2007
Apparel Industry Is Going Green! Organic Fashion What Eco-Conscious Clothing Companies?
Posted by: Fashion06 in Design, Starting your own line |
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There have been many signs that suggest going green is a new trend with clothing companies. I guess what I’m saying is that the fashion industry is now more than ever Eco-ready!
I wrote about our first organic produced clothing company last week named Social Awearness. They are just one of many new clothing companies popping up on the map who have decided to go the eco-route.
As many know organic-made products yield higher cost and in?return equal less profit or higher prices to your end consumer…it’s your choice.?Maybe the apparel industry is taking responsibility on creating a greener earth or just making a strategic business move for the happy tree-huggers pockets! Only time will tell.
I haven’t seen one piece of organic clothing that really caught my eye. I wonder why in the apparel industry designers seem to lose their creative juices when catering to a unknown or untapped market think about most big & tall counterparts of your favorite clothing lines. Are they just as fashionable or stylish as the mass produced general sized garments? In most cases the answer is not.
I’ve seen some?new?guys in the fashion industry who intend to fill that void and?put some style back into the big & tall consumers’ closet…but I’m getting off of subject.
Apparel trade events have even took notice and are catering to the green fashion producer/consumer and have?dedicated time with mini-shows of organic clothing lines in major fashion shows.? Global Eco Trade Show is up and coming industry event that is based entirely around environmentally safe organic fashion.
Making the switch to green is not as easy as it may seem, but actually a headache during the sourcing process. Many manufacturers new to the organic game worry that materials will become scarce and hinder production.
Companies producing organic fashion must follow certain?rules under the Global Organic Textile Standard, which is an international code that spells out what steps a company must take to make an organic garment.
Will you go green? I think an entire sportswear line with organic fabrics is in hand?
or is this just a trend that will fade?
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August 11th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
I wonder why people are so up to make “Organic” Cotton t-shirts? I don’t hear about farmers using hormones to grow cotton. How can cotton itself be organic. Isn’t it already for the last 100 years been organic?
Or are they more or less talking about the dyes used to color the shirts?
August 14th, 2007 at 10:52 am
[…] Apparel Industry Is Going Green! Organic Fashion What Eco-Conscious Clothing Companies? […]
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:27 am
[…] Apparel Industry Is Going Green! Organic Fashion What Eco-Conscious Clothing Companies? […]
June 16th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
To answer your question, there IS a difference between conventional and organic cotton, and a definite eco-impact. It’s not hormones, it’s pesticides and herbicides, as well as the chemical run-off in used in crop irrigation which further pollutes the environment. It takes 1/3 of a pound of chemicals to produce enough cotton to make a conventionally-produced t-shirt that you’d find at a department store, and an entire pound for a pair of jeans. How many t-shirts are in your dresser? That’s a lot of chemicals used! Additionally, 20,000 deaths occur each year from pesticide poisoning in developing countries, many of these from cotton farming, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Furthermore, pesticides used in conventional cotton farming can enter the human food chain. Because cotton is grown primarily for its fiber, it is regulated as a non-food crop.
The majority of the cotton plant, by weight, ends up in our food supply. Processed foods contain cottonseed oil, and beef and dairy cows are fed cotton straw, cottonseed meal and waste from cotton gins.
The dyes used in conventional clothing are another story altogether - synthetic dyes often contain reproductive or developmental toxins (like the flame retardants containing PBDEs) and mutagens and endocrine disrupters (like dioxins), either in synthetic dyes or mordants, which “fix” the dye to the fabric.
Conversely, vegetable and water-based dyes are non-chemical, and come from renewable resources.
When you consider the production methods of most consumables - packaged food, conventionally-grown crops, breeding, feeding and processing of animal products - the amount of chemicals with which we come into contact on a daily basis is staggering. But, since most of us don’t commonly have access (or think about) that information, we aren’t aware of how our purchasing practices affect the market - all the way back to the production of the plants - aka, the butterfly effect.
Here are a couple of websites to check out if you are interested in more info:
Organic Trade Association at http://www.ota.com
Co-op America: http://www.coopamerica.org