the focus from scarcity and extraction to abundance and regeneration.
We take a critical approach to design and development. Continual research and experimentation helps generate new ways of understanding materials, our relationship to them and their role in our everyday lives.
Justice
Push Pull’s working relationships are established through shared values of care for the earth, equity and empowerment. The textile industry is strengthened through racial justice, intersectional environmentalism and recognition of cultural provenance. Our partnerships are formed on the basis of trust, mutual respect and clearly defined representation.
So much Indigenous and cultural craft innovation has been appropriated, stolen and re-contextualised for commercial gain. Push Pull strives to set just standards for ethicality and accountability in craft and design.
Locality
As part of an interdependent network of producers, Push Pull fosters and invests in local economies. In the community, we partner with small businesses, conservation societies, secondhand suppliers and buy-and-sell groups. We also work with regional partners in Australia, Japan, Taiwan and India to exchange goods, skills and knowledge.
Push Pull rejects monopolies, gatekeeping and centralised supply chains, and embraces collective and cooperative systems of reciprocity.
Existing Materials
Push Pull’s practical experiments focus on using materials that are either discarded, damaged, or are renewable and available in abundance. Repurposing decommissioned textiles means lifecycle impacts that would normally be generated in the creation of virgin fibre are eliminated.
When we do use virgin fibres, we work with handloomed cotton, linen and hemp produced ethically by Anuprerna and Moral Fibre.
Biological Cycles
By choosing to work with bio-based fibres and dye treatments, Push Pull’s textile projects can eventually return to the earth after a lifetime of use. Plant and animal hair fibres, when composted correctly, biodegrade rapidly, breaking down into pure organic components – carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. This has a net positive effect on ecosystem health.
We don’t use fossil fuel-derived fibres, and encourage the move away from extractive manufacturing processes and toward phasing non-circular materials out of our textile systems.
Reduction
We use low impact and low energy processes wherever possible. Construction techniques are hand driven. Dye extraction is slow and manual, processed without chemical shortcuts that may risk ecological toxicity. Waste water and dye byproducts are safe to release into garden or greywater.
Acids, alkalis and metal salts used as auxiliaries and mordants are non-hazardous to NOHSC standards. We do not use harmful surfactants, levelling agents, or heavy metal mordants such as aluminium acetate, tin or chrome.
This document current as of August 2025.
Thanks and credit are due to Mathilda Tham and Kate Fletcher, authors of The Earth Logic Fashion Action Research Plan, whose themes were drawn on heavily in developing these Action Principles. It is a privilege to know of and share in this vision for the future.