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The great fashion icon Coco Chanel once said, “Fashion has to do with ideas — the way we live, what is happening.”
Following suit, designers look to world events and trends for inspiration. They create visual embodiments of ephemeral concepts and then, through the trickle down of styles from haute couture to chez Renée, these visual ideas slowly infiltrate our everyday lives.
This makes fashion useful for addressing all types of issues, such as gender equality (I love pantsuits), social justice (sweatshop-free, baby), cultural acceptance (ghetto superstar) and now, eco-consciousness.
But, just like everything else, it’s not easy being green. In a 1957 issue of Life magazine, Chanel said, “Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”
So is fashion the candy wrapper of the consumer world, made to be thrown away? According to research done by the EPA in 2000, yes — 85 percent of all textiles end up in landfill.
If you’re wearing your clothes ragged, and still have that shirt from the 7th grade it’s likely that your neighbors are not. Furthermore, you might not be that fashionable anyway. We’re going for something that is eco-stylish, not corduroy patchwork. So how do we make the billion dollar fashion industry greener? It is harder, but also cooler, than you’d imagine.
We first need a sense of the scope of the problem. Textiles use more water than any other industry besides agriculture. Even synthetic fibers get made into cloth through a complicated process that uses several wet baths and washes. All of this water gets reintroduced into the water system untreated.
According to the World Bank, 17 to 20 percent of industrial pollution comes from textile dyeing and treatment. Freshwater resources are threatened by 72 toxic chemicals from this process, and we don’t know how to purify 30 of these chemicals out of a water supply.
Cotton, the fabric of our lives, is a crop that uses an enormous amount of pesticides. According to the Environmental Justice Foundation, it accounts for 16 percent of global insecticides — more than any other agricultural crop. Great strides are being made in terms of improving the process and growing organic cotton, but still there is no truly eco-friendly textile. Somewhere along the way, between the raw materials, transport, processing, etc., the consequences add up.
Due to the enormous size of the fashion industry — Americans spent roughly $340 billion on clothing and shoes last year, which is about 25 percent of the global market — any improvements that can be made yield huge benefits. But the industry needs educated consumers to demand the extra effort.
Here are a few ways to green your duds on any budget.
Bright new things
It is hard to justify buying new clothes if you’re trying not to contribute to the problem. Don’t despair — your lust for luxury can be sated. Just Google “eco fashion” and peruse the many sleek blogs about up-and-coming designers and creative new fabrics to watch for. After a quick search I found several great companies.
There’s Atayne, a high-performance sports clothing company based in Brunswick, Maine that makes their product out of “trash,” and 46664, Nelson Mandela’s new colorful, casual mensware line made ethically and sustainably with a South African flair. I also found Uranus, which makes cute boy shorts made from soy fabric and an amazing slideshow on TreeHugger.com that gives a better overview of the hot new eco designers than I have room for here.
Diamonds on your soles
Between Tom’s, Simple Shoes, Sanuk and Birkenstock, the options for sustainable shoes are fast-multiplying. Now if only L.L. Bean could make a boot I can eat.
Second life
The greenest clothes are the ones that are already made. Bangor’s American Retro, Orono’s Black Bear Exchange — heck, let’s start a hip Swap-a-Rama. I have two sisters and we constantly get to revive our closets by circulating clothes. We can all satisfy our cravings and be good to the Earth.
Love the threads
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Get intimate with a needle and thread. Make your grandma proud and sew on that damn button. Who cares if it doesn’t match? Now you can sell it for $80 at Anthropologie. Cut up, braid, dye, applique and button your way to eco and style success.
And one final thing: Let yourself be dirty. Atayne recommends taking a shower in your workout clothes after using them, then just letting them air dry. Apparently nearly 80 percent of a garment’s ecological impact comes from our horrible care habits. So the absolute easiest way to have a big impact is to buy a lot of underwear and let the laundry pile up.
