The thing is, the fashion industry does far more toxic and dangerous things every single day than run a small nuclear reactor. I couldn’t get Ruff’s idea out of my head, as strange as it seemed at first. So yeah, I’ll bite. What is “micronuclear?” Who is Rickey Ruff? And is this idea ... feasible?
Read moreHarper's Bazaar | Can Sustainable Fashion and Inclusive Sizing Coexist? →
These brands are tackling two important, underrepresented facets of the fashion industry, but they’re still a minority.
Read moreInStyle | American Fashion Changed After the Depression, and It's About to Reinvent Itself Again →
If we draw on the expertise of fashion historians and trend forecasters, we can learn from the social, financial, and fashion upheaval of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to predict how our style will change in the coming months and years. In short? It’s not going to be all leggings all the time: Dressier days are on the horizon already.
Read moreThe Cut | Fashion Week Is Simply Not Sustainable →
Why are we still doing this? Of course, runway shows create but a sliver of the environmental impact of the fashion industry, but they represent everything that is wrong with it. They’re inherently wasteful, with glossy sets built, torn down, and landfilled after a ten-minute spectacle. Attendees fly first-class from fashion capital to fashion capital, where they jump into black cars that ferry them around, leaving trails of disposable water bottles and gift-bag swag behind.
Read moreVogue Business | Does Luxury Fashion Still Need Wholesale Showrooms? →
When Nicholas and Christopher Kunz launched Nicholas K in 2003, like most upscale brands, the sister-brother duo worked with showrooms to build up their wholesale business. For 11 years, as the label developed through gothic leather-and-silk draped dresses and undyed alpaca wrap sweaters, showrooms sold their product on the East and West coasts and occasionally pitched in on PR. But in 2014, the siblings realised it no longer worked for them.
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Popular Science | How to dress to protect yourself from UV rays →
If you’re wary about sunscreen or you just want to compliment your strategy against UV rays, thinking about what you wear and when, could make a huge difference.
Read moreMartha Stewart Living | These Two Women Are on a Mission to Make the Fashion Industry More Sustainable →
(For print) Learn how to outfit yourself more mindfully, and support brands that are as eco-conscious as they are cool.
Read moreVogue Business | African-made luxury fashion is making a comeback →
In 2016, Suno shuttered after a decade of creating critically acclaimed collections in Africa. The next year, Maiyet, whose Nairobi artisans were once featured in a glossy New York spread, stopped making its own products and became an ethical-wear boutique in London. Edun, which Bono and his wife Ali Hewson founded in 2004, held on until last year when LVMH divested, and operations ceased in the US. It had suffered about $80 million in accumulated losses.
Read moreNew York Magazine | Where to Donate Your Old Clothes in NYC →
If you’re trying to do the right thing, your best bet is to shop more sustainably. Buy fewer, better pieces of fashion, so that your future closet clean-outs yield fewer, better donations that people actually want. But in the meantime, if you’re trying to dispose of a garbage bag full of Forever 21 that you just Kondo’d, here are the best ways to do it.
Read moreCraftsmanship Quarterly | Argentina’s Textile Crusader →
If you want an unusually cozy scarf or sweater made of natural fiber, merino wool or alpaca is the usual choice. But what about guanaco, the alpaca’s little-known cousin, which grows even finer fleece? For Adriana Marina, the guanaco’s time has come to be South America’s finest source for sustainable textiles.
Read moreVox | No Online Shopping Company Can Figure Out How to Quit This One Plastic Bag →
In 2018, the healthy meal-kit service Sun Basket swapped out their recycled plastic box-liner material for Sealed Air TempGuard, a liner made of recycled paper sandwiched between two sheets of kraft paper. Fully curbside recyclable, even when wet, it allowed Sun Basket to reduce its box size by about 25 percent and reduce the carbon footprint of shipping, not to mention reduce the amount of plastic in their shipment. Customers were pleased. “Kudos to your packaging folks for coming up with this concept,” one couple wrote in.
