A look at the people who are truly making your clothes unique.

Fashion designers within the conventional fashion industry have become disengaged from fashion construction and makers are marginalized. Designers are the public face of the fashion industry, basking in its glamor and prestige, with makers often sitting at the opposite end of the hierarchy. The distance is philosophical, with the role of the fashion designer seen to involve applying creative vision to generate a sketch for the maker (or more, usually a team of makers) to manifest.

Julian Roberts, inventor of the “Subtraction Cutting” method in an Openwear interview talks of designing in patterns, “rather than in vague illustrative drawings which become reinterpreted by other skilled cutters.”

The distance between designer and maker of fashion at the design stage can also be physical, with the actual manufacturing process hidden from view in far-away sweat shops and not talked about or celebrated. Julian Roberts says “before you buy a garment and wear it, it will have been touched by many skillful hands, but often the hand that touches it the LEAST is the hand of the fashion designer.”

The physical and philosophical distance has enabled a range of issues to arise and be solidified over the last 150 years, or ever since Charles Worth the “Father” of fashion design, placed his label on a garment. These include concerns of exploitation, copying, speed vs. innovation and secrecy. How can a re-engagement of design and making foster meaningful, sustainable change in the fashion industry?

Shingo Sato

I consider myself to be a patternmaker-designer. To design zero waste garments you need to be able to design as you make the pattern and not just in response to a design. Design occurs in many places but it does not occur as a sketch of the exterior of the garment, but in the development of the pattern. What implications does designing in this manner have on the development of a sustainable fashion industry? For a start it can result in the unexpected. Much of the fashion we see is a copy of what’s been done before, either last week, last season or last century. For many, the design process involves directly or indirectly copying an existing design, so the patternmaker’s job has become to faithfully recreate the look within the companies size range and for the desired fabrication, perhaps with a few modifications.

The end result can be disheartening for consumers when they see a rapid dissemination of similar styles globally, a process that leads to its ever-faster fashion “death.” It is also a difficult thing for designers, as they know styles are repeated ad nauseam throughout history, then their consumers can (and do) buy vintage garments while remaining fashionable.

For most companies it does not make economic sense to invest time (and therefore money) into the development of a design if the likely outcome is not known. The speed of change driven by the monetary benefits of Economies of Scale and consumer are demanding, so while the argument for which comes first generally descends into a chicken and egg debate, the problem is a very real and immediate one for fashion companies. A problem they solve by repeating and copying existing styles. It should be no surprise that this is the foundation of the contemporary fashion system.

Comme des Garcons, AW 2012

Famous Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie MacIntosh, once said “There is hope in honest error. None in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.” Have fashion designers become mere stylists? With economic and time pressures at an all time high for fashion creatives, the space once available for truly innovative fashion is being squeezed out and much of what does happen occurs at the fringes of the industry. This is often in education, where both graduates and academics in many cases have more creative time and space without the financial restrictions demanded by the need to produce a commercial body of work up to six times per year (or more in the case of fast fashion).

Luckily every season there are examples of designers who push things in a different direction. Whether by material use, technique or form there are designers and their creative teams which pride themselves on demonstrating true innovation in at least parts of their collections. When Rei Kawakubo of Comme Des Garcons sent her models down the catwalk for AW 2012 devoid of a soundtrack with 2-Dimensional garments full of wry cliché it was a clear critique of the growing “flatness” of the industry.

Junya Watanabe

Rei Kawakubo is renowned for being an innovator in the true sense of the word in the fashion world, constantly pushing viewers and wearers with her own unique view of the dressed body – famously bulging and distorted, always 3D – so for her to present such a flat body of work speaks volumes of the state of the industry. As the representation of the fashion industry becomes more and more about ubiquitous and repetitive copies, fashion rebels like Rei Kawakubo and Junya Watanabe seek to find alternatives. For many, this alternative is evident in the rise of craftsmanship, in particular, a re-emergence of innovative patternmaking.

Pattern Magic, Tomoko Nakamichi

Patternmaking is seen by many to be an aloof, mathematical and often dry practice, certainly not design, and very inaccessible. However, when Patternmaking and Design meet as equals, magical things can happen. The brilliant and enigmatic book series from Laurence King Publishing called Pattern Magic, gives a taste for what kind of alchemy is possible. Written by Tomoko Nakamichi of the famous Bunka Fashion College in Japan – a college who taught fashion innovator Yohji Yamamoto –  this series of books introduces the reader to thinking about the design of garments in unashamedly 3D and unexpected ways. Originally printed only in Japanese the images show garment features merging from collar to body, form leaping off the body, while soft geometry and the body tussle with each other and mercifully, standardized forms became passé. The skilled patternmaker can become a kind of magician-designer, deceiving the wearer and viewer, distorting the dressed body, and giving us something refreshing.

From Pattern Magic

Patternmaker, designer and educator Shingo Sato gives away many of his techniques and make his “tools of the trade” readily available on youtube. While his approach, which he calls “Transformation, Reconstruction” has been critiqued as simply dart manipulation and elimination, something which is neither new or innovative, he demystifies the process, merging design with patternmaking to “draw” line and form on the dress form, often with a magic marker. An exploration of his techniques reveals an ease with breaking tradition and the adoption of new form, the old rules need not apply.

