A few months ago, my husband and I took a four-day tour of the mountainous Matagalpa region of Nicaragua. The itinerary, which was designed to immerse us in the local culture while benefiting the community, included almost no restaurant meals. Our Nicaraguan guide brought us to the homes of small-scale farmers, where home cooks would emerge from their dirt-floor kitchens, a plate in each hand filled with some variation of freshly made corn tortillas, plantains, rice, beans, salty white cheese, and chicken, with a side of fruit juice.
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 moreGlamour | How to Gift Consciously This Holiday Season →
We all know that, as far as holiday gifts are concerned, it truly is the thought that counts, but as more shoppers wake up to fashion’s damaging effects on the environment, people, and animals (the industry is responsible for an estimated 5 percent of the world’s global carbon emissions and 4 percent of the world’s waste), the "thoughtfulness" of gifting has taken on a whole new meaning.
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 moreCraftsmanship Quarterly | Eco Fashion's Animal Rights Delusion →
For most women like me, when a fine, silk blouse catches our eye in a clothing store, we don’t think much about the worms that made the silk. If you do, here’s the story you will typically find: A few days after silkworms disappear inside their cocoons, right about the time they finish spinning, the little pods are collected and submerged in boiling water. To make a pound of raw silk, up to 5,000 worms must die.
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 moreQuartz | Multilevel-marketing companies like LuLaRoe are forcing people into debt and psychological crisis →
“I was urged to stop paying my bills to invest in more inventory. I was urged to get rid of television. I was urged to pawn my vehicle. I just had to get on anxiety meds over all of it because I’ve started having panic attacks.”
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.
Read moreQuartz | Conscious Consumerism Is a Lie →
As a sustainable lifestyle blogger, my job is to make conscious consumerism look good. Over the course of four years Instagramming eco-friendly outfits, testing non-toxic nail polish brands, and writing sustainable city guides, I became a proponent of having it all—fashion, fun, travel, beauty—while still being eco-friendly. So when I was invited to speak on a panel in front of the UN Youth Delegation, the expectation was that I’d dispense wisdom to bright young students about how their personal purchasing choices can help save the world.
Read moreQuartz | Will the man running a sex party like a start-up be able to leave anyone satisfied? →
But Saynt isn’t just another rich guy throwing an orgy in his mansion: He’s an entrepreneur who wants to disrupt the nascent sex-positivity movement, and ride it to wealth and fame. In May, his previous effort to throw a cutting-edge sex party succumbed to friction and hostility from the community he was trying to join. Would his most recent attempt blow up, or blow it?
Read moreQuartz | Barring a massive change in how we fish, there won’t be any sushi left by 2048 →
These days, if you’re lucky enough to find yourself at a Michelin-starred restaurant, it’s an almost foregone conclusion that the ingredients will be sourced locally, seasonally, and sustainably.
But amid all the devotion to local terroir, foraging, heirloom produce, and pasture-raised meat from coddled livestock and fowl, there’s one segment of the restaurant industry that remains stubbornly in opposition to the slow food movement. In fact, when it comes to seafood, many of the world’s best restaurants fly in an endangered species for its patrons to feast on a nightly basis.
Read moreQuartz | Witchcraft is the Perfect Religion for Liberal Millennials →
What ties together crystals, feminism, polyamory, lapsed Catholicism, and tarot cards?
Besides being increasingly of the moment, they are all related to modern witchcraft, a movement that is being propelled out of the forest and into the mainstream. The hook-nosed, broom-riding, pointy-hat-wearing, cackling witches of yore have transfigured into hip, feminist, millennial women with slick websites and soothing advice on manifesting your dreams. Instead of a bubbling cauldron filled with eye of the newt, they’re slinging essential oils seeped with wild herbs.
Read moreThe Harsh Reality Of When Mass Retailers Find Indie Designers →
It’s an up-and-coming designer’s dream. You’re laboring over handcrafting earrings or oils or needlepoint in your apartment to sell at flea markets and on your Etsy shop, and then you receive a single order from a retailer (one you’ve actually heard of!) for more units than you’ve sold in the entire time you’ve been making them. Validation!
Then…panic.
Refinery29 | Is This New Housing Trend Bad For 20-Somethings? →
I’m at Pure House, a so-called millennial commune in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. It’s one of several millennial communes currently operating or under construction in New York City. One commune in the Financial District, The Loft, seems to revolve around drinking and other bro-tastic activities. Pure House sounds a bit more like me. It offers the opposite: fresh juice, discounts on activities like yoga at its event space in Williamsburg, plus spontaneous dinners and brunches in a positive community of like-minded, creative people.
Read moreRefinery29 | Sex, Drugs, And V-Neck Tees: Inside The Cult Of American Apparel →
A CEO who has run into so many PR disasters and has a dismal financial track record? Of course he should be fired. But then, American Apparel is unlike any other fashion brand out there, as I found out after speaking with current and former employees, Dov Charney’s supporters, and Charney himself. Because, despite the endless lawsuits, the sexts he allegedly sent employees, the viral video of the ex- CEO flaunting his penis in front of staff, the cult of Dov Charney lives on at AA.
Read moreFROM UNKNOWN TO PLAYING CITYFOX IN SIX MONTHS: JUSTIN MARCHACOS' STORY →
Justin Marchacos came out of nowhere to play an acclaimed live set at the Cityfox New Year's Eve party. We thought maybe we just hadn't been paying attention, but when he told us that was his first set ever, we were floored. We visited him in his studio in Queens on Superbowl Sunday, getting a private live performance and hanging out talking for hours. Turns out, Marchacos loves telling stories. So we'll let him explain in his own words his biggest inspiration, how he landed on the Cityfox label, and how he came this close to messing up his very first performance in front of 1,500 people.
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