How Noah, Patagonia, and Others Are Doing Black Friday with a Conscience

The awakening this past year to the ravages of unchecked consumer culture and the climate crisis means that the fashion industry is thinking up new ways to make and sell stuff more ethically. A number of brands during the fashion shows of June and September both touted their new efforts to produce more ethically and encouraged their customers to consume more responsibly. And now, In perhaps the ultimate high-wire act of holiday shopping, a number of brands are attempting Black Friday with a conscience.

Noah, the no-longer-cult New York menswear brand, has been a leader in this regard, making the decision last year to close their store on Friday. “We can still have cool shit. We can still have fun,” Noah founder Brendon Babenzien told GQ earlier this year. “But there's gotta be some limits.” It appears the brick-and-mortar store and website will be open this season, but the brand has upped their efforts to produce products with recycled materials, with a new T-shirt made from yarns discarded from other cotton production. (“This tee is garbage,” reads the Noah blog.)

Patagonia, of course, remains the gold standard for ethical consumerism, or as close as we’ll ever get to it, with its WornWear program, that encourages consumers to make repairs on the Patagonia pieces they already own, and includes the ReCrafted program that makes new pieces from deconstructed Patagonia material. This year, they’re matching all donations from Black Friday until the end of 2019 made through Patagonia Action Works, a program that connects consumers with grassroots organizations fighting the climate crisis in their community.

Lastly, the travel brand Pashko, best-known for their flight-friendly pants, is encouraging its customers to recycle their clothes rather than throw them out. You can fill a prepaid Pashko-supplied envelope with unwanted clothing, and they’ll recycle the clothes through Helpsy, ensuring that they don’t go to a landfill. (Last year, Helpsy’s recycling program kept 25 million pounds of clothes out of landfills, thereby saving 320 million tons of CO2 emissions.)

Even the least cynical among us can acknowledge that a brand encouraging us to do good through consumerism is a tough sell, but brands and designers seem unusually attuned to that reality this year, with Patagonia winking that a donation to Action Works is the perfect gift for climate-change deniers, for example. And the reality is that, unless you go full Scrooge this Christmas, you’re going to have to buy gifts! So why not do it with at least a little bit of societal goodwill?

Originally Appeared on GQ