Julian Roberts, Subtraction Cutting

Julian Roberts is a UK based designer and inventor of what is called Subtraction Cutting. This process involves designing not the exterior, not the front, back or side, indeed there are usually no side seams to his garments (after all, do humans have side seams?). Instead, Roberts designs the interior space of the garment that the body travels through. His approach results in forms that are difficult to predict, requiring an intimate relationship between designer, hand, cloth and body. While acting as “Fashion Adviser for Europe, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa” for the British Council, he also spends much of his time teaching workshops full of students how to take the creation of clothing in new directions by engaging their maker-mind in the design process.

Julian Roberts, Live Subtraction Cutting, Liverpool

Both Shingo and Julian freely share their processes, rebelling not only against aesthetic norms but also against the tradition of secrecy in the fashion industry. The growing call for openness and transparency strikes fear into the hearts of many designers and the wider implications still need working out. However, sharing design processes which cannot lead to mindless copying (from designer to designer to highstreet to trash), helps to slow the fashion juggernaught down, provides consumers with real choice and not just the illusion of choice, while reconnecting designers and consumers with makers and producers, will lead to an industry which does all things better.

And for that we should all rejoice.

Image: Style.com, Laurence King Publishers

The post The Marriage of Patternmaking and Fashion Design appeared first on EcoSalon.

“The more ephemeral fashion is, the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead.” – Morand

In a recent blog post, Consumerist fashion: Innovation Repressor, author and fashion pioneer Kate Fletcher wrote that “consumerist fashion not only damages the resource base, workers, consumers, etc., but also – and perhaps more insidiously – represses innovation; stifling anything other than that which benefits those invested in the status quo.”

One of the most obvious manifestations of this is in the immense speed of the fashion cycle, a system so rapidly changing that opportunities for “real innovation” are extremely limiting. The speed of change in fashionable dress is an old grievance of cultural observers. “Ah! Quelle Antiquité!” exclaim the couple in Carle Vernet’s etching dressed in the height of 1793 French fashion – “Oh! Quelle Folie que la Nouveauté!!!” replies the couple dressed in fashionable 1778 dress. The exchange roughly translates to  “Ah! What Antiquity!” and “Oh! What Madness of Innovation!” illustrating the rapid changes occurring in fashion in post-revolutionary France – and as a result the remainder of the fashionable world.

Carle Vernet

This “Madness of Innovation” is what still compels the fashion industry onward today. Author Barbara Vinken describes fashion as “the empire of the ephemeral,” in her book Fashion Zeitgeist and French writer and early Modernist Paul Morand claimed, “The more ephemeral fashion is, the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead”. Such musings are all well and good, but when the ephemeral nature of fashion leads to seemingly mountainous deposits of undesirable fashion items relegated to landfill – perhaps another attitude needs to be encouraged.

Fletcher describes consumerist fashion as a system that continually needs to “self-justify” itself, creating new styles in ever-faster cycles to replace old ones, which inevitably wear out quickly and were never intended to be mended. The phenomenal speed of this cycle relies on the ability of fashion houses large and small, from the high street to fashion week to copy and be influenced by the existing design work of other designers, either contemporary or historical. I say it “relies on it” because for fashion houses at all levels the development time for collections is growing ever shorter, leaving minimal time for true innovation and the pressure to meet deadlines and profit margins necessitates a degree of copying.

A homage or just plain knocking off? From left to right: East West Musical Instruments Co., Balenciaga, and Urban Outfitters

A good friend who was working for a fast fashion producer in London replied to an email I had sent her about my own work addressing sustainable fashion design, production and consumption systems. Describing the design process in the company she worked for she wrote “I don’t actually design them. But, in the loosest sense of design, I ‘adjust.’ Are you laughing??? I do most days. I correct appalling fit, I decided on length/print/colourways. I rip out a Lacroix skirt (out of Vogue) that I love with loads of lace and send it out to the factory with a line drawing and basic spec, cross my fingers and hope that something nice comes back.”

Current international law regarding the protection of fashion designs in theory allows designers to protect their designs, usually through the application of design patents or “trade dress,” and in the case of copyright automatically protects the patterns, textile design and sketches relating to any design and long as it is original. But what is original? The fashion zeitgeist can be described as a continuous line, a progression of ideas for which most are traceable through a cyclical lineage which marries other contemporary designers work with historical dress and often street fashion. As a result the difficulty in proving originality of idea in its entirety is immense.

An added complexity is the evolution of the fashion industry from being a relatively simple “trickle-down” procession of ideas to the non-linear system we have today where fashion ideas appear to come from anywhere. When writing about and discussing Zero Waste Fashion Design with others, I often need to point out that what I do also isn’t new. Zero-waste pattern cutting has been around for thousands of years in the form of Kimono and other historical costume, and more recently many designers worldwide such as Issey Miyake, Timo Rissanen, Mark Liu, Yeohlee Teng and Zandra Rhodes have been engaging with it.

