Eco Fashion Gets Greener
To say that renewable fashion is having a moment might be an understatement. Designer Stella McCartney has a sustainability section on her website that explains countless global green initiatives, while Swedish mega-retailer H&M released their third annual Conscious Exclusive collection earlier this year with supermodel and activist Amber Valleta fronting the campaign.
“What does it mean to be eco or green today?” asked Valleta at the second annual Cradle to Cradle Innovation Celebration & Product Symposium event held in New York City on Friday. “We need to redefine that. We need to modernize the fashion industry. This is where we need to be in the 21st century, all products need to be created with thought.”
Valleta, of course, was speaking on behalf of Fashion Positive, the new 2014 initiative from Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, which hopes to give new meaning to the term “sustainability.”
“Whatever goes into the building blocks of fashion, we need to have the ‘good’ lists, we need to have the ‘positive’ lists,” said Fashion Positive Senior Vice President Lewis Perkins. “We decided we would take the Cradle to Cradle methodology, which is clean water improvements, renewable energy, social practices, designing for upcycling, and material health and chemistry and apply those five principles to materials – fibers, dyes, yarns, fabrics, threads.”
Apparently several of the designers and brands like Maiyet that Perkins first spoke with were interested in creating “healthy” fashion, but didn’t know how. “People would say to me that they would make a ‘positive’ collection, but they didn’t know the cut-and-sew house they should be using,” he said. “That’s when we knew we were on to something.” Clearly, those initial conversations were a success, as Fashion Positive has enlisted brands like G-Star, Loomstate, Saitex, and Under the Canopy/Portico with Michael Stars for their launch collection – each brand will create an upcoming capsule collection.
Additionally, Perkins found inspiration from some of the companies who were already following this model, such as Germany’s Trigema, who was honored at the event for their work and Puma. “They were both key in figuring out what would work and wouldn’t work for the larger industry,” he said. Perkins is actively continuing these talks with the likes of Kering (owner of Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and Saint Laurent), PVH (owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy HIlfigier), and VF Corp (owner of The North Face and Seven For All Mankind) in hopes of growing the model: “We’ve taken this venture capital, Silicon Valley kind of thinking and moving as fast as we can.”
