We love style. We love fashion. We also want to make sure our sartorial choices do little damage to the world as we can. Eco-friendly clothing manufacturers throw around terms like “conscientious” and “sustainable fashion”, but what does that really mean?

There are plenty of fashion designers that describe themselves as eco-friendly. While brands may use it as part of their marketing plan, are they really good for the environment?

How do you choose sustainable fashion?

1. Shop Low Impact Dying

While many fabrics may start out as sustainable fibers, the finishing process can cancel that out pretty quickly. Organic cottons quickly lose their earthy appeal when chemical dyes and formaldehyde are used to treat them. South Carolina-based Gaia Conceptions grows its own plant and pigment-based dyes made from natural sources to color its clothing. These are great for both the planet and the wellness of the person wearing them. The company also uses fiber reactive dyes. These are developed for higher absorption rates so chemicals are not needed to fix them to the fiber. This also means that less water is wasted or used.

2. Let the fabric suit the fashion

Fashion fans love silk as a luxury fabric. Unfortunately, many don’t realize that typical silk manufacturing involves boiling and killing the silk worms after they have produced the fibers. Peace silk or vegan silk is a fabric made only with silk fiber casings only after the worms have emerged and moved on. This is a much more humane practice but costly. To keep it truly eco, peace silk should be bought in natural colors. This makes peace silk an ideal choice for green weddings. Conscientious brides often have a natural aesthetic for their wedding and are willing to splurge on the perfect dress. Boutiques like The Cotton Bride in Brooklyn, New York are committed to using such fabrics. Their wedding gowns are even sewn in-house.

3. Respect the maker

We hear a lot about Fair Trade and fair labor practices. Is there a way to really know if your dress was made by a happy seamstress? You can support that ethos by shopping from designers that work with organizations like the Ethical Fashion Initiative, a joint project with the United Nations. You can check if your brand is accredited by the Fair Labor Association. These organizations ensure that workers have decent working conditions and wages. Some companies like Satara go a step further in providing skills training and financial guidance. Its website even allows you to find the individual woman who made your garment. The fashion industry has enabled many women in third world countries to improve their quality of life and become financially independent.

4. Wear Fabrics Made from Recycled Fiber

Buying a jacket that helps empty the landfills of all those plastic bottles? That is fabulous. Patagonia was one of the first major clothing manufacturers to work with PET (polyethylene terephthalate) fabrics. Its patented Polartec fabric is a form of polyester. While a synthetic, petroleum-based textile sounds like the opposite of eco-friendly, PET’s main strength is that it uses recycled fibers to produce. Recycling garbage like plastic bottles and collected old garments to make this fabric cuts down on the energy and fossil fuels needed to make it compared to traditional polyester. While this may not please organic trendsetters, this should make upcycled and recycled fashion fans happy.

What sustainable fashion boils down to is often what your Eco-friendly clothing is boiled in. Many fibers can be farmed or produced in a sustainable way, but the finishing is what makes or breaks its Eco cred. Also, think about who is doing the boiling. Guests are afraid to mistreat a chef at a restaurant handling their food. Wouldn’t you want to make sure the person making our clothing is happy too?

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Images: Mariana Leung

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ColumnHow has Uniqlo managed to avoid the dreaded “fast fashion” label?

If you don’t shop at Uniqlo, you will soon. The Japanese retailer has already captivated urban centers like New York and San Francisco with ambitious plans to expand to 1,000 U.S. stores in the next decade.

Uniqlo’s specialty is cheap but quality basics, presented in a rainbow of the season’s trendiest colors. But despite the chain’s quick-moving inventory and bargain basement prices, Uniqlo has somehow managed to escape the fast fashion stigma slapped on competitors like H&M, Forever 21, Zara, and Old Navy. This week’s Behind The Label looks at why.

The Uniqlo we know today got its start when Japanese entrepreneur Tadashi Yanai evolved his family suit business into a chain of contemporary activewear stores in 1984. The first store was called Unique Clothing Warehouse, a lengthy moniker that was later shortened to Uniqlo. The chain initially sold brands like Nike and Adidas, but as it expanded, it shifted to more store-brand apparel.

Today, there are more than 835 Uniqlo stores around the world, with seven in the U.S. Over the past decade, parent corporation Fast Retailing has also added brands like Theory, J Brand, Helmut Lang, Princess Tam.Tam, and Comptoir des Cotonniers to its portfolio of companies.

The Good

Uniqlo’s first American retail presence was in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, where it quickly gained a cult following of devotees drawn by the promise of quality items at low prices. Indeed, Uniqlo’s mission is grounded in the promise of a fashion democracy; its tagline reads “Made For All.” But how is Uniqlo able to offer quality to “all” at such low prices?

First, there’s the power of buying in bulk. But Uniqlo doesn’t just work with anyone. Where some fast fashion companies work with up to 300 manufacturers, Uniqlo works with approximately 70, according to its latest corporate social responsibility report. According to Takao Kuwahara, chief executive of Uniqlo U.K., the company takes a hands-on approach in order to ensure quality. “We make a lot of our products in China but, because of our approach to manufacturing, we can maintain very good quality control,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “When we find a factory we want to work with, we commit to buying all of their product for the next five years—but only if they meet our standards. Then we send in our own team of trained craftsmen to teach the factory how we like things done. The team stays until they get it right.”

Then, there’s Uniqlo’s minimalist approach to design and construction. Design director Naoki Takizawa is an alumnus of Issey Miyake, Japan’s most famous minimalist fashion designer. Much like fellow Japanese brand Muji, Uniqlo aims to eliminate the inessential. “The only things that stay are the things you need: It has to protect you from the rain, and heat has to escape,” Takizawa told Fast Company.

