In the last of this 4 part series, undercover industry writer, Louise Lagosi address the history of fashion marketing, the strategies used to build the perfect consumer while covering up poor quality, and how those tactics have effected us as a society. We also look at how the fashion industry and marketing is changing with the times to keep up with an evolving society of people.

If you read the first three parts of this series, you might be in the mood to avoid the media, shut off your TV, stop shopping, and just give up on fashion. But, other than offering you peace of mind, what would that accomplish? As easy as it is to point fingers, the leaders of the fashion industry are not the only ones responsible for the state of fashion. Society as a whole bought what was being sold without stopping as individuals to question the motives behind the advertisement or wondering if our “consumer” habits were good for us, our neighbors, or the planet.

Unless you want to go back to wearing burlap bags, and go Medieval, we all need something to adorn our bodies. And let’s face it, beautiful clothes, beautiful anything for that matter, really does make life more joyful. That said, nothing can be beautiful if it has a dirty, rotten underbelly it’s hiding. So let’s just get to the core of this thing.

Taking Responsibility

Now that the phrase “Think Globally, Act Locally” has been imprinted on our brains, we all know that shopping with small mom and pops stores, as well as supporting local designers and supply chains is the best thing we can do for our immediate environment, but how can we be effective on a global level? Have you read any articles, or signed any petitions requesting that corporations clean up their acts? Written to your government representative asking for higher international labor standards lately? Not sure who your representatives are? Well, it’s pretty easy to find out. In this age of information sharing with a little due diligence and research it’s becoming increasingly easier to figure out who’s doing business right, and who’s doing business wrong. And it’s even easier to find a petition or even to start a petition asking companies and the government to do business responsibly.

It has become more and more common to share our opinions and knowledge of this kind freely among our friends and associates, on Facebook, Twitter, and various social media sources. As a favor for your sharing the information, they in turn go on and share it with their friends and pretty soon the news has gone viral. Some of your conversations on Facebook might look something like this:

“There’s a joke going around China today that you can tell what colors are going to be in fashion next season by looking at the rivers.“

“I think I’ll opt for a nice neutral, beige from now on, thanks.”

 “Time to Stop the Fashion Pirates again. Forever 21 has gotten caught stealing yet another design from independent designers.”

“I stopped shopping at Forever 21 after my last purchase from there smelled like magic markers and fell apart in the first wash. But I do buy clothes from the local designers in my own town.“

 “Why does Disney still carry polyester jammies for kids coated in fire-retardants? Didn’t they get the memo that it’s been repeatedly proven that both the synthetic fibers in clothing and formaldehyde based fire-retardants are carcinogenic, cancer causing, hormone disrupting, and/or can cause damage to our nervous systems?!

“I wouldn’t know, I avoid both synthetics and Disney like the plague.“

 “Did you hear that Victoria’s Secret were caught slashing and throwing away garments that were returned because donating them to charity was too much of a hassle to organize?”

“I wouldn’t wear Victoria Secret, even if it were free. Let’s just say that I don’t know a single 16 year old whose boobs naturally sit directly under her chin, so why, at any age, should mine?”

Whether or not these conversations in social media and on the street actually sway the decisions of those in power to create a change in the industry, for us to be aware enough about these issues that we feel a little whistle blowing is in order can make us better, more informed, people.

Word gets around fast in this Internet Age and in no time at all, Walmart has a publicity crisis for abusing their laborers, and the Gap is making public apologies for promoting red,white, & blue flag waving products that are made in China. H&M and Nike claim they too are doing their parts, all while receiving raised eyebrows from the sustainable community, for making lofty corporate responsibility initiatives mandated for 2020 that promise unprecedented standards with little or no suggestions on how they might go about doing so. Perhaps H&M & Nike could borrow from their multibillion dollar marketing budgets to fund reaching their 2020 goals.

Are initiatives enough? Hardly, but when you’re a company that’s big enough to consume one third of the planets organic cotton supply, even a small initiative, like H&M’s organic cotton initiative can keep large amounts of fertilizer and herbicide from going into our water, provided it’s an honest effort. “Good” is questionable when you take into account that their organic cotton is not all that organic after all.

Recent New York City H&M window

With their greenwashing marketing efforts these companies still do not get the green light for sustainable shopping. In the same way we shop for food, if we can’t find clear and certifiable labeling on the product, many of us are not buying it. Some consumers are even going so far as avoiding stores with bad track records altogether, regardless of their “eco” initiatives.

In 2009, The Hartman Group’s report, titled Sustainablity: the Rise in Consumer Responsibility stated that 88% of consumers engage in what they consider to be sustainable behavior. Are people hearing concerns about water contamination or global warming and choosing to cut back where they can to help? Are fast fashion fans growing annoyed that their clothes fall apart after a couple washes when the hand-me-downs from their mother’s wardrobe seem to last forever? Have people suddenly realized that they have enough stuff in their closets that they could probably go for years without shopping and still maintain appearances?