Writer and designer Holly McQuillan at the traveling Yield Zero Waste Exhibit she curates

Miucci Prada famously said, “We let others copy us. And when they do, we drop it”. This altruistic attitude only works when the copied designer is already desirable to fashion consumers and the designer has generated income from being the first to produce the design. However since the advent of the Internet and improvements in manufacturing, the translation from high fashion to high street now only takes weeks, explaining why copying is so much more of a problem now.

Previously high fashion and couture houses were relatively unconcerned by copies as they would only be on the market after the original designs had had their moment and they had made a return on their investment. Indeed the copies indirectly drive later sales due to the obsolescence they induce. The Internet, whilst making fashion more accessible to consumers worldwide, has also made it very easy for fast fashion houses to translate consumer interest into new variations.

Anna Sui spring 2007 RTW on left and Forever 21′s Maven Top on right

Once styles are gleaned from the internet and processed by the design room, manufacturing advances mean that fast fashion firms such as Zara can take as little as 14 days from design room to retail floor – consequently taking income away from the designers that invested in developing the idea in the first place. Contemporary fashion moments pass by so quickly as to negate much of the need to protect individual designs – by the time designers patent their work, the fashion value of that piece is likely to have diminished if not dissolved completely. The result is that the majority of the fashion world treats their outputs as Creative Commons – “shared resources that can be freely reused, recreated and recombined” with a mostly self-governing “shame-police.”

Instead of legislating the rights of designers, fashion savvy consumers and observers can spot, and through blogs, out an overt copy, or as it is more euphemistically labeled “homage.” The loss of reputation can be damaging so most high-end designers try to avoid intentionally referencing other designers work too heavily. The situation becomes much more complex when well known designers copy little known players in the industry. It has been argued that this “referencing” aids the original designer, by giving them publicity which they may have otherwise never received, a convenient viewpoint for those with power in the fashion industry.

Feral Childe Teepee Print

Forever 21 Knockoff Print

Despite the potential benefit to society there appears to be little motivation from either designers or consumers to slow down the rate of change and so-called “innovation” in the fashion industry. The financial benefit from the current system is great. The specter of the derivative-driven fashion cycle is however something that should concern sustainable fashion designers. Indeed if the fashion industry as a whole aims to eventually be sustaining and follow best practice then the rampant excesses of consumption need to be addressed, something that companies such as Marks & Spencer who, whilst making great leaps forward in providing organic product ranges and other sustainable initiatives, fail to address. There are few design companies who actively encourage their consumers to buy less.

There are other ways to measure success. The fashion industry could protect and nurture up and coming designers, it could develop better pay and working conditions for the millions of its workers, it could move toward being an industry which values truly innovative design and prevents the proliferation of so-called “new or innovative” products purely for the sake of a quick return.

The more often that products are released to the public, the more often the consumers feel the need for change, and the faster that consumers get bored with current offerings. This could be attributed to the idea (as French provocateur Jean Baudrillard stated) that we consume as we lack any other real purpose in our lives. So we need alternatives.

Kate Fletcher writes: “To this, the response of those of us who love nature and the creative and cultural power of fashion and design can only be to invigorate innovation of these alternatives and develop a different plan of action.”

Image: Fashion Bomb Daily

The post The Hypocrisy of Fashion ‘Innovation’ appeared first on EcoSalon.

Zero waste fashion designers step up the aesthetics to be more pleasing for the masses.

Zero Waste Pattern Design seems at first glance to deal unashamedly with only the front end of the fashion cycle, with the theory going that if the designer agonizes over eliminating waste then consumers only need worry about what to do with the garments when they don’t want them any more. But it is much more than just a matter of asking “Have I used ALL of that piece of cloth?” as doing only this would potentially result in garments that no one would want to purchase.

With zero waste pattern design, and indeed all sustainable fashion, aesthetics cannot be at the expense of the environment, just as much as the environment cannot be at the expense of aesthetics. There must exist a harmony between both, and thankfully many sustainable designers have found it.

It is a strange thing however, that many of the worlds zero waste designers come from two such apparently different parts of the world, New York or Australasia. Australiasian designers who explore these ideas include Material By Product, Mark Liu, Timo Rissanen and Julia Lumsden. There are a number of New York based designers who use zero waste fashion design philosophies in their work, notably the iconic Yeohlee Teng.

I spoke to last year and this year’s Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation winners Tara St James and Titania Inglis this past week, fresh out of their New York Fashion Week shows. Here’s what they had to say.

Mark Liu

What is your sustainable fashion philosophy and how were you motivated to take your work in this direction?

Titania Inglis: My philosophy came from my mother, who taught me from a young age that it was better to buy a few beautiful pieces of clothing than lots and lots of not-so-great clothes. With the end goal of a small wardrobe in mind, I try to make clothes that are versatile and can often be worn in multiple ways; that feature high-quality, long-lasting fabrics and finishing; and that are both of the moment and yet well-proportioned and classic enough to wear for years to come.