Read moreVox | The Spare Button Represents All the Ways We Fail to Be Good Consumers →
In my snow day fantasy, I’m nestled under a blanket on the couch, my cat sleeping on top of the pile of mending. I’m digging through my box of spare buttons, picking out the correct one and serenely sewing it back onto my favorite sweater, pausing occasionally to sip from a hot mug of tea. So hygge, right?
Read moreRacked | Will Shoppers Ever Really Care About Sustainability? →
Customers say they want brands to be more environmentally conscious — but eco-friendly marketing campaigns fall flat.
Read moreRefinery29 | Relax. Sustainable Fashion Is Easier Than You Think →
Nobody can seem to agree on how to dress sustainably.
Some people advocate for organic cotton and Fair Trade fashion, while others criticize how expensive those types of pieces are for most people. Some advocate for only buying vintage, but shouldn’t indie designers also be supported in their efforts to be eco-friendly? Certain experts cheer for the huge ripples that international brands send across the supply chain with seemingly small improvements, while others decry said small improvements as straight-up greenwashing.
Read moreRefinery29 | Faux Fur: Good For Ethics, Bad For The Planet? →
Anti-fur advocates have come a long way since the days of slinging red paint on the fluffy-clad fashion elite. Instead, they now count some key luxury fashion players as their advocates. In just the past nine months, Gucci, Michael Kors, Versace, and the entire Yoox Net-A-Porter universe, not to mention InStyle editor-in-chief Laura Brown, have all committed to being fur-free, many of whom have expressed a deep interest and dedication to sustainability. But brands aren’t exactly eschewing fur as an aesthetic choice, as some animal rights advocates would hope. Instead, they’re switching to lavish faux fur options — cue up Burberry’s giant happy rainbow cape.
Read moreInc. Magazine | The Future of Leather Is Growing in a New Jersey Lab--No Animals Needed →
Andras Forgacs started getting calls from the last group of people he imagined would be interested in his company--fashionistas.
It was 2011, and he had just stepped away from his leadership role at Organovo, a startup that 3-D-printed skin tissue for medical use. It turned out, the fashion executives told him, leather is a gnarly industry. Livestock create one-fifth of the world's greenhouse gases, and an estimated one-third of leather hides produced end up in landfills. The demand for leather goods was booming, yet there were shortage issues, and synthetic leather alternatives performed poorly.
Read moreNewsweek | Fast Fashion Is Creating an Environmental Crisis →
Visitors who stepped into fashion retailer H&M’s showroom in New York City on April 4, 2016, were confronted by a pile of cast-off clothing reaching to the ceiling. A T.S. Eliot quote stenciled on the wall (“In my end is my beginning”) gave the showroom the air of an art gallery or museum. In the next room, reporters and fashion bloggers sipped wine while studying the half-dozen mannequins wearing bespoke creations pieced together from old jeans, patches of jackets and cut-up blouses. This cocktail party was to celebrate the launch of H&M’s most recent Conscious Collection. “H&M will recycle them and create new textile fibre, and in return you get vouchers to use at H&M. Everybody wins!” H&M said on its blog.
It’s a nice sentiment, but it’s a gross oversimplification.
Read moreFast Company | Your Clothes Might Be Destroying The Rainforest →
Rayon, viscose, and modal have a dark secret: They’re often made from old-growth trees from endangered rainforests.
Read moreRacked | 10 Things You Can Do to Shop More Sustainably →
If we agree that mass-produced fashion is awful, that garment workers shouldn’t die making our clothes, that rivers should not be poisoned just for a cheap T-shirt, and that 1.715 billion tons of CO2 released a year (or about 5.3 percent of the 32.1 billion tons of global carbon emissions) is way too much, what can we do to change it?
Read moreRacked | We Have No Idea How Bad Fashion Actually Is for the Environment →
My journey down the rabbit hole started with this fact: “The global fashion industry is the second most polluting industry in the world.” You’ll hear this repeated at panels, on blogs and news sites, and anywhere else sustainable fashion is being discussed. Intuitively, it sounds true. But when I searched for the source, I couldn’t find it. No study, no official report. I asked every sustainable fashion industry expert I knew. Several said they would get back to me. A couple of experts pointed me to the Danish Fashion Institute, which in turn disavowed the fact.
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