Author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth Cline, describes the pivotal moment in her consumer mindset, “When I piled up all of my clothes in the middle of my bedroom, I was astonished that there wasn’t much variety within the mound of poorly made clothing. It was mostly all one color, and I had bought more or less the same few items over and over again. I wasn’t using most of it, and most of it was cheep crap that I didn’t even like very much. Overall, I was unsatisfied with what was in there.”

She explains the transformation that occurred in that moment of realization, “It made me more mindful. I shop my own closet now. I have stopped buying repeat garments. I don’t crave having a million tops. That doesn’t really interest me anymore. I want one or two good garments for each category to make complete outfits within my wardrobe. I want to save my money to buy really nice items to fill in the holes.”

Signs of Change in Mainstream Fashion Media

CFDA Leader, Diane Von Furstenburg, and American Vogue Editor-in-Chief, Anna Wintour, recently released that they support encouraging a cleaner Fashion Industry through an initiative presented by the NRDC called Clean By Design. We’re still waiting to see how they do clean up, but they have taken the first step, which is openly acknowledging the elephant in the room. This is nothing short of a miracle.

Fashion Labels Evolving With the Times

Eileen Fisher

This privately owned company has always taken a holistic approach to designing clothing. The brand carefully chooses fibers for their sustainable, community based, growing methods, natural content, longevity, and feel. They work with collectives and factories around the world that pay fair-trade wages. They design clothes that are timeless and that do not relate to any trends, allowing the clothes to survive as long as their high quality materials do. And through their recent initiatives like Ampersand, they have been educating their customers on why choosing their products supports a sustainable environment here on earth for everyone involved.

Patagonia 

Patagonia also keeps their marketing to a minimum, but when they do promote something, the message is unusual for a clothing company. They promote clean water initiatives, such as Our Common Waters, in their recent Common Threads Initiative, they tell people to stop buying more than they need. They also provide transparency in their supply chain like in The Footprint Chronicles, with this interactive map on their site showing exactly where their factories are located with stats, reports, and a brief on Patagonia’s history with each one. This brand ultimately puts their dollars in recycled materials innovations, such as polar fleece made of recycled bottles, and maintaining factory standards, so they can provide more responsible products to their customers.

Timberland

Timberland is a brand that is committed to the outdoors. Which is why they have made  developed TIMBERLAND RESPONSIBILITY, their plan for significantly reducing their companies emissions through the research, evaluation, and investment in company structures that will allow them to run cleaner and produce products that have a smaller impact on the earth. The company reports are transparent and available to the public on their home site, grading their efforts and describing all the methods used to achieve their challenging goals to reduce their company wide climate impact.

Levi’s 

Levi’s has been doing business with the goal of striving towards sustainability and excellence for over 100 years now. They give cash credits to customers who return their old Levi’s in for their denim recycling programs and they have been working on increasingly finding ways to reducing their water use in their denim production processes. Are they singing about their exceptional practices in their ad campaigns to help better educate their customers? Let’s just say this is one of the places where they still have room to improve.

Pendleton

This nearly 150 year old American company produces much of it’s premium products, from fibers grown, spun, dyed, and woven in America. They keep marketing to a minimum and keep their funding aimed at doing business responsibly and offering the best quality products possible to the customers they serve. Their product’s are so beautifully made, by  that they end up heirlooms in most of the fortunate homes that they grace.

Change is indeed happening all around, but most of all it starts with each one of us. We have to make up our own minds. What type of consumers are we?

Image: oxfam, Fashionista, Last Night’s Garbage,Amy DuFault

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SeriesInundated with marketing messages, Americans adjust their spending belt.

In part 1 and 2 of this series, we looked at the tricks of the trade and the psychology behind the advertising end of marketing. In this article we look at what sales and marketing tactics are covering up: The quality corner-cutting that’s happening as we’re simultaneously being driven into a consuming frenzy.

I love a bargain. This weekend I thought I officially became the queen of treasure hunting when I found a mint condition Christian Dior cashmere coat at the thrift store. When I checked out the label, I found a tiny label stating “Made in America.” Made in America? Christian Dior’s couturier is based in Paris, this little detail gave me reason to pause, and question the authenticity of my find. It could not be coming from the actual Dior couture house with that country of origin label. The question begged to be asked: who designed this coat?

On another day, I headed straight for the sales rack at J Crew, finding three t-shirts for just over the price of one. And on another occasion, when I was strapped for cash and running short of underwear, I’ll admit that I made myself go to T.J. Maxx in search of some fresh pairs among the $6.99 Calvin Klein styles mixed in with the no-name brands for $2.99. I’m totally guilty of buying some of both. But at the moment of that purchase, I was just thankful to find underwear that fit the budget and even some that seemed to save me a few pennies.

