Who needs another fashion brand?

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In the UK we now consume 4 times as much clothing as just 10 years ago. And we wear them for just half the amount of time before throwing them away. A staggering 48% of clothing purchased in the UK is worn once, or less.  

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Objectively, disposable fashion at low prices is a plague on the planet.  

Subjectively, many also argue that it’s a plague on youth and health.

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Today we avidly consume and aspire to fast fashion and its icons, and yet our primary worry is about climate change and our environment. They are utterly incompatible. 

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According to the London College of Fashion there has been an over stimulation of the market.  The adrenalin rush of buying new cheap clothes is now completely at odds with being seen to be doing the right thing. 

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Fast, price led fashion has become a normality. There needs to be change.  

In place of Fast fashion, there are the seeds of a shift to Slow fashion. In much the same way as the movement against Fast food became Slow food and created more awareness of the perils of fast food and the physical and emotional joys of slow food.  In a world that is hungry to consume, less IS more.

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To give just three examples of the problems of fast fashion… 

• The Aral Sea – a freshwater lake the size of Ireland on the Uzbek/Kazak border has now been drained entirely to irrigate cotton fields to supply our growing hunger for cheap cotton clothing. (The water from the Amu Darya river in the south and the Syr Darya river in the north that previously fed into the Aral sea, was diverted to irrigate the desert to help grow cotton,  melons, rice and cereals so not entirely cotton fields, does that matter?) 

• We know that plastic waste in oceans is causing a sea-life calamity.  The second largest source is from clothes. A staggering 34% of plastic in the sea is from synthetic clothing and through the release from washing machines of micro plastics in cotton/man made composites. 

• Washing. We over-wash clothes. But some clothes can be simply brushed clean. Hiut jeans for example, have a “no wash” club. Don’t wash your jeans for 6 months. Brush them. You’ll end up with better fitting and more personal jeans and save a lot of water. The same is true of high quality tweed (see below**).  

 

Fast fashion is one of the major contributors to Global warming. And that wasteful obsession needs to change. We can’t do much, but we can try.

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We need materials that are truly sustainable. Materials that have in-built longevity, that are designed and manufactured to be worn time and time again, that can be cleaned and renewed and adapted and accessorized so that they remain timelessly stylish. Not sent straight to landfill.  

Materials like wool tweed. 

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It doesn’t need frequent washing. Wool isn’t washed very often, tweed never! 

Woven wool clothing lasts longer.

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Small batch tweed is perfect for individual expression. Fewer pieces, more individual, better accessorised.  

 

The wool industry is woven into the very fabric of the history of England. But like so much else it is in danger of being outsourced to oblivion. Yet the tweed that we can make in England is finer, can be worsted, and is highly adaptable and we have some world class artisans. It’s also soft to the touch, and incredibly hard wearing.  

Wool tweed can be England’s denim. It has durability, functional excellence, practical warmth and Coco Chanel cool.

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It can also help ween us away from fast fashion towards style and originality. We’ll be donating 10% of our profits to help clean up the mess that fast fashion has created.