Tara St James: To date I haven’t focused on one single sustainability philosophy, instead I try to examine several aspects of ethical design to evaluate which are a good fit for my brand and which are not.  For example my very first collection, entitled The Square Project, was a study in zero waste pattermaking, while of course using all overstock or sustainable textiles, and to this day I still implement a lot of zero waste in my designs.  I also work very closely with artisan weavers and knitters through Source4Style and other outlets. And I produce about 90% of my garments in New York City.

Ironically I was steered towards sustainability in 2004 when I started my previous brand Covet and was sourcing new textiles in China where I found a bamboo jersey I loved. I say ironically because I no longer work with either bamboo or China, but it opened my eyes to the concept of ethical sourcing, and that’s when I started researching different textiles and production methods. There has been tremendous change since then, I’ll say that.

Titania Inglis, Spring 12

How do you incorporate this waste reduction/elimination philosophy into your design and/or production processes?

Titania Inglis: Again, I believe strongly that classic, beautifully made clothes are the best antidote to waste. That said, with an eye to cradle-to-grave sustainability, I recycle all of my fabric scraps and try whenever possible to cut smaller pieces from existing scraps; try to choose 100% cotton and 100% wool fabrics that are easily recycled; and recommend on the care labels that garments be aired out often and washed less, both to save on water and to ensure that they last longer.

As far as zero-waste pattern making goes, my Spring/Summer 2011 collection was based around that technique, and I approached it both through bias cutting and origami folding, creating two origami-pleated bustle skirts and a bias top and dress that were cut from simple shapes that could be interlocked on the marker to eliminate fabric waste. Because there was a tiny bit of fabric that wasn’t used in the pieces, I called it my “Almost Zero” collection. Some of the pieces have since reappeared in successive collections, with the bias T-shirt becoming one of my signature pieces.

Tara St James: I’ve found it much easier to reduce waste on an individual level and less so when larger production quantities come into the picture. If I’m designing, cutting and sewing something myself, I can easily control how the garment is made, but to scale both the design and pattern to include different sizes and fabrications has been a challenge, although not an insurmountable one.

Tara St James, Spring 12

How do your customers respond to your ethical goals and resulting products – how strongly do you market your products as ethical?

Titania Inglis: While I do offer information about my philosophy and production methods on my website, I choose to market the line first and foremost as a fashion line, leaving the ethical standards as an added benefit. Clothing is a unique product in that it’s meant to be worn, so the look of it, the fabric choice, and the fit come first when a woman is shopping. If she loves a piece and will wear it forever, that’s far more environmentally sound than if she buys it for its ethical production methods and then leaves it in the back of her closet because she hates the look.

Tara St James: I don’t actively market my brand as ethical, I want my customers to buy the clothing first because they love it, and they usually only find out the sustainability of the brand after they’ve spoken to the shop owner or done some research on the brand.  However there is a rising population of shoppers who seek out ethical fashion and want to support local designers. With them I’m happy to be as open sourced and transparent as possible. After all, the story behind the clothing is my means of creating a dialogue with my customer. I don’t want that dialogue to end when they’ve made their purchase.

How do you see yourself improving on your current practices – what’s in the future for your company?

Titania Inglis: The biggest challenge is always fabric sourcing. I’m constantly on the lookout for beautiful new organic or sustainably produced fabrics; I’ve traveled to London and Tokyo for sourcing, and found amazing materials there. This season I sourced a gorgeous vegetable-tanned leather from France, and I’m dying to make handbags or shoes from it as soon as I find the right collaborator.

Tara St James: I would like to start researching more technical and recycled synthetic textiles. I love using natural fibres such as hand woven cottons, wools and silks, but when I examine the water consumption for some of these fibres, it’s difficult to ignore the reality and is pushing me towards longer lasting, more versatile textiles such as recycled polyester, which can also be printed by companies like AirDye, who I worked with on my Spring 12 collection.

The post Zero Waste Fashion Touts an Overabundance of Style appeared first on EcoSalon.

From a wasteful fashion industry emerges the Zero Waste movement.

It is said that the next great war will not be over oil, but water. So when it takes 1,800 gallons of water to grow enough cotton to produce a single pair of jeans, it is extraordinary that cloth has become a readily disposable commodity of little value. Indicative of this is the fact that on average 15 – 20% of cloth needed to produce a garment is wasted and the useless remnants are destined for the incinerator, landfill or occasionally as mattress filler.

In 2008 China, one of the world’s largest exporters of textiles and clothing produced 31.8 billion meters of fabric in January to July alone. You could reasonably estimate that almost 5 billion meters of that fabric was wasted. This astonishing wastefulness is caused by the entrenched traditions of the fashion industry, which separate the stages of garment design and production into hierarchies where the designers often work isolated from production. It is a system that fails to acknowledge that textiles are a finished product with energy invested into their design and manufacture and which seems primarily interested in the next new thing, forgetting also about what happens to garments at the end of their fashionable lives. So what’s being done about it?

Zero Waste cutting

Over the last couple of years I have had the privilege of working with Parsons Assistant Professor Timo Rissanen to bring together the work of 12 designers from all over the world in a zero waste fashion exhibition called Yield: Making Fashion Without Making Waste. All of these designers engage in some way with what has come to be known as Zero Waste Fashion Design (ZWFD). ZWFD involves designing clothing that in some way eliminates waste from the production or consumption of clothing.