Unfortunately, all of the underwear bought that day fell apart faster than any underwear I’ve ever owned. The shoddy underthings went straight into a bag for Goodwill and I had to head to the store once again not long after my purchase. Let’s just say, I had gotten exactly what I paid for.

The Fine Print That Bargain Hunters Miss

There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you find an unbelievable bargain in fashion. Unfortunately, 99% of the time the “unbelievable bargain” is just that. Discounted sales and fashion “bargains” are actually marketing tactics that encourage us to buy more stuff, much of which we don’t necessarily need. The sales tactic: overvalue the nicely displayed full price products in the front of the store so that customers get excited about the discounted stuff on the overcrowded, back sales racks. This encourages us to visit the store more often to look for sales to avoid missing the deal. However, usually when you buy items on sale, you’re in fact paying the price closer to the items actual make-value (just above how much it cost to make it).

Recent reports show that this tactic is now beginning to backfire on the the retailers, especially those who would like to maintain their product quality and regain profit growth to pre-recession profits. Even JC Penny, who in past years held as many as 590 annual promotional, sales and coupon events, has decided it’s time to change their sales tactic.

Not All Designer Labels Are Created Equal

Sales racks aside, what about finding “designer labels for less” in department stores and at discount retailers like T.J. Maxx? What of my “made in America” Christian Dior coat which originally would have been sold in an American department store like Nordstrom’s rather than at the House of Dior? We all equate designer labels with higher quality and value, but in the world of fashion not all designer labels are created equal.

Many successful designer brands have multiple tiers of product qualities that their brands sell to reach a broader market: high end lines for the investment shopper, middle market lines for the value shopper, and low end licensee lines for the bargain shopper. Quality is more closely monitored at the top of the market where the customer is paying a premium and recognizes and expects high quality goods. Quality slides through the middle market where the customer wants better design but is not as aware of the difference in the quality of the make, and the only thing that remains “designer” in the cheaply made bargain basement find is the designer-logo-label stitched in the back.

Vogue, January 1949. Which would you be more likely to purchase: An lower quality no-name umbrella for $15 or a Dior jacquard logo umbrella for $25? The two are probably made at the same place.

That low end product is more or less designed by the factory that works with a brand’s licensing partners. Their only objective is to make easy to produce, lower cost garments for high volume mass production. The designer brands who are named in the labels of these items, in turn, get a nice cut of the sales profit for allowing the use of their logo and brand name. The use of their logo or label in turn push the sales into a frenzy that might not have been possible on an equivalent average or sub-par product.

The Path That Leads To a Global Market Profit Is Licensing

So, how does a Dior Coat come to be made in the USA? It all comes down to licensing agreements (that work kind of like fast food franchises) and the label in my coat tells the tale of how this works.
Back in 1947, Christian Dior and his business partner, Jaques Rouet, were some of the first in the fashion business to pioneer license agreements with international factory partner companies. Before then, being a clothing designer/producer meant you either owned a local factory or a couture house and basically did all of the design and production – albeit tightly monitored – under one roof.

For Dior, who owned his own couture house, fashion was his legacy and he intended to see that legacy, as well as his fortunes, grow. By 1947, he had already set up licensing agreements with production partners to manage lines of furs, socks, perfume, ties and clothes in regional production areas around the globe, thus being able to extend his brand and multiply his sales by selling product in local markets all over the globe near his license producers’ locations. Most likely, Dior would have sent a sketch and a swatch of fabric for the factory to follow and the factory would fill in all the blanks of the details on how to make it.

With a status label like Dior, his licensee partners could sell much more product than they might otherwise, because the couture house’s name was well known among the fashionable society and was considered highly desirable. Meanwhile, Dior could turn his focus toward marketing and advertising his house as a high-end, luxury market brand. This new business model allowed him to continue presenting his exuberantly priced couture collections without the pressure of needing to make a profit on haute couture because the licensed products that he barely touched were making enormous profits behind the scenes.

By August 31, 1964, The New York Times reported on a trend which had designers putting their labels into items that they didn’t actually design. What Dior’s business savvy had started almost two decades earlier had evolved and turned into a full scale, industry-wide, fashion free for all. It started with designers lending out a few sketches to a manufacturer with their branded label attached as a stamp of approval, they then collected their fee and let the manufacturers take over from there. But as the New York Times reported, designers had their names on products they didn’t even recognize, let alone would ever admit to designing. One appalled Parisian designer even bemoaned that he had found his name on cotton gloves that were on sale in New York, cotton gloves apparently being something he would never have made.

Some designer brands were more careful than others to avoid the “white glove” scenario by adjusting their licensing contracts so that all products had to be be approved by someone in their company before they headed to the stores. But overall, the fashion industry fully embraced this new business strategy that left the product details up to the factory and licensing partner and let the designer brand reap the profits without having to do all the work. Many successful brands operate through license agreements today.

