DEPARTURES STYLE
DEPARTURES STYLE CONSCIOUS CLOTHING 44 toxic red slurry of dyes, solvents and pesticides ran from a factory near Basel, Switzerland down the Rhine and through at least four countries before dumping into the North Sea. Thousands of textile mills in the area of St Gallen were quickly and expensively forced to retrofit to strict standards. “If you wanted to survive you had to have a plan,” says Christian Dreszig, the head of marketing at Bluesign, an inspection company based 16 kilometres from the shores of nearby Lake Constance. Bluesign was a spin-off of a Swiss textile company. It was supported initially by chemical companies and textile mills in Europe and Taiwan, then by environmentally attentive outdoor outfitters like Patagonia, Vaude and Helly Hansen, and now by streetwear purveyors like Puma, Nike and Everlane – brands that are popular among customers who are increasingly aware of how their purchasing power can be put to work in service of the future of the planet. Bluesign’s scientists and technicians follow a textile from birth to its rebirth as a garment, monitoring the chemicals used and discarded along the way. Though they don’t currently monitor labour practices, they are, Dreszig told me, moving towards adopting standards set by the UN Sustainable Development goals. “The manufacturers and brands are required to act responsibly and sustainably with regard to people, the environment and resources,” Bluesign reports. Sustainability with regard to people – meaning labour rights – is an intrinsic aspect of overall sustainability, despite being frequently glossed over in marketing and in practice. Towards that end, fashion has room to improve: the nonprofit campaign for workers’ rights in the clothing industry, Labour Behind the Label, states in a report that the vast majority of global brands talked about paying sustainable wages, but of the 32 surveyed, 31 “could produce no evidence that any worker making their clothes was paid a living wage anywhere in the world”. For anyone looking to see the length and breadth of a product’s environmental impact, a complicating caveat arises: as brands have grown, supply chains have moved from a region in the Alps or the US to somewhere else in the world with less regulatory infrastructure. A US garment maker is today most likely just a front office for shirts made in Bangladesh, where there is less-stringent chemical monitoring as well as lax labour protections. “The supply chain is vast and complex,” says Dreszig. “In Bangladesh, they know how to do textiles, but the mills are not staffed with scientists who are monitoring.” Once, a brand had its own mill. “Now,” Dreszig adds, “sometimes they do not even know their suppliers. The real manufacturers are actually hidden in the supply chain.” But if every fashion company followed Bluesign’s standards, or something similar, the effect would be formidable: “A 2015 study that we commissioned,” Dreszig says, “showed that if the whole industry would use best-available technologies now, we could reduce 50 per cent of water consumption, 30 per cent THE VOORHES
of energy consumption and 15 per cent of chemical consumption. And that’s getting close to the sustainable development goals of the UN.” Daniel Jones is the CEO of Bext360, a start-up company that monitors supply chains. “With coffee or cocoa, we can weigh and grade the product and pay farmers with a digital payment, and we don’t need an internet connection,” Jones says. Add sustainability data, and suddenly the EP&L statement is significantly more accurate, verifying not just where cotton is coming from but how the farmers are growing it and how they are getting paid. Jones had not initially thought of working with fashion companies, but Fashion for Good, a sustainability think tank, approached him. “I give them credit,” Jones says. “They came to me and said, ‘Come show us what you’re doing, and we’ll show you why it pertains to cotton.’ And for a small company like ours, to be teamed up with industry experts who have that kind of reach and ethos – it’s hard to turn down!” NEW FRONTIERS The next phase has to do with textiles that can be returned to the earth without dire effect. Patagonia’s Alex Kremer, a principal at the brand’s venture capital fund, Tin Shed Ventures, invests in and partners with sustainability innovators. Kremer also works on Worn Wear, Patagonia’s recycling operation, which is opening a retail space this fall in Boulder, Colorado, as well as on Regenerative Organic Certification, which encourages farmers of cotton, for instance, to use sustainable agriculture practices – a way, Kremer says, that might not just go a little easier on land and water, but would suck up carbon and restore watersheds: “Ultimately, we think agriculture practised the right way can be a good thing for our planet.” His dual positions, in the day-today Worn Wear business but also investing in new technologies, mean he’s on the deck looking forward at what sustainable fashion in the future might be – or, really, what it has to be. “How do you break a garment down into its core components?” he asks. “If you can find a solution where that jacket, whether amazingly made the first time or not so amazingly made, then that can be reused. That solves a major environmental issue, and it also solves the issue of having to extract more oil to make a new synthetic, or reduces the need for more farmland if it’s a natural textile. That’s great, that’s huge!” A number of brands are getting in on the action. Stella McCartney’s collaboration with Adidas resulted in sneakers and yoga gear made with Parley Ocean Plastic, a fibre created from detritus harvested from oceans and rivers. In July, the two brands launched a sweatshirt made using NuCycl, technology developed to liquefy used cotton and make it into a new fibre. A month earlier, in June, Prada announced that it would phase out its use of virgin nylon by 2021 and expand its bag range with a new collection called “Re-Nylon” using Econyl, a fabric made from nylon recovered from landfills and the ocean. Eileen Fisher is working on something else entirely: a whole new textile, born of but not necessarily related to its fashion designs, which upcycles old clothes into works of art and home accessories. “In fact, we are making a very different product that points to other markets,” says Sigi Ahl, the head of Fisher’s artisanal textile unit, called, succinctly, Waste No More. “We’re a fashion company, but now we find ourselves starting from scratch basically, going into new zones.” If the loop is ever to be completely closed, with what we wear remade out of and into something else entirely, it will require technologies that are only just beginning to seem possible. Ambercycle, a Los Angeles-based start-up sponsored by Fashion for Good, takes garments made with cotton and polyesters and runs them through a process that makes the cotton usable as cotton again and makes the synthetics into pellets that can be extruded and spun into new fibres. At that point, Christina Mauro, Ambercycle’s brand development director, says, they will be able to begin to limit the harmful polyesters “that we ship to various landfills around the world”. They hope to launch in 2020. Daniel Grushkin is the founder and executive director of the Biodesign Challenge, a competition that allows university and high-school students from around the world to envision future applications of biotechnology. It’s a cross between an art and design class and a biology project, an exercise not just in modelling good behaviour in terms of sustainability but in creating entirely new protocols. A few years ago, some of his students were proposing a yarn made of algae, which grows quickly and also happens to suck carbon from the atmosphere; now they are launching a textile startup called AlgiKnit. More recently, a group of students from the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia, created what they called Woocoa, a yarn made from coconut husks softened with enzymes from oyster mushrooms; they won the 2018 PETA Prize for Animal-Free Wool, which included a visit to Stella McCartney’s studio in London. “Here was a bunch of design students who decided they were going to take a waste material that didn’t have many other uses and turn it into something that would be a replacement for wool,” says Grushkin. Though they came into the event as design students, they managed to commandeer tools from the biology lab, like an electron microscope, which they used to show how they changed the surface of the fibres. Ordinarily these departments are siloed, says Grushkin. “Suddenly, you find scientists working on a design project in support of these students. It’s transformative!” In other words, the ship is turning. DEPARTURES 45
