The PR-heavy fashion industry rarely defines the term “sustainable”.

What does sustainability mean in the ultra-disposable world of fashion where it is often the last consideration in a person’s purchase decision process?

Ultimately, sustainability is not something that can be seen easily from the outside. How do you know if that garment she’s wearing was made from local, organic cotton, rather than from imported, conventionally grown fibres made in a sweatshop?

You don’t and there’s the rub.

Sustainable fashion is nearly impossible to market unless a brand image is attached to it. Brands need to cultivate an image of sustainable production processes that a person can trust when going to a store. Patagonia may be the best that I know of that does this, although it is mostly a very expensive type of hippie brand that the article below laments.

Patagonia makes a big deal about their environmental programs and corporate social responsibility programs, so I naturally assume that they are on the leading edge of doing good for the planet and me. They are sustainable without having to actually define what that is.

For the sustainable fashion movement to stick, brands need to carry the torch forward. Whether that means individual designers or whole lines of clothing, the key is the ability for people to quickly and easily recognize a sustainable article of clothing much like they can with organic produce.

Source: Montreal Gazette

Indeed, most sustainable fashionistas are proud of their earthiness, but are keen to see more high-style clothing grace the industry. It’s part of an effort to ditch that hippie stigma.

“We want to enjoy dressing up; we don’t want to wear hemp all the time,” said Alexandra Schwartz of Studio Breathe, a sleek-looking Montreal yoga and karate studio. On Nov. 19, Schwartz held a charity auction for the David Suzuki Foundation to promote ethical consumerism.

Schwartz agrees that, aside from a few cute frilly tops, Montreal’s sustainable-fashion movement tends to produce lots of casual T-shirts and cozy sweaters. Because many of these looks can be granola-heavy, “terms like ‘organic’ can get a negative reaction,” she said.

Schwartz also believes customers are wary of eco-clothing because of “greenwashing” – whereby companies advertise items as eco-friendly when they have only a small percentage of organic cotton mixed with a bulk load of petroleum-based ingredients. They may also make other eco-claims they can’t back up.

In the hopes of giving sustainable consumerism a fresh start, Schwartz has adopted the “blue” philosophy of Adam Werbach, the former head of the Sierra Club and now CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S, the ethical division of the ad agency. Werbach’s “blue” ideology stresses the ethical features of consumerism — such as buying a pair of those charitable Toms Shoes — rather than just focusing on the “green” items, such as organic cotton.

Fashion first

Eva Anastasiu is an ex-Montrealer living in Paris who runs www.ecofashionworld.com with three other partners. The site, which was launched two years ago, has more than 1,000 subscribers to its newsletter, and more than 300 sustainable brands listed.

A regular at Paris’s Ethical Fashion Show, Anastasiu believes the industry’s mission should be to reach out to the global fashion community.

“The goal is to have more fashion designers to go eco-(style) — not necessarily more humanitarians,” Anastasiu said. While she’s all for former Peace Corps workers launching their indie fashion labels, she thinks designers with proven talent should be recruited into the sustainable-fashion movement. That way, they can help improve the industry’s style and image, which is key to igniting an even larger consumer trend. In turn, even more corporations will have to become responsible.

She sees looks becoming more upscale: Last year, John Patrick Organics was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America award. This year, two more sustainable-fashion designers, Monique Pean and Natalie “Alabama” Chanin, were nominated.

“All this organic culture is a heritage of hippie culture; it’s just where it started,” Anastasiu said. “Now it’s taken up by people who are trained as designers and more fashionably interested brands.”

Bigger brands such as American Apparel should also be recognized for their vertically integrated business model and fair working conditions, Anastasiu said. “And they have quite a bit of organic cotton,” she added. Anastasiu lists H&M as another company with corporate-responsibility initiatives.

Still, Anastasiu acknowledges that bigger companies tend to be about “fast fashion” — fast food for your wardrobe, based on manufacturing and selling cheap, disposable clothes. This runs counter to the sustainable-fashion philosophy, which is all about good quality, longer-term buys from smaller, up-cycled vintage stores, and sustainable-fashion shops.

“A lot of eco-fashion designers are amazing people: They go to farms, to factories, and have their noses everywhere,” she said. “I admire them so much, and I really think their work should be promoted.”

What goes on in marketing meetings at major brands and their ad agencies is something like this:

“Hey Joe, did you see Wal-Mart’s new Greener Good line? They are able to sell almost the same products but at higher margins. We should do something like that. We’d make a killing.”

And so goes the selling of a sustainable way of life.

Sustainable style soon will be added to the pantheon of existing “lifestyle choices” that consumers can decide upon when choosing how to define and separate themselves from their peers as they blithely cruise down the aisles of Ikea and Target.

Eventually, the word “sustainable” will not have the same meaning as it does on this blog because companies will position their products as sustainable, co-opting the word as it becomes associated with just another meaningless marketing campaign in the minds of most citizens.

The ultimate effect, I fear, will be for the word to be owned by the very corporations it was designed to supplant.

Green-washing (see cartoon above) was an earlier example of this co-opting of language. As always, Caveat Emptor and use discernment when a company tries to sell you their “sustainable” products.

Source: Montreal Gazette

Everybody’s doing it. “Smart,” “green,” “natural,” “pure” are today’s ubiquitous advertising buzzwords, capitalizing on the fragile state of planet Earth and what to do about it.

The trend also reflects and stimulates sheer societal peer pressure to show your true col-ours in the face of the ecological apocalypse.

Tom Wolfe’s famous dictum – “Style is always a window into what a person thinks of his place in the world or what he wants his place to be in the world” – rings even truer today on the environmental stage, where folks trip over each other to demonstrate eco-consciousness in the products they consume.

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Indeed, being environmentally unfriendly is the new taboo. Especially among those who consider themselves Born to Buy. The “green” and “smart” movement is a middle-class phenomenon, with all the status-seeking the petit bourgeoisie is historically notorious for. Yuppies, for whom consumerism is self-defining, get an opportunity to give their consciences a workout by buying green. It’s all about, as the mantra goes, “making a difference.”

In fact, these days it’s hard to tell the difference between green/smart ad campaigns and traditional not-for-profit public service announcements.

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The mainly young people in green and smart ads chirp with the self-satisfaction of knowing a good thing when they see it, even at Wal-Mart: “Hey, all-natural fibres. Cool.” They strut their smart sustainable stuff, safe in the knowledge they’ll never be stigmatized, like cigarette smokers (ugh). The geopolitical world may be in trouble -rife with war, inequities, racism, poverty -but don’t blame these smart people: they’re doing their part for the environment.