This can be achieved in a number of ways and through various approaches; some designers use the left over fabric pieces to make other garments or products; others eliminate the creation of waste altogether when designing their patterns. Many designers use second hand clothing in order to remove waste from the post consumer end of the fashion consumption cycle, while others use innovative technology to make garments in completely new ways. All are in some way are addressing the huge volumes of textile waste contributed by the fashion and textile industry and consumers every year – a massive 30kg per person per year in UK and U.S.

Piles of second hand clothes for sale

Designing Out the Waste
Anybody who has cut out and sewn up a garment will be aware of the pieces between the pattern that are not incorporated into the finished garment. Many people save such offcuts for future projects, but there will typically be pieces that are either too small or oddly shaped to be of any use. These are routinely discarded, passing through the trash, en route to the landfill. In industry, markers are designed to eliminate as much of this wastage as possible in order to save money. However, the design of the garments is dictated by aesthetics and market alone, inevitably resulting in surplus pieces that cannot be used. The company can either creatively use this left over 15% to make different products, or by designing both the positive and negative spaces of the pattern it is possible to reduce this figure to zero. ZWFD aims to tick all the boxes of aesthetics, fit, market and zero waste.

The kimono as a historic example of Zero Waste cutting

These approaches, while sometimes appearing new, are in fact as old as clothing itself. For hundreds of years, aesthetics, and to a lesser extent functionality, have been the two pillars of fashion design, and when coupled with the slightly more contemporary desire for speed and change, has lead to the proliferation of too much fashion, too many collections, too often. Historically fashion was expensive because cloth was expensive and time consuming to produce. This meant it made sense to be careful about how you used the cloth you had and how you cared for the clothing you owned. Mending was common and using cloth frugally was standard practice – there are examples of “zero waste garments” from almost every continent and culture, and we’ve been practicing it for centuries.

Admittedly designing ZWF isn’t the easiest when first starting out. This type of design is not about numbers, it’s about experimentation, playfulness and taking a risk, all while being mindful of the impact of your actions. It slows the design of fashion down and forces many parts of the fashion chain to think about waste and material use from a design and production perspective. Many of the problems that exist in the fashion industry begin with ideas of separation, both geographical and hierarchical. Whether designer/producer, producer/consumer, consumption and disposal, the greater the distance and separation between the stakeholders in the fashion chain, the greater the likelihood of discordance and a lack of appreciation of what is really going on.

Holly McQuillan’s own Zero Waste Designs

Designing ZWF needs to be done with either a close relationship between designer and pattern cutter, or by a designer who is the pattern cutter, any other arrangement will be an exercise in futility. The change enables a close relationship between market, aesthetic and fabric yield to flourish, and from this, beautiful things are possible.

A designer attempting a zero waste garment design cannot simply ask, “have I used ALL of that piece of cloth?”

Doing only this would potentially result in garments that no one would want to purchase. So with ZWFD and indeed all sustainable design, aesthetics cannot be at the expense of the environment, just as the environment cannot be at the expense of aesthetics. There must exist a harmony between both.

Writer Holly McQuillan, is the Yield exhibit’s curator, and is also a designer and lecturer in the fashion design program at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts in Wellington, New Zealand.

Top image: McQuillan’s Yield Exhibit in Chicago

The post Zero Waste Fashion and the Next Great War appeared first on EcoSalon.

EcoSalon’s top 20 favorite sustainable fashion sites from around the globe.

They help us find out about new designers, industry news, trends, learn what sustainable fashion means, and discover all the swanky events we can attend on a global level – these are our eco fashion writers and designers, our go-to girls reporting all the news fit to print, from the exciting and beautiful to the all-too-often tragic and wasteful designer landscape. These are the pioneers of a new type of fashion that explores, connects and draws us in to what the industry could be if we simply supported it more.

We’d like to throw our own hat into this ring, as well- but then, you’re already here reading us, aren’t you?

Past Fashion Future

Past Fashion Future founder Emma Grady says: “I founded Past Fashion Future one year ago as a platform to explore my personal style aesthetic and to show the beauty of timeless and classic fashion and style. I love hearing people’s personal style stories, specifically about their sentimental connection to the clothing that they wear.”

We love the site layout, sharp, stylish images and especially, Something Old, Something New, a series that reveals how modern day style mavens wear heirlooms, vintage, and ethical fashion.

Vogue’s Green Style blog

Come on, It’s Vogue, it’s Livia Firth, it’s eco fashion and it’s high style – do we need to say any more about it?

Ecco eco

BurdaStyle

BurdaStyle, is an online social community that uses the web to bring the craft of sewing to a new generation of designers, hobbyists, DIYers and anyone looking to sew. What could be more sustainable than making clothes yourself? Sewers flock here to mingle, share and support over projects, patterns and full galleries of completed designs.

Join their community to keep current with what other budding (and seasoned) designers are doing. We most certainly do.

Six Magazine

SIX says it was founded with one aim, “to celebrate the designers, individuals, independent brands and companies who are creating a more ethical and sustainable future for the fashion industry.”
We love how the site incorporates beauty products as well as high fashion and packages it so beautifully we want to read every article.
We also love that SIX represents the sixth sense we all have when it comes to style and value.

