Levy-funded research and marketing group Australian Wool Innovation (AWI) has launched a new ad campaign to highlight the sustainability of wool, compared to synthetic textiles. The ad, which will run in America, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia, depicts people swimming in a pool of black oil, struggling to get out. When they finally emerge, they remove their dripping clothes to reveal clean wool products underneath.
The new ad isn’t the first attention-grabbing video devised by AWI’s marketing arm, The Woolmark Company, which also created a 2020 campaign for China featuring a celebrity interviewing three ewes. The new ad contradicts proposed European Union sustainability labeling laws, which could see synthetic textiles ranked above natural fibers like wool. Since the Stone Age, wool has been appreciated as one of the most effective forms of all-weather protection known to humanity, and science is yet to produce a fiber that matches its unique properties. Wool breathes, isolates, keeps off moisture, and it is temperature regulating and self-cleaning. However, fast fashion has shifted towards synthetic fibers that are not sustainable. Thus, the current campaign is to spread awareness.
John Roberts, AWI CEO, said, “Everyone is dead keen about sustainability, and if you want to be true to sustainability, you have got to look at what sort of clothes you are wearing and what is the makeup of those garments. As a textile community, we need to come to some kind of consensus on what is sustainable and what is not.”
