Pangaia chief innovation officer Dr. Amanda Parkes: 'Fast fashion is slowly dying'

Amanda Parkes never thought she'd wind up in fashion. Then again, 2-year-old Pangaia, where she serves as chief innovation officer, isn't your typical fashion company. 

"We are a materials science company," Parkes said on the latest Glossy Podcast. "We're all about the future of materials, and we really think that's an approach that can change the fashion industry from the inside out."

However, many fashion fans best know Pangaia as the brand behind the rainbow-bright sweatsuits with lines of text that have been worn by Harry Styles and Kourtney Kardashian.

Parkes started her career as a mechanical engineer and product designer, before eventually going back to school, at the M.I.T. Media Lab. There, she earned a hybrid computer science-materials science Ph.D. and the rare job title of fashion scientist.

"I came into fashion through the back door," she said. "When I was in college, 20 years ago, there was no such thing as a fashion scientist."

But, she said -- despite the lack of interplay between the two worlds -- fashion and science go hand-in-hand.

"Fashion is an amazing platform to be able to show off science," she said, adding, "I was really shocked when I got more into the fashion industry to realize that big fashion companies don't have internal research. I was coming from tech, working with companies like Intel and Google. They are doing their internal R&D 5-10 years out to change and transform and make their industries what they want them to be. Fashion didn't have that as much inside of the big companies or at all. So I saw that as first of all massive opportunity for [Pangaia] to fill in the space."

Parkes also discussed the power of the Gen-Z shopper, the state of greenwashing and the future of sustainability in fashion.