Clever.

4 Equal Sides

Tara St James, founder of Study NY and 4 Equal Sides believes that “open source material plays a strong role in the development of the sustainable design community,” making her the rare designer that has vision enough to see how the sustainable designer’s new model needs to play out. Under her guidance, Study’s interns have developed, produced and continue to sell their own sustainable mini collections. St James is very open about her production and design process and documents her own story as a designer in a visually as well as editorially personal way that makes you come back for more.

Fashion Me Green

FashionMeGreen is a sustainable fashion awareness project and style site. Founder Greta Eagan says it’s “Conscious coolhunting from around the globe,” and we are in total agreement.

All the curated product pulls, designer features, amazing photo editorials and fashion trend pieces give us extreme hope for the future of ethical fashion that it can in fact be stylish enough to become mainstream without anyone even noticing.

Closette

Yuka Yoneda, founder of Closette and Ecouterre’s Senior Editor calls herself a shopaholic.

“Well, I was a shopaholic. I was always a jeans and sweatshirt kinda girl, but when I graduated from college and got a job in the city, I went a leeeetle crazy with the shopping – okay, a lot crazy. Then I learned about where the clothes I was buying came from and how they were affecting and hurting other people, particularly women and children, around the globe. The idea that these crimes against women, pollution and chemicals going into our water and bodies, and just shear waste were all happening because I wanted a new top or jeans really made me feel ashamed. I knew I had to make a difference in my own life, so I started thrift shopping, supporting sustainable designers and making my own clothes and I feel wonderful knowing that the garments I wear don’t contribute to anyone else being hurt (except maybe for the people who have to look at my crazy outfits).”

Check out Closette for some fun DIY ideas, shop vintage and secondhand clothing or try winning one of her fun giveaways.

Goodlifer

Founded by Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Johanna Björk, Goodlifer is all about style and the good life. “With your help, we’re writing a guidebook for a new generation of Goodlifers. We want you to share in and help craft a positive, enthusiastic vision of a future that is both sustainable and achievable. Through first-hand, personal journalism and thoughtful exploration and discussion we’re here to consider daily choices, reconsider assumptions, pose questions, uncover opportunities, make you think and collaborate with us on what it means to be a Goodlifer.”

Sign us on Johanna.

We’ve been following Timo Rissanen since we came across him in this New York Times article and were more than elated to finally meet him recently at the Yield exhibit in Brooklyn. Timo says on his site: “I’m investigating fashion creation without fabric waste creation through design practice.”

We are fascinated by his finds.

EFW

EcoFashionWorld says they aim to inspire with new ideas, ideals and information. “Our goal is to keep you green, gorgeous and growing with a comprehensive guide to finding sustainable designer brands and online eco fashion stores.” For those new to the game and fumbling over the words like Peace Silk or tencel, check out their glossary for the latest terminology definitions.

Ethical Fashion Forum

The Ethical Fashion Forum is a non-profit organization, that makes life just a little more easy “for fashion professionals to integrate sustainability at the heart of what they do.”
Membership to the EFF delivers support for sustainable fashion businesses through three programs with each program including several essential tools which members can take advantage of to succeed in ethical fashion business.

Members can also stay current with events, sourcing and EFF socials.

Ecouterre

The fashion daughter of Inhabitat, Ecouterre is a heavily photo-curated website devoted to the future of sustainable fashion design. “We’re dedicated to showcasing and supporting designers who not only contemplate cut, form, and drape, but also a garment’s social and environmental impact, from the cultivation of its fibers to its use and disposal. Our ethos: To follow the evolution of the apparel industry toward a more environmentally sound future, as well as facilitate a conversation about why sustainable fashion matters.”

Treehugger

What came first, eco blogging or Treehugger? I think many of us were reading Treehugger when eco fashion was just beginning to evolve past the point of crunchy. Still on track to provide us with timely fashion news, we’ve bookmarked the site and will continue to go back.

Eco Chick

Eco-Chick editor Starre Vartan, consultant and author of The Eco-Chick’s Guide to Life, says the main intention of her site is to “inspire readers toward a healthier, more sustainable life (which we think means a happier life too). That includes slowing down, unplugging, getting out, going in, making mistakes and moving on, being choosy, doing research, and growing every day. Rest and relaxation are real and important, and so is time with friends and family. We love local food, farmer’s markets, independent designers, handmade everything, and connecting with where our stuff comes from and who makes it. We especially love inspiring women who keep us on our toes and asking questions.”

Her site covers all aspects of the fashion industry and Starre is a known girl about town on the streets of New York City when it comes to getting the scoop on eco-fashion. If you’re where she is, you’re in the right place.

Magnifeco

Magnifeco is an eco-fashion blog currently based in Tokyo by founder Kate Black and features fair-trade, sustainable, organic, recycled, vintage and vegan brands in a place where ethics meet aesthetics. From earth friendly fabrics, to sustainable manufacturing processes and fairtrade practices, the site features conscious designers and products for the conscious consumer.