Couture house, Pierre Cardin, took it particularly far. With over 900 license agreements, Cardin had manufacturers producing everything from paper clips to automobile interiors with his logo stamped on them. His brand eventually flooded the market, so much so, that it lost its appeal to the “designer” customer and was downgraded to Sears status, where it is still sold today. Clearly Cardin didn’t mind. By that point he had become so wealthy building his brand through advertisements and selling his name, that he had no problem leaving the labors, and the quality control of couture behind him.

The fashion industry had finally figured out how to transform from providing a service – making clothes for people to wear – into a highly profitable business. Brands were able to achieve this by focusing on marketing the concept of their brand as a high end status symbol while selling stuff en masse to the middle and low markets through their license agents. The job of the designer now became to present lifestyle products and advertisement imagery through marketing to keep customers believing that even their lower priced lines were worth the higher price tag attached to the brand name.

What we’re left with after all of this are stores like Macy’s who sell “designer” labeled clothes that the designers barely touched, Calvin Klein underwear that has very little to do with Calvin, and stores like T.J. Maxx, Loehmann’s, and Marshall’s full of “designer brands for less” claiming that they’re selling the “real thing” and leftovers from the high end market. Far from the truth, the leftovers were all made specifically for those low end retailers and can be sold for up to twice as much.

Secret License Agents

So who are these secret agents producing the license product for Calvin Klein, Anna Sui, DKNY, Betsy Johnson, Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren and friends? The same guys who are in charge of designing and producing all the no-designer-name stuff it sits next to at the stores where you find designer goods for less. Basically you’re just as well buying no-name underwear for $2.99 as paying double the price to have Calvin Klein’s logo. Some stores, like T.J. Maxx, even have a licensee design office of their own, designing products in the name of their licensee partners, like Calvin Klein, and for their own no-name label brands at the same time so they can handle the details on some of the products in their stores themselves.

An industry friend of mine (who will remain nameless) works in quality control at one of the licensing partners that produce goods for J.C.Penny, Sears, Burlington Coat Factory, Loehmann’s, and T.J.Maxx. She used to manage quality control for brands at factories all over the world. But her new job posed a much more troubling issue than workers not knowing how to hand stitch buttons properly.

“This is the easiest job I’ve ever had. Quality control? What quality control? We get one sample to fit, make color, print, fabric and trim comments on and to approve. Then it goes straight into production. We produce the goods so fast that by the time they hand me a sample to check and approve the quality, the item is already on the factory floor being cut and sewn for the bulk order. My comments can’t even be put into effect,” she says.

“I remember being called into my boss’ office once when there was ‘a problem.’ A jacket had come in with the lining literally shredding on the hanger. This was nothing new. But the real problem was that the item was going to a retailer that required testing (some of the bigger retailers, like JC Penny require every item to have a sample sent in for quality control testing) and this would never pass.”

Was the company going to take a hit and have to absorb the cost of the bum goods? I asked. “Nope. Do you know what they decided to do?” she asked me. “They had me take the sample to a tailor to have the bad lining taken out and replaced with a nicer quality lining. Then they sent that one sample in for testing. Of course it passed, but they just shipped the rest of the product as is, shredded lining and all. I’ve never worked with such unethical people in my 30 years of working in fashion.”

I asked another friend of mine who has worked as a freelance designer in and out of one licensee company that had license agreements with Kenneth Cole and Calvin Klein, as well as producing several no-name lines that would sell at the same retailers that their licensee product would.

“We had to produce designs so fast, we didn’t have time to think about the finishings. Just fabric, sketch, maybe a button. Send it to the factory and leave the details to them to figure out,” she told me. “It was so easy, but the quality was terrible.”

But don’t they get customer complaints about the quality? I asked.

“Why would the stores ever complain? We’re giving them product that’s dirt cheap!” Apparently the customers who frequent these stores just take it for granted that their clothing is disposable. One or two wears out of them is all that is expected. This is also a part of the marketing strategy. It’s rare for anyone to make returns on product at the low end of the market, because it’s just not worth it. None of the product has any value to begin with.

According to Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: the Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, “In 1930, the average American woman owned an average of nine outfits. Today, we each buy more than 60 pieces of new clothing on average per year.” But according to economists, the average American household only spends 3.1% of their income on clothing, which is approximately 22% less than what Americans spent on clothing in the 1970s – this makes sense with 3 for 1 specials and bargain blowouts but when considering how logical it is for the planet, we might want to dive a little deeper.

Editor’s note: Industry insider Louise Lagosi is not the author’s real name and is used to protect her anonymity.

Image: Diego 3336, The Consumerist, Ell Brown

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SeriesInundated with marketing messages, Americans are tricked into believing products equal happiness.

Editor’s Note: This four-part series from a leading industry insider is authored under the pseudonym “Louise Lagosi” for the individual’s protection. The series addresses our engagement with consumer culture and how marketing and advertising can manipulate us – and society as a whole.

