Green-+the+New+Black



Ariel Siegel Sustainable Fashion 11/1/11 588

**Green is the New Black**

What distinguishes us from the animals, well honestly we are all just dressed up monkeys playing accordions. In particular our fashion industry is innovative in ideas, but not design and oftentimes lacking quality. We are driven to consumption, but the fashion industry also tries to adapt but if full adaptation was made, then we would not have a need to constantly go jean shopping. Throughout history, all of the trends albeit Victorian, Gothic, hippie, rocker, etcetera alternate trends which are “hot.” There are many aspects to sustainable fashion, in order to make this transition, there needs to be unification.

Fashion designers consider sustainable fashion as quality products with style and longevity. There has been a shift in the paradigm of fashion because an industry predicated not on need but desire is one that is often associated with indulgence and excess. There needs to be a sense of morality to fashion. However, some brands have attempted to go “organic” or sustainable with eco-friendly or pre-organic components. There has been a dependence and stress that cotton is better yet it is not the most eco-friendly material, and polyester is not by hostile with respect to ecosystem since it is synthetically produced. According to the Skolen School of Design, in order to produce 1 kilo of cotton an average use of 8000 litres of water, whereas production of 1 kilo of polyester hardly uses any water. Yet this debate is not over, for polyester fibers are made from oil, and brings into the equation global impact with respect to politics, society and the environment. In a study of the World Wide Fund indicated that 10 luxury brands got no higher than a C+ in eco and ethical categories. In particular the textile industry is heavily dependent on cotton and polyester with the world’s total textile fiber consumption of 59.5 million tons in 2005, cotton constitutes 24.4 and polyester 24.7 million tons. These materials comprise the vast majority of the world’s total textile production, and another sustainable way forward could be to begin contemplating more diversity within textiles and hence less vulnerability in relation to exploitation of the soil and crop failure in the case of cotton, and less dependency on fossil fuels in the case of polyester. The matrix of sustainable fashion is not only with textiles, but also with education, policy, and understanding.

 In order to further shift fashion to sustainable practices, a way to research and understand the overall sustainability of a particular brand should be advertised. With respect to online shopping, there could be a method to compare and contrast different brands. This pulls in policy, if the government or corporations would dedicate resources to this advancement, there would be results and hopefully honesty within the results of each brand. How do we know that a shirt is sustainable? We do not, currently a lack of cohesion and the competitive nature of fashion is preventing the progress to sustainable practices. There is also a shift to homemade/designed fashion, however according to Oranges and Apples, the production of sewing machines is rather costly with respect to the environment, so mass production is a better method with respect to sustainability.

 Will the fashion industry ever change? Cohesion and consumer knowledge is important in fighting this battle. Education is currently taking sustainability into instruction. Consumerism and materialism is within the mentality that we have to overcome. With fashion, culture and the way in which we think needs to change, but we are far away from any “sustainable” fashion.

Dalby, M. “Sustainable Fashion: Issues to be Addressed.” Design Skolen Kolding. Denmark. 2010.  []

Franca. “Sustainable Fashion Part 1L Conceptualizing the Issues.” March 2010. []

Friedman, V. “Sustainable fashion: what does green mean?” Financial Times: Style. February 2010. [|http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2b27447e-11e4-11df-b6e3-00144feab49a.html#axzz1cNOi46ce]