Market Publique

Market Publique is an eclectic marketplace dedicated to vintage fashion “committed to bringing the community together so we can all have a place to buy, sell and discuss vintage in a positive and focused environment.”
The Brooklyn based company started when the founders realized there was a lack of options for quality vintage sellers online.

We are obsessed with how great the styling is and are always inspired to grab a piece to add to our own wardrobes or to simply wear clothes differently after we leave the site.

Holly McQuillan

Holy McQuillan, Yield Curator, designer and lecturer in the fashion design program at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts in Wellington, New Zealand says since completing her Masters of Design, which explored the presentation of cultural memory through garment design, her work has focused on exploring the possibilities that arise when garment design is restrained by one goal – zero-waste.

Peruse her site or get in touch with her with some of your own zero waste design questions. She will get you rethinking fashion for sure.

Organic Girly

Organic Girly founder Jennifer Barckley is not only one of the nicest people we’ve ever met, she’s also a fantastic resource. Utilize her “Ask me anything,” button and she will get back to you quickly. Check her site for periodic updates on vegan and sustainable fashion forays that sometimes even lead her to chicken sitting.

Social Alterations

Mary Hanlon’s Social Alterations was “developed with fashion and textile design educators in mind, it also acts to create a platform for design educators to benchmark themselves against other educators not only within their own field, but across various design disciplines. In order to create real lasting change, designers of all disciplines must work together to foster transformation.”

A wonderful venue for timely fashion news regarding everything from Fast Fashion to CSR.

Image: Shandi-lee

The post From Eco to Vintage to DIY, 20 Fashion Sites We Can’t Live Without appeared first on EcoSalon.

Yield’s “Making Fashion Without Waste” exhibit, a closer look at an art and a movement.

In the midst of Fashion Week here in New York, it might seem contradictory to go to a show on producing less waste when all around, fashion is flying. In eco-fashion, however, it’s always good to keep things in balance and to have a reality-grounded perspective about the fashion industry. However beautiful, however sustainable, designers have got to keep themselves in check when it comes to the waste they produce with every collection.

Some designers are better at this than others.

The Textile Arts Center launched Yield: Making Fashion Without Waste, on Friday night at their Brooklyn location, featuring zero waste designers Holly McQuillan, Caroline Priebe, Timo Rissanen, Julian Roberts, Tara St. James, David Telfer, Yeohlee Teng, Jennifer Whitty, Natalie Chanin, Carla Fernandez, Sam Formo, and Julia Lumsden.

Holly McQuillan, Yield Curator, designer and lecturer in the fashion design program at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts in Wellington, New Zealand was available to answer some questions pre-show about the exhibit and just how zero waste can be that when by the simple act of design and creation, there is excess.

Here’s what she had to say.

Yield curator and designer, Holly McQuillan

Would you consider zero waste design an art?
No, it’s a technique. Painting is a technique and can be an art form or a way to decorate your home. It depends on what you do with it, like any technique, its up to the practitioner. So some zero waste design could be considered art, but much of it is commercial design.

Julian Roberts and Holy McQuillan

Why don’t more designers use it if it helps maximize fabric use and create less waste?
Primarily for 2 reasons.
A: When you first start it is difficult to do well. Like any new skill that requires a bit of effort, zero waste can begin badly, many students try it once, it doesn’t meet their expectations and they assume its not possible. The reality is that it’s a technique, like standard pattern cutting and draping on a dress form and sewing, learning it takes time.

B: Because of this, the assumption is that you have no control over the aesthetic – something all designers want. The more you practice zero waste fashion the more you can shape the outcomes. Many good designers have spent 3-4 years being taught the skills of traditional fashion design (sketching, design development, drape, pattern cutting, construction) and then go into industry and continue to have at least some of these skills developed. This enables designers/pattern cutters to have control over the outcomes; a layman has a great deal more difficulty resolving a garment design because they don’t have the skill base.

Julian Roberts

Designers want to be able to immediately be as good at zero waste design as they already are at the traditional models, but of course most won’t be as they haven’t had years of learning in education or industry. So they assume the outcomes they initially see from their attempts are all they will be able to achieve. They also assume that the outcomes they see out there by existing zero waste designers are all that can be achieved, but every designer approaches it differently and therefore has different outcomes.

Recently I’ve been in conversation with one of the worlds best known producers of clothing about implementing a zero waste fashion collection to their ranges. If these guys can do it, anyone can.

Timo Rissanen

Can you talk about “cultural memory” inherent in our clothing and how that ties into zero waste?
I stumbled into zero waste while completing my Masters of Design at Massey University in 2004/2005. My masters (called First Son) wasn’t on zero waste fashion at all – it was exploring the role clothing can play in communicating cultural and collective memory. How clothing can tell a story and the appropriateness of garments as a medium for that. I was interested in the flexibility inherent in cloth, the intimacy of wearing clothing next to the skin, its ability to tell people about who or what you are, the multi-layered, adaptable possibilities of cloth and garments, and importantly the way garments, more than most other personal items, seem to be able to ‘hold’ the memory of the person who wore them.