Studies On The Development Of Consumerism

“All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality.” -Alfred L. Kroeber, The Superorganic

If you took a time machine back to 200 years ago, you would see families living modest lives: busy working at home tending their vegetable patches or livestock, cooking and eating family dinners, making their own soaps, sewing and mending their own clothes, using what they had down to the last scrap, and buying as few products as they possibly could to maintain the comforts of their lives on their modest incomes.

Fast forward to today, where most American households buy everything they own from a store and consume far more than they actually need; nowadays, community refers to our Facebook friends, we home-make almost nothing for own consumption, we have no idea where our food or other products come from and we dispose of barely used products regularly, in order to replace them with something new for the sake of newness. We’ve become a consumer society which currently consumes approximately 1 1/2 times the amount of resources that the planet can produce annually.

What’s driving our culture toward consuming is a recipe based on keeping up with the Joneses, a rise in societal shopaholism and our basic survival skills at work within society. It’s also safe to say that in the name of industrial prosperity, the economies of Western civilization have pushed us to this point.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that in the eyes of capitalism, we’ve become trapped. Industry marketers and advertising experts have been able to turn our own survival skills against us in the name of turning a profit.

Consumer Grooming
Ever catch your mind wandering while looking at a fashion magazine or a sexy billboard, thinking, “I wish I could have that…” These thoughts may not in fact be yours, rather a direct product of the marketing industry’s labors to grab your attention. Consumer grooming is the method of applying psychologically embedded imagery, strategically placed where they will be seen by the masses, to influence the purchasing choices of the global population. Our human desires to be loved, respected and admired are played upon through airbrushed images modeling sex, status, wealth, and beauty aspirations. This is not a new thing, it’s been in the works since before the Victorian Period.

A portrait of the Astor family stiffly posing, shows the idyllic life of the extremely rich during the Industrial Revolution. While age perhaps has made this image more elegant to our modern eyes, this would be the Victorian equivalent to today’s Kardashian family Christmas card.

Madeline Levine, modern day psychologist and author of The Price of Privilege, describes in her book the negative effects affluence has on children growing up in wealthy families due to dramatic changes in American culture as “a shift away from values of community, spirituality, and integrity, and toward competition, materialism and disconnection.”

The Psychological Underpinnings Of Advertisements

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate“. -Victor Lebrow, Economist, 1955

Consumerism has long had intentional underpinnings. In the 1890s, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen gave sweeping attacks on production for profit, propelling the rise in conspicuous consumerism in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. He noted a spreading consumer trend that appeared during the Industrial Revolution with the emergence of nouveau riche moguls who were displaying their wealth and social standing prominently through conspicuous consumption of material goods, ultimately evoking envy among their neighbors.

Apparently their neighbors were taking the bait, right along with the growing middle class. Back in 1899, Veblen, scathingly noted a general trend in society that people were willing to give up their quality of living, their health/family/spiritual life balance, in order to appear wealthy through their dress.

For all his studies and reports, whom did his theories aid the most? It was the industrial businessmen who had much to gain from reading his findings even if he carped at the wealth throughout his work. Many of the conclusions he came to showed that given the opportunity, society could easily be encouraged to consume aggressively through different forms of peer pressure. His theories outlined how wasteful habits of over-consumption was spreading, giving industries, like the fashion and beauty product industries, the key to pushing huge amounts of unnecessary products to unconscious consumers.

By the 1920s, economists such as Paul Nystrom theorized that lifestyle changes brought on by the industrial age were inducing a “philosophy of futility” in the masses, which would only increase fashionable consumption. By the 1930s, advertising executives in a budding industry realized that they could capitalize on the social phenomenon of consumerism by encouraging consumers to compete with their neighbors for social status. In 1932, Earnest Elmo Calkins, a leading ad executive noted to colleagues that “consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use.”

Study after study has been written about our social tendency to conform to a collective wasteful behavior. While these studies do not seem to be reaching most of the population to educate, economists and businessmen have been eager to read them, continually thrilled to learn more about the harnessing potential behind the phenomenon of consumerism.

The Arsenal Of Advertisement Aimed At Consumers

The advertising, media, and marketing industries work to create and place ads in front of the people who are most likely to imitate and be influenced by it. Namely this would be people interested in anything related to societal activities: those who follow culture through magazines, TV, movies, or by surfing the net, live in an urban environment, or who at very least, listen to the radio.

In order to do accomplish their goal, the ad industry has come up with continually innovative methods that encourage the social drive to “keep up with the Joneses.” Celebrities since time immemorial have been brought in, images of excessive materialism carefully placed for target audiences to see and in turn, a consumer response to go shopping. This method of advertising has been highly effective at driving sales and has become one of the most effective forms of marketing excessively used today.

Vintage Elizabeth Taylor selling hair cream with a brand slogan attached, appealed to women that wanted to have hair like the  iconic Taylor. They didn’t mention that the cream is made with toxic chemicals or that you might need a team of hair stylists along with the cream to achieve her coif.

