In Honor of Earth Day, The New York Times Looks at Sustainable Fashion
In honor of Earth Day, New York Times fashion director and chief critic Vanessa Friedman trained her eye on the fashion industry’s current taste for sustainable design and manufacturing. Sustainability is undoubtedly a hot topic in the fashion world today – see also Kering’s recent commitment to environmentally ethical production, and sustainability as one of the pillars of focus for the upcoming FTF: Conference.
Friedman calls the current climate, if you’ll excuse the pun, “Sustainability 2.0.”
“It comes after stage one — acknowledging there is a problem and marketing the realization — and reflects brands’ attempts to assess their own environmental impact, including water use, electricity, fiber production and so on,” she writes.
In addition to Kering’s news-making internal progress, Friedman points to a new initiative from Adidas that pairs the brand with Parley for the Oceans, a project that amounts to essentially reducing plastic in the oceans through direct action and recycling it into polyester fabric.
Maiyet, who earlier this week announced a new Creative Director, also announced a new sustainability program, its first to take on the supply chain used to produce its clothing. Working alongside the Gobi Revival Fund, Maiyet will cut out the Chinese suppliers who typically distribute cashmere from Mongolian goat herders; the label will work directly with the farmers themselves.
The supply chain is, as Friedman calls it, “among the thorniest in all of fashion,” in large part due to its environmental impact – but also for its human impact, often relying on underpaid or mistreated workers.
But there are some who are going even deeper than the supply chain to support sustainability. Parsons The New School of Design appointed a new dean to oversee the fashion school, Burak Cakmak. With experience at the helm of sustainability initiatives at Swarovski, Kering and Gap, Cakmak has made it his mission to incorporate sustainability in all Parsons classes, ingraining the importance of the cause into the minds of the next generation of industry leaders.
“In other words, fashion may have reached the stage where it has realized green is no longer the new black: a trendy color that is in one year; out the next,” Friedman says. “Now it’s the new denim: a basic every brand needs as part of doing business.”
Photo via The New York Times
