ARTS & CULTURE
12 Obiter Dicta
Conscious Couture
Making Sustainability a Part of Your Wardrobe
marie park › arts & culture editor
S
us ta i na bl e, e a rt h-f r i e n dly, e c oconscious, green - whatever we call it, the
new hip thing to do in our everyday lives is
to try to be considerate in our daily decisions
about the environmental and social impact of our
affluent Western lifestyles. In earlier days, it wasn’t
always clear how to apply sustainability to everyday living, but today, information about “green”
options for many decisions we make on a regular basis
abounds.
There is organic produce at grocery stores, fair
trade coffee at a good number of franchises, cosmetics companies that do not participate in lab animal
testing, locally crafted and artisanal goods at farmers’ markets - the list goes on and on. The more serious eco-conscious consumer now even has the option
to consider hybrid or fully electric automobiles, cutting their carbon footprint significantly.
Despite the fact that sustainable choices are a vailable in many industries, the apparel and fashion
industry has been slow in picking this up. Both from
the industry side and the consumer side, clothing
seems to have been neglected as an opportunity to
make great change happen, both for the environment
and for the social benefit of the supplier communities
across the world.
Perhaps the very nature of the fashion industry prevents the uptake of such initiatives - fashion
is always moving, changing, and being redefined.
What was fashionable last season is no longer desired;
something fresh has to always be made and distributed to satisfy the masses. It is a tragic consequence
of an aesthetically driven industry, which encourages
the belief that perfectly good and relatively durable
consumer goods should instead be considered disposable and readily replaceable. It is fair to say that the
garment and apparel industries need special attention
if we as a society wish to ensure that our conduct does
not devolve into vain self-absorption.
At first glance, one would believe there are viable
solutions to the quandary of disposable fashion - give
away your unwanted clothes to some sort of good
cause, for example. But believe me, the clothes that
go in the donation bins do not end up benefitting
many people at all - only about ten percent of donated
clothing is considered good enough to resell. The rest
are sold to textile
recycling plants
or dumped into
the waste stream.
Facts aside, there
is a more important moral consideration to be made: just because we can afford to do
so does not mean that we should participate in such a
wasteful lifestyle.
Consider also the source of the raw materials.
According to the Organic Trade Association of the
United States, the cotton industry uses twenty-five
of the world’s pesticides. Its processes produces toxic
plant wastes that are also reused for animal feed, most
often for cattle. Furthermore, the notorious case of
Monsanto’s Bt Cotton, a genetically modified cotton
variety with built in resistance to certain pests, is
incredibly concerning. The 2011 documentary Bitter
ê Photo credit: goodhousekeeping.com
Seeds exposed the reality that small-scale farmers in
India have been coerced into increasing production of
Bt Cotton farming which has led to devastating hardships and resulted in thousands of suicides.
The reality is that the negative impact of the fashion industry can be challenged if only we, the consumers, redefine
our understanding of need versus
want. We need to
learn that more
does not necessarily render us
fashionistas; to be fashionable is to be able to develop
our own individual aesthetic, as well as the ability to
define our identity by more than who we are wearing.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, however,
and change does not seem impossible in the near
future. For one thing, a global group of like-minded
industry specialists have come together to form the
Sustainable Apparel Coalition. The group has developed an industry tool, called the Higg Index, that
purportedly helps give manufacturers a way to measure the environmental and social impact that their
products may have. In addition, some brands and
“. . . to be fashionable is to be able
to develop our own individual
aesthetic . . .”
vendors (though they may be few and far between)
have devoted themselves to providing more ecofriendly and socially responsible apparel. Some of the
better known brands that have picked up this habit
include H&M’s Conscious Collection, Montreal’s Matt
& Nat vegan handbags, and Stella McCartney’s line of
apparel.
Where can you start? The first step is to take a look
at your own spending habits when it comes to clothing. Also, do a bit of research into the issues. There is
a world of ugly truths that the fashion industry would
prefer their consumers not to know about. It also
helps to excited about sustainably-minded manufacturers and to make considered purchases that you
intend to use for a good, long time.
In the end, the important take-away is that when
it comes down to it, your beauty is defined not by
what you wear, but who you are inside. u