And Michael Jordan probably sold more shoes for Nike than anyone in history, while making millions doing it. Like Louis Vuitton’s Tribute Patchwork Bag, Nike turned Jordan’s namesake shoes into a “limited edition” to drive consumers into fearing that they might not get a pair. This effectively allowed the company to raise the prices of the products incredibly to meet their high demand, adding consumer status and “value” to the shoes. Quite often the Air Jordan shoes would be back-ordered for months or until the next edition was released.

The fashion media even invented their own celebrities. In the 1980s and 90s supermodels were born when the industries realized that they could draw attention to images featuring favorite “iconic” models, unusual in their looks, who had loads of attitude and glamour. Glamazons like Cindy Crawford, Naomi Cambell, Claudia Schiffer, and Linda Evangelista became household names and were easy to recognize in fashion spreads.

Women fell in love with the images of their beautiful “lifestyles” portrayed in fashion magazines and they achieved celebrity status for their pretty faces and extraordinary physiques. Women poured over their favorite fashion magazines: playing name that model, studying their make-up, hair and styling in an effort to emulate their style, beauty, and allure. Completely distracted by the pretty faces adorned with cosmetics and designer products, the under laying message that was embedded in the images easily sunk in. Of course, one would have to buy the products these beauties were modeling in order to emulate them.

Reality TV shows, featuring made-up, pseudo-celebs, have been devised specifically for product placement.

Superficiality, rage, greed, jealousy, envy, and competitiveness are now gratuitously displayed, on shows such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians, America’s Top Model, and Jersey Girls. All three shows invite viewers to embrace petty drama into their own lives and suggest that celebrity status might follow, even for people who completely lack talent.

The underlying message in all this media-based imagery is, “If you buy our products, you too will be beautiful and admired,” but the obvious question begging to be asked should be, “What are we hiding?”

Image: Tinou bao

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Editor’s Note: This four-part series from a leading industry insider is authored under the pseudonym “Louise Lagosi” for the individual’s protection. The series addresses our engagement with consumer culture and how marketing and advertising can manipulate us – and society as a whole.

Whether or not you are aware of it, this image of celebrity Jennifer Aniston is embedded with psychological material. Her honey-blond hair and softly-lit, Photoshopped face is childlike and dewy. Her intense attention to the money in her hand while clutching her designer bag loaded with more cash oozes power, sex, wealth, and control. The photograph even uses markers to pinpoint these little features while at the same time promoting the items you might want to buy if you wish to look like this. Celebrity, eternal youth, power, wealth, sex: That’s what this carefully articulated image has to offer up for sale.

But at face value, what is it really giving you?

Now, look at these photographs. What do you see? Realize that any previously presented Anistonian aspirations are absolute nonsense. She’s an attractive woman to be sure, but she’s only human. Even Jennifer Aniston doesn’t live the life that Jennifer Aniston leads in the above glossy magazine image.

Presenting Jennifer looking average or even shabby is playing up the competitive side of our human natures, getting us to compare ourselves to her, picking her apart, and at the same time picking ourselves apart through the comparison. We’re being primed to react defensively to the first image: Go shopping. But, at the end of the day, what does Jennifer Aniston have to do with our personal lives, and why do we find ourselves looking at her and other celebrity personalities with the obsession that we do?

Stuck In An Advertising Ambush

Are we truly tired of the messages that ads and the media are sending us? If you’re falling out of love with your relationship to fashion and shopping in general, join the club. It’s still a small one, but it is rapidly growing as our living spaces and surroundings are cluttered with stuff while our credit cards are maxed out. We need very little and yet we seem to want so much. And everywhere we look we see both evasive and aggressive marketing campaigns which bombard us with advertisements on a daily basis, suggesting that we need to buy more to gain beauty, glamor and fabulosity. In fact, if fashion were a drug, it would be almost impossible to kick the habit; there are pushers on every corner.

President of the Marketing Firm Yankelovich, Jay Walker-Smith, stated in a CBS news article, “It’s a non-stop blitz of advertising messages. Everywhere we turn we’re saturated with advertising messages trying to get our attention. It seems like the goal of most marketers and advertisers nowadays is to cover every blank space with some kind of brand logo or a promotion or an advertisement.”

Research from the late 1950s to the 1970s has shown that the average person 40 to 50 years ago was exposed to somewhere between 78-500 ads a day. Walker Smith points out that today we’re exposed to as many as 5,000.

NYC The Blog reports on the first NYC subway train completely wrapped in advertising

The tipping point is coming. Do-not-call. Adblock. “We have to screen it out because we simply can’t absorb that much information. We can’t process that much data,” Walker-Smith notes, “and no surprise, consumers are reacting negatively to the kind of marketing blitz; the kind of super saturation of advertising that they’re exposed to on a daily basis.”

