Earth Day was Wednesday, but it’s never too late to think about being a little more earth friendly. More specifically for this column, we can focus on taking a greener approach to style.
I recently attended the fourth annual Nashville Fashion Week and a big topic was the fashion industry’s responsibility to create more sustainable and eco-friendly products.
It may be hard to imagine, but our clothes and how they are made have a huge effect on the environment.
According to www.fibre2fashion.com, the clothes we wear and the textiles they are made from can cause a great deal of damage.
The following are examples of the impact the fashion industry has on the environment.
The pesticides that farmers use to protect textiles as they grow can harm wild life, contaminate other products and get into the food we eat.
-The chemicals that are used to bleach and color textiles can damage the environment and people’s health.
-Old clothes that we throw away take up precious space in landfill sites, which is filling up rapidly.
-Most of the textile machineries cause noise, sound and air pollution.
-Over-usage of natural resources like plants, water, etc. depletes or disturbs ecological balance.
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-The working conditions in the textile and clothing industry are of sub-standard.
-Exploitation of animals often goes hand-in-hand with intensive farming practices that damage the environment as a whole.
Sounds pretty bleak, right? However, there is hope, and the fashion world is embracing it.
The eco-friendly industry has grown tremendously over the past few years. Fashion designers such as Stella McCartney practice cruelty-free techniques and excludes the use of animals in her designs.
Eco-friendly brands have become more popular with the increasing awareness of sweatshops, animal cruelty and resource scarcity. According to style site thefashionglobe.com, our neighboring state Alabama is home to a lifestyle company Alabama Chanin, which produces everything from ready-to-wear to wedding dresses to quilts and placemats. They make clothes with organic and recycled material and utilize the slow movement, which promotes the wellbeing of society, individuals and the natural movement. More importantly, their clothes are made locally in the town of Florence, Alabama.
Florence is also home to designer Billy Reid, who is also eco-friendly and totally worth checking out.
There are also vegan shoes such as “Kailia,” an eco-friendly shoe brand created by designer Nancy Dong based in Bologna, Italy. The company collaborates closely with European family-owned factories for the creation of beautiful, handmade shoes. The factories use water-based glues and polyurethane soles rather than more toxic vinyl and PVC. Her shoes are also made with organic linen and cotton, a quality that other eco-friendly brands share.
Eco-friendly and organic beauty lines come from makeup artists such as Kate O’Brien, who was reluctant to let her daughter wear make-up due to the harsh chemicals, so she created Alima pure, a 100 percent pure mineral pigment makeup line.
Brands like Kailia and O’Brien are making a name for themselves by offering handcrafted and homemade items keeping Mother Nature in mind.
While all of these companies should be applauded for the eco-conscious efforts, I must warn you, the price for such items will leave you a bit weak in the knees and in the pocketbook. With the time, attention and earth-friendly care each of these items gets, there is a cost.
However, you also have the knowledge and comfort that you are doing something good for the earth by buying such items.
I would also like to think that if buying items like this becomes the norm, then price will become less of an issue.
So I hope I’ve given you some food for thought and a list of designers to Google in your free time. While I love a good bargain as much as the next fashionista, I also love Mother Earth, too. Here’s to a greener fashion industry.
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