Can I kick my fast fashion habit?

 

As you've probably gathered from my recent blog posts my work this semester has focused a lot on sustainability within the fashion industry. It is a subject I have been interested in for a while but learning more about the reality of how and where our clothes are made has really made me want to change the way I shop for the better.

The fashion industry uses huge amounts of resources: water, energy, chemicals, oil, the list goes on, but it is also responsible for terrible pollution from the use of pesticides and dyes as well as the exploitation of workers around the world.


Water Pollution caused by textile dying
 http://we.thinkaboutit.eu/profiles/blogs/nightmare-maritsa-river-with



We all know that Primark is bad but the reality is many of the high street chains people perceive as offering better quality and ethics don't, Zara for example, despite charging much more for their products were recently at the heart of a scandal involving the use of slave labour in their factories.  As consumers we have very little concept of where our clothes come from or how they are made and what I have realised from my research is that often companies don't know either due to the complex supply chains in the fashion industry.



3% of Hong Kong's daily textile waste

http://www.ecouterre.com/16-foot-mountain-of-clothing-illustrates-hong-kongs-daily-textile-waste/

I am as guilty as anyone of shopping and not thinking about what it is I am buying, what its made from and who they are made by but I've decided that I need to change my shopping habits.
There are a lot of ways to wear more sustainable clothes, the most obvious one is to buy less and wear what you already have. If you think about the amount of energy, resources and time that goes into each garment you own it makes no sense to leave half of them in the back of your wardrobe and then throw them straight into landfill.



Another way to be more sustainable is to buy from charity and vintage shops. Reusing clothes means your are consuming less virgin materials and  making use of what has already been produced. Another great idea is upcycling, either by adapting your old clothes or buying from companies that remake second hand clothes. A brand I really admire are Goodone who produce beautiful clothes from second hand clothes and industrial waste fabric, the designs are really modern and wearable, breaking the stereotype of what 'ethical' fashion looks like.

Goodone AW 2012 collection

There are a lot of companies out there that are doing a lot to improve how sustainable they are, one of the aspects of this is improving the tractability of products so consumers know where their clothes have come from. Nurmi are a band that really focus on this element of their business producing garments that not only are low impact but can be traced back to their source. I really love their jeans which are made from hemp and organic cotton and produced in Finland.

Nurmi Jeans

Unfortunately buying sustainable fashion is more expensive than high street clothing and in reality a lot of people will choose the £2 Primark T-Shirt over the more expensive organic cotton, ethically sourced version. But on the other hand by cutting back on the impulse buys in the Topshop sale you will save money allowing you to invest in better quality clothing that doesn't cost the earth, that's my plan anyway!

Fabric shopping at Cloth House

 

Last week I went to London to visit some of my favourite fabric shops, it sounds sad but its pretty exciting walking in not knowing what you are going to find and slowly bringing a collection to life. My favourite street to shop for fabric is Berwick street and my favourite shop is Cloth House, well shops because they have two  outlets on the street.

Cloth House, 47 Berwick Street
http://tolkathoughts.blogspot.co.uk/2009_01_01_archive.html
 

The first shop you come to when you turn off Oxford Street houses their linen, cotton, suiting and denim. they have an amazing collection of hand printed and woven cottons and a basement filled with every colour of velvet and corduroy you can imagine. The second shop is further down the road towards Soho and is  where you need to go if you are looking for something luxurious or unusual. As well as stocking a wide range of stretch jerseys and wools they have some slightly more outlandish fabrics including neoprene, rubber, PVC and numerous types of silk.

This shopping trip was different from normal in a couple of ways; as this project is concerned with reducing the environmental impact of clothing I had to think about the sustainability of all the fabrics I chose, and also I had by dad in tow. Rather than being a hindrance as I imagined Papa Harding actually proved pretty useful as he falls into the target customer of the brand I am designing for, it was useful to have a potential customer to bounce ideas off and he actually suggested some fabrics I hadn't considered such as combining the green and orange wool fabrics seen below.

Fabric samples from Cloth House 

In terms of sustainability I found a couple of interesting fabrics, one of which is the denim fabric which is actually made from hemp. Hemp comes from the cannabis plant and has had a reputation in the past for being a scratchy, stiff fabric worn by hippies, I was surmised to find that this fabric was almost indistinguishable from normal cotton denim so I decided to include it in my collection as it has a much lower environmental impact as it needs less water and chemicals than cotton.

The best thing I found in Cloth House was a reflective tape which I can incorporate into my collection, making tailored jackets suitable for the environmentally conscious man to wear on his bicycle. I can't wait to get started designing!