There’s even an advertising company, cleverly called Wizmark, that’s putting advertisements in urinals. “You can’t look left. You can’t look right. You have to look at the ad and listen to it,” Richard Deutch, CEO of Wizmark brags with tongue firmly set in cheek.

Buying Into Luxury Brand Ads

Over the last 20 years, the fashion industry has employed numerous marketing tactics to drive consumers into a shopping frenzy, making industry giants enormously rich. Investing in “brand strengthening,” companies cultivate consumer loyalty which equates to high numbers in sales, quite often, from returning customers who have bought into the message that the brand’s advertisements are selling.

Take, for example, one of the most competitive luxury brands in the world: Louis Vuitton. In 2010, Louis Vuitton spent some $14 million on advertising during the first quarter. Their ad campaign appeared all over the pages of luxury lifestyle magazines, news publications, and across the internet where affluent shoppers would see them while shopping. Surprisingly, it was not enough to stimulate their consumer demand because in 2011, during the same quarter, they increased their budget to $22 million ( a 57% budget increase). The steep increase in ad spend could hardly be considered a coincidence.

The above ads were just about everywhere you looked in New York City during the spring of 2011. Louis Vuitton employed a small army of campaign advertisements to seduce luxury consumers back after the Great Recession.

In 2010, Consumer Reports revealed a noticeable trend that consumers were changing their habits: Shopping less, saving more, and choosing products that they equate with craftsmanship, practicality, and social values (think TOMS shoes) rather than luxury status “bling”. Bling is out. The reports also revealed that this new trend was not likely to go away anytime soon; it wasn’t merely a reaction to economic pressure, this new consumer was an entirely different beast living by a new set of rules. All of those advertisements were the velvet-gloved iron fist of Louis Vuitton attempting to coax the mass of luxury and aspirational consumers back into their former position of brand submission.

If you took eight LV samples and stuck them in a trash compactor, out would pop this expensive little piece of “limited edition” baggage called the LV Tribute Patchwork Bag. This particular bag might have cost approximately $3000 to make, but was sold exclusively to only 20 customers (worldwide) for $42,000 a pop in select stores.

What’s $36 million in advertising? Chump change to a company like Louis Vuitton that wants to ensure a dominant market position doesn’t erode. (In 2011, LVMH, the company that owns LV, boasted in their company quarterly report net profits of over $2 billion in fashion and leather goods sales alone.)

If you’re selling logo-covered, luxury-status, vinyl-canvas handbags with the words “Louis Vuitton” stamped on them, you can charge consumers a premium. The price tag we see can be anywhere between 250-1400% of the expense of making even a very well-made bag. The more expensive price tags (in the $1000+ range) subsidize the basic vinyl tote bags Louis Vuitton offers in the hundreds, allowing the company to lure the aspirational middle class with “affordable” luxury.

To the luxury fashion consumer, the primary value is not in the the design, the materials, or even the quality of labor that goes into the bag – it’s in the social status that the advertisements and exclusive products offer to customers. And over the past 20 years, while there have been many consumers that have bought right into the dream, there are those conscious customers who have simply walked away. After all, who really needs another logo-plastered tote when there are already so many of them out there?

The post Fashion Marketing 101: The Pushers appeared first on EcoSalon.

2011 was a landmark year for eco fashion: EcoSalon had it covered.

From more mainstream designers exploring sustainability and declining fast fashion sales to record numbers of museum goers enjoying a non-consumer fashion experience, 2011 was a game changer in the way we consume and think about fashion. Recognition for the need to slow down the fashion juggernaut created by fast fashion, compelled new approaches to how we can become more connected to fashion as a way of improving our lives and the global environmental crisis. Our top 10 fashion stories encapsulate the year that proved, once and for all, that eco fashion is not simply a trend.

We got acquainted with bamboo’s true environmental impact. 

1. For years the eco movement centered around finding more alternative materials to cotton, the production of which accounts for 2.6% of annual global water usage. Grown without chemicals and as one of the fastest growing plants on earth, bamboo, in particular, initially seemed like the go-to eco fabric. “Bamboo seemed like a miracle fiber – and in a sense, it is. It’s turning it into fabric that’s the more complicated issue,” Kelly Drennan wrote in her article Bamboo, We Hardly Knew Ye, getting to the bottom of an issue that’s responsible for the majority of greenwashing accusations leveled at the industry.

A condom hat may be great for clicks, but it’s bad for eco fashion progress.

2. A further image problem faced was the reliance on gimmicky “trash to treasure” designs and stories that trap eco fashion in its worst stereotype and ultimately, shortchange the production of clothing we do want to wear. Abigail Doan’s call to action “to move beyond the glorification of trashion and recycled art projects,” in Why Anna Wintour Won’t Green Vogue reminds us of the  need “to address long term solutions for waste reduction and sustainable economic development.”

Vilte’s February 2011 collaboration with designer Josephus Thimester for his AW2011 collection, illustrated the exquisite potential of recycled materials.

