Eco Fashion World

You thought you were pretty eco-cool with your designer hemp shirt and organic cotton jeans, but did you every think about your zippers? In fact, all the little metallic bits and bobs that give the finishing touch to your beautifully cut trousers are often produced in terrible conditions with polluting materials. So, in their search for the most eco friendly materials to create their looks, companies like Loomstate , Mana Clothing and Levi’s have turned to a new player in the green fashion market: San Francisco-based trim supplier, TYT Trend is now leading the charge to help apparel designers and brands develop truly 100% earth-friendly products for their earth-conscious customers.

Fabric made out of pineapple, woodpulp, bamboo jersey and seaweed. It all sounds very exotic and it is, if you think of wearing it on your body! The last few years have seen an increase in the creation of eco luxurious fabrics and it looks like this market is only growing. Founder and CEO of Osklen, Oskar Metsavaht, will give a talk on the development of this niche during Biofach Latin America to be held in São Paulo from October 23-25.

Great news for all you ambitious conscious designers out there: more and more crazy, sexy, cool eco fabrics are being developed as we speak! Last year it was like finding a needle in a haystack, but this year, Paris fabric fair Premiere Vision had clearly indicated the companies offering eco fabrics. One thing that lacked however, was that the sales people of the 50 bamboo fabric suppliers and 75 eco cotton companies couldn’t say much yet about the eco credentials and sources of the fabrics, which leaves room for improvement next year.

Innocent chitchat, summer 2008:

"What are you doing this summer?"

"Oh, not much, I’m going to use my staycation to do some upcycling and sort out my closet for the next swishing party."

Of course, before the advent of this new vocab, you might have said “Nothing, I’m too broke to go on vacation or shop, I’m just going to patch up some old things and see if I can exchange them at the charity shop”. But these days, with style.com running a story on glamorous staycationers like supermodel Karen Elson (who, by the way, is using the time to plot the imminent opening of her vintage shop: Mars and Venus), home is the hippest place to be. And while you’re there, why not take advantage of that to do some cleaning up?

I don’t know about you, but we at EFW noticed a while ago that nothing in our wardrobe really worked well with disposable, ripping, overflowing plastic bags. It might be a whole other set of motivations that led the Chinese government to declare a country-wide ban on giving away these crusty carriers for free, but ban they have and so far the results are probing: in a country that used up to 3 billion plastic bags per day, supermarkets are now seeking a decline in use from 50 to 90%!