Thursday, September 4, 2008

Sustainable FASHION? Sustainable clothes...Or a sustainable industry?

(Sustainable) Capable of being continued with minimal long-term effect on the environment

I think to achive a sustainable fashion industry would be very difficult, and would not be an over night thing and it would need to happen on a global scale, it would require many smaller changes to the way we work. One change is as follows:

Sustainable clothes!-
* As far as i can see, either no one cares about ssustainable clothes and/or no one can afford them.
*there are many loop holes in what is sustainable (eg, electricity, cradle to cradle, employees conditions ect) so its hard to pin point what IS sustainable so that it can be corectly marketed without buyers being misleaded.

THEREFORE! I think that if INSTEAD of starting up a new "sustainable fashion market".... small (and hopefully not toooo costly) changes can be made to the current, mainstream market, that will only increase prices slightly (ideally by 10-15 dollars per garment for a garement ususally costing 60ish dollars).Theses changes can include using properly paid workers, or fibres such as bamboo or hemp, or using clean electricity.
If these sort of changes are made within all clothing companys, gradually the clothes will becaome greener, and because sales are staying up, the technologies used to keep green (solar power or hemp plantation) will hopefully get cheaper as it tends to do (remeber when the iPod first came out and it was like $400?it was a giant brick with only a few gig memory, now u can get one for around 150 thats super tiny and with tonnes of space)
It is still possible for companies to NOT go green and make more money from cheaper clothes ect, but thats will happen in any industry with any new change.

Inconclusion, instead of making a new sector and trying to get everyone to convert, why not just slowly adjust the old one (lol, like the catholics did to the pagans (ooooh!)) But it worked for them why wont it work for fashion..?

1 comment:

steve said...

Meg, what an intellegent proposal to a big problem, How can we start this change?
I'm sure the pope thanks you
steve