The latest company to jump onto the green bandwagon is the BBC. The BBC are targeting the niche of ethical fashion. Recently ethical fashion has become a hot term amongst fashion designers and those who consider themselves to be trendy.
These days it’s not enough to wear the right clothes- the clothes have to be ethical and green. Stella Macartney has launched an ethical fashion range and the pages of Cosmopolitan and the like are full of ethical fashion tips.
The magazine Thread, launched by the BBC commissioned research that found that 31% of people between 16-30 years old wanted to buy more ethical fashion. They found that as yet people are unsure where to turn to find what’s hot and what’s not.
This puts pressure on fashion retailers to provide information about how their clothes have been produced and where the materials come from. At the top of the list of what people are most concerned about was the working conditions of the people making the clothes. This was followed by organic labelling, the use of chemicals, how to recycle the clothes and the energy used in producing them.
Soon then we could see how large an items carbon footprint is! Will this put companies off having their clothes made on the other side of the world? Only time will tell….
We’ll bring you more about ethical fashion telling you where are the best places to buy clothes and more about how they are produced. We’ll look at the best and worst retailers of ethical fashion and see if it’s affordable.
Good luck to the BBC and Thread. We hope that they’ll be able to bring more people to ethical fashion and wider ethical issues.
Whilst writing these posts it seems that we are going full circle. Hundreds of years ago each country was responsible for growing it’s own food and making its own products, be these clothes or toys. These days most things we use seem to be made in a foreign country. If we do go full circle and only use the resources on our small island this will have an effect on the economy. As yet we don’t know if this is good or bad but it will help the environment.
Luis said,
May 21, 2008 @ 5:40 am
Want to see a sexy Green Car
go to Youtube.com and type in:
Car running on water. BMW Hydrogen 7 series
or
Jay Leno talks about BMW Hydrogen 7 series
Shauna Chapman said,
May 26, 2008 @ 8:16 pm
I operate a green and ethical fashion label and produce all the clothing lines within England, 90% of it within 45 miles of the studio.
When I first started out – at the business plan stage – I tried to source fabrics which were actually made in the UK. I called at least 30 different factories in the Midlands to no avail. The only fabric I could find was various types of Scottish tweed (though not all the wool used was even British) and some upholstery fabrics. Although some hemp is being grown within the UK, it is shipped overseas for processing and then shipped back again to be sold.
The only sustainable, organic and truly cultural product coming out of the UK is wool, an example of which is Ardalanish Organic Tweed or Garthenor Organic Wool, both approved by the Soil Assoc.
We’re currently in a credit crunch, several people in my green network have had a miserable April and May 2008.
Green fashion is making consumers go cross eyed. On one side they have £3 Primark blouses and somewhere, in the haze, is a few journalists chirping about the greatness of green fashion, where a blouse costs considerably more in the eyes of the average consumer and perhaps only the most affluent can afford.
Shauna Chapman
Founder, Quail
samantha waine said,
August 7, 2008 @ 10:45 am
I started my new ethical fashion brand Dirty Pretty as a response to all that is unethical in the fashion industry, i wanted to create a brand to prove fashion can be ethical.
i use recycled fabric and trims from antique markets, that i hand pick could be curtains a men’s shirt or rement fabric, i then create unique one off garments with these unusual fabrics that are wearable and affordable.
i belive using recycled fabrics is a good alternative for ethical fashion as it does not create a demand and there is always a large supply of these especially as the new disposable fashion trend has hit.
I agree consumers must be tempted to say the least, but being aware and choosing carefully i.e something you will not throw away next week is also important in being ethical.
samantha waine
Dirty Pretty