Sam Formo

All of this combined into a collection of five garments that told a story collected from a group of people about a person important in my life – my father. He was an ordinary husband, father, farmer and friend who grew up in post WWII New Zealand and died in 1993 after a battle with cancer. I was using his life and the memories people had of him as representative of (masculine) culture in post war New Zealand and testing how clothing could be used to transcend time, to communicate narratives and loss to contemporary New Zealanders.

To achieve this I used a process of cutting 2D cloth (landscape) without cutting any part off, and transforming the cloth into five different garment designs that told a different story about my father and the time he lived in. The garments are not fixed, they can be ‘unmade’ and ‘made’ again and again using the relatively complex fastenings, folds and twists, so to be able to make them the way I intended them you need to know the story behind them. However, someone else could make a completely different garment with a different interpretation of a similar ‘story.’’ The garments were zero waste because nothing in memory or time is cut off and removed, nothing is ‘wasted,’ it all comes together to make us who we are, what our cultures are, both good and bad, whether we like it or not.

I didn’t know what zero waste fashion was, my manifestation of what we now call Zero Waste Fashion came about from my research into memory and a chance encounter with a pattern for a Kimono (which are usually zero waste). There were no sustainable goals in my master project, just a respect for craft, time, landscape and a desire to communicate an idea.

Yeohlee Teng

Do all the designers featured design with zero waste in mind all the time or was this just a challenge for some for Yield?
Not all the designers are always zero waste designers. All but Julian Roberts had garments that were zero waste in some way, which is why they were selected back in early 2010. Julian Roberts uses a technique he invented called Subtraction Cutting which lends itself well to zero waste fashion, and has been inspirational to Timo and myself in the work we do. So we challenged Julian to attempt a zero waste piece for this exhibition, it is not quite zero waste, but a vast improvement on his usual yield.

David Telfer explores a range of innovative approaches, one of which is zero waste design. Yeohlee Teng and Zandra Rhodes do not always design with zero waste in mind, but are always extremely mindful of how they use cloth. The garments in YIELD are demonstrations of what is possible. Today we could add many more examples, as more and more designers attempt this process, but that’s a whole other project.

Carla Fernandez

How does a fashion designer one day decide to call what they are creating “zero waste” when by the very act of designing they are creating waste?

I’m not even sure where the term came from! It should probably be called Zero Waste Garment Design or Zero Waste Pattern Design. We intentionally didn’t call our exhibition Zero Waste Fashion because not all the designers are zero waste fashion designers, so instead it’s YIELD: Making Fashion Without Making Waste. So when we make the garments in the show we don’t make any (or much) waste. It’s the easiest way to explain what the premise for the show is, and for what we do in general, so it seems to stick.

Principals of waste management ask that you first don’t produce any waste, then you reduce waste, then you reuse it and then you recycle it. So this process targets the first step in waste management, we don’t produce waste in production. Now a company/designer/consumer can choose to follow through with other equally important steps to reduce their environmental impact, or not. Obviously I’d prefer they used organic, recycled or otherwise sustainable fabrics. That they designed timeless garments that encouraged their consumers to buy less and local, That they transported their locally made garments in biodegradable packaging using transportation methods with minimized impacts on the environment.

Natalie Chanin

I’d like it if they encouraged their consumers to wash less, in cold water, and to not use the dryer. I would encourage designers and consumers to support mending services and local craft. And, when the garment can no longer be mended, for it to be reused in another capacity until its eventual disposal – ideally being recycled or composted. Zero Waste Fashion is one step in a possible series of steps. Zero waste fashion can also be about using the scraps for other purposes – such as what Natalie Chanin does, or designers could use textiles that can be recycled into new fabrics. Sustainable designers need to deal somehow with the resources they waste in the production of their garments. There are so many opportunities for designers, consumers and retailers to make a difference, zero waste fashion is one such opportunity.

Tara St James

There a number of important repercussions from designing in this way also:

Designing a zero waste garment is slower: It would be extremely difficult have a lead-time (from design to delivery) of 14 days (such as Zara has) for all but the most simple zero waste fashion design. While the waste reduction from this process would benefit from the vast scale of fast fashion – the more zero waste garments you make the greater the reduction of waste – the negative impacts of fast fashions speed of change would cancel this out. It’s quite the conundrum and something I struggle with a lot. I guess it depends if you believe its possible for designers to stop people from consuming/disposing of clothing the way they currently do.

It requires all members of a design team to consider every decision they make. The production of clothing has long separated out the roles of design and production. To successfully achieve a zero waste garment either the line needs to be developed by a person with strength in pattern cutting, 3D design and construction, or the team needs to work as one in a truly collaborative way. The pattern for a zero waste garment is the 3D design, the pattern and the marker all in one – the design is not a sketch.

You can’t copy an existing design easily: following fads can be difficult. The value in a zero waste design is its originality, its craft and its embedded energy. Garments designed through a zero waste design process will have moments that are unexpected, they wont look exactly like everything else you see in stores because it is difficult to draw a design or to look at an existing garment and say “I want to design something like that.”

The post EcoSalon at NYFW: Yield’s Zero Waste Exhibit appeared first on EcoSalon.