And finally, there’s a minimalist approach to inventory. “We have much fewer styles, especially when you compare us with companies like H&M or Topshop or Zara,” Shin Odake, CEO of Uniqlo U.S.A., told New York Magazine. “That’s the secret of why we can get better quality. We try to consolidate the fabric buys as much as possible. H&M sales are bigger, but we have bigger orders. We take huge quantities, and we have negotiation power.”

The Bad

Uniqlo’s minimalist approach to sourcing, design, and inventory may partly explain how the brand is able to offer $5 tees and $19 jeans. But labor is a significant part of the equation too.

Uniqlo has long produced the majority of its clothing in China, but in recent years it has expanded into cheaper manufacturing bases like Vietnam and Bangladesh. According to the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, Bangladesh offers the cheapest garment labor in the world, at 21 cents an hour. Vietnam’s wages aren’t much higher: 52 cents an hour in cities and 36 cents an hour in rural areas.

Cheaper labor comes at a price, as the recent garment factory collapse and fires in Bangladesh have reminded us. The incidents have prompted major retailers like Walmart, Gap, and H&M to initiate conversations on how to improve Bangladeshi working conditions. Fast Retailing, the world’s fourth largest clothing retailer, isn’t reported to be a participant in these discussions. The company is not a member of the Fair Labor Association, which promotes responsible labor standards, nor does it participate in industry-wide environmental working groups like the Sustainable Apparel Coalition.

Uniqlo’s apathy toward its workers is further evident in this year’s CSR report. The chapter on garment manufacturing focuses more on quality control than quality of life. The strongest statement on fair labor is that Fast Retailing “always produces clothing under socially acceptable working conditions” – hardly a revolutionary commitment.

Uniqlo has also been singled out for having an unhealthy corporate culture. It is currently suing the publisher of a scathing book called the “The Glory and Disgrace of Uniqlo,” which accused the retailer of “extremely harsh, slave-like labor conditions at overseas factories.” And earlier this year, Japanese business magazine Toyo Keizal ran a feature article on Uniqlo with the headline: “Hihei suru shokuba” (“the worn-out workplace”). According to an English summary of the article by the Japan Times, Uniqlo perpetuates the worst stereotypes of Japanese rank-and-file corporate culture. Workers have little decision-making capacity and are expected to follow the company manual to the letter, with harsh punishments for minor infractions. They are regularly expected to contribute “service zangyo,” or voluntary overtime with no pay, even though the practice is forbidden and employees can be demoted or fired if found out. As a result of these and other restrictions, a staggering 53 percent of employees leave the company within three years.

The Questionable

My strategy since become a conscious consumer has been to build a wardrobe around high-quality staples: great-fitting jeans, comfortable tees, versatile black dresses. For this, Uniqlo is heaven-sent. Its styles aren’t driven as much by trend as they are by timelessness. In fact, its new LifeWear collection, released last month, promotes a minimalist wardrobe of 11 basic “projects” that together comprise a full wardrobe.

“We don’t have seasonal fashion themes like other companies. We are much more product focused. Year by year, we are constantly testing, improving and updating,” Yuki Katsuta, Uniqlo’s senior vice president of global research and design, told Business of Fashion last month.

This shopping philosophy resonates with many conscious consumers, which may be why Uniqlo has escaped the dreaded fast fashion label. It’s easy for ethical shoppers to justify a Uniqlo purchase by arguing for its quality, much like slow fashion proponents do.

But Uniqlo’s supply chain is still littered with the social and environmental issues representative of other fast fashion retailers. At the end of the day, Uniqlo still uses cheap labor to make cheaply constructed garments. But because of the brand’s focus on quality, versatility, and minimalist wardrobes, you hopefully won’t be tricked into buying more of them than you need.

Images: Instant Vantage, Sean Davis

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When Rapanui founders Rob & Mart Drake-Knight launched their clothing line in the U.K, they knew consumers were keen to eco-brand’s greenwashing and that they’d have their work cut out for them when it came to showing credibility. So they came into the arena ready for war.

Not only have the brothers become completely transparent in getting consumers the information they want (as to how their clothing got to them) but they’ve also put a clear coat on how they market it as well. How? By investing a lot of time in communication design, eco-labeling to benchmark their products’ eco impact and offering interactive traceability maps “with images, video and figures of our entire supply chain for every product from seed to shop.”

“We’re saying that brands should start educating themselves, and their consumers, about their supply chains and reduce spin marketing and reconnect the consumer’s awareness of their environmental consequence – i.e, their buying action,” says Mart Drake-Knight in a businessGreen.com article.

Rapanui claimed their own 2010 Sustainable Business Award (the youngest winners ever) this year for not only their organic fabrics but for the renewable energy powered factories they work with, and the fact that they enforce fair labor at all points of their supply chain.

As more and more sustainable brands and stores are entering the marketplace touting green clothing, confused consumers being fed gobs of “green” information are recognizinggreenwashing tactics, which devalues the cause itself.  Will brands have to be much more transparent when claiming to be eco without being laughed at?

Absolutely.

Say the brothers on their site: “I don’t think we are going to be some kind of world saving company that is the solution to the 21st century sustainability crisis, but if we can inspire people to make wider lifestyle choices in going green and to spark a change in the industry or inspire some sort of wider change in the industry, then I think we have done our job in making a significant contribution towards sustainability.”

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