3. While the trashion has to go, recycled and found materials can be beautiful. In her eye-opening round up of designers using recycled materials to create unimaginably gorgeous clothing in The Wilder Side of Fashion Fashioning Self and Environment Abigail Doan shows us what is possible when we start looking at what we already have.

Luxury Shift: Recycled products that rival those from the best fashion houses in the world.

4. By the time summer was in full swing, reports of numerous eco initiatives and green clothing launches showed that eco fashion is an idea that luxury designers finally caught on to. In Hooked on Recycling we reported the “buzz is that fashion retailers are turning to reusable materials and some innovative techniques to get mainstream fashion consumers hooked on recycled fashion.” Our fashion forecast for next year: expect to read more stories about high end fashion houses recognizing the benefits of going green in 2012.

Shopping Made in the U.S.A. isn’t really so patriotic…or is it?

5. While luxury will always have an audience, the continuing concerns for the economy and high unemployment put the Buy Local/Made Here movement front and center. In her two part series, Made In The U.S.A. Isn’t Cause For Patriotism (Or Is It?) and What Goes On Behind The Business Of American Fashion industry insider, Louise Lagosi, dares to ask, “Aren’t there still values and standards that we as Americans believe are worth saving? If you can’t find what you want with a ‘Made in the USA’ label in it, is it wrong to buy it if it is made elsewhere?”

Feral Childe and EcoSalon partner to create a limited edition t-shirt designed to make you feel rebellious for fashion.

6. The increasing awareness of what has been lost in our appetite for fast fashion made by mass corporations turned to growing support for the “little guys” who fight valiantly against having their designs copied. In Amy DuFault’s passionate championing of an indie designer’s cause in Fashion Giant Forever 21 Steals Sustainable Label Feral Childe’s Design, EcoSalon drew readers into the discussion for greater protection of intellectual property rights in fashion.

Undercover writer Louise Lagosi helps us track our cast-off clothing.

7. Unlike traditional fashion which concerns itself chiefly with buying new clothes, eco fashion devotees consider fashion holistically. With roughly 75% of our discarded clothes ending up in the trash and in landfills, we lifted the lid on what happens when we throw away our clothes in EcoSalon Investigates: What Happens to our Castoff Clothing?

It became clear to cultural programming committees across the country that we want to see more fashion.

8. One of the most thrilling developments of 2011 was our culture’s deepening ability to enjoy fashion beyond the act of consumerism. EcoSalon covered the growing popularity of fashion exhibits in 4 New Fashion Exhibits Translate High Style For The Masses. Our coverage of the Alexander McQueen exhibit at New York’s MET included Abigail Doan’s thoughtful take on Why We Need More Savage Beauty in Life And Fashion which examined “those fashion conventions that genuinely stifle our creativity and ideas about self in relation to the environment.”

EcoSalon’s look at the art of  slow fashion launched a knitwear line, became required reading in some knitting groups, and even got a few off their meds.

9. Valuing the lost art and craft of fashion and its many psychological benefits was examined in a special 3 part series by Amy DuFault in her fascinating journey to inner peace when, Using Your Hands to Soothe The Brain.

What if all fashion runways were mossy paths through redwood groves?

10.  As the year draws to a close it’s time to think about the next steps towards a greener 2012. Alongside Amy DuFault‘s The Post-Recession Fashion Industry Series, which provides an excellent starting point, was EcoSalon’s report on a remarkable runway show in Flowering Of Fashion’s Consciousness. Reminding us that all the inspiration we need to make better fashion choices in 2012 is right outside our doors.

The post Looking Back, Looking Forward: EcoSalon’s Top 10 Fashion Stories of 2011 appeared first on EcoSalon.

Our insider spills fashion industry secrets in Part 2 of a special series on American fashion manufacturing.

A Tommy Hilfiger advertisement proclaims, “Fresh American Style… discover style that truly fits the way you live.” The irony behind this statement is laughable. Here’s an “All American Brand” hardly designed by Americans, made far from American shores, that isn’t even primarily owned by Americans. Does American Eagle produce anything in America? Heck no. Think Abercrombie & Fitch is authentic? Forget it. Tommy Hilfiger sold his company to the Dutch and has been sitting pretty on his yacht ever since.

But the advertisement isn’t the only thing about that brand that is misleading. In 2000, Tommy Hilfiger, whose brand signified the great America dream, was caught manufacturing clothes in sweatshop conditions in the United States territory of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands. As a U.S. Commonwealth, clothes made there could be labeled “Made in the USA,” but federal labor laws including the minimum wage did not apply. Perhaps Tommy Hilfiger didn’t know what his production partners in Saipan were up to, but you better believe they pulled their production out of there as soon as the news hit the stands. Shortly after the story broke, the garment factories in Saipan were officially closed.

Are the companies entirely to blame? The pressure to keep profits high and the cost on the sales rack low is an issue driven by both investments of blind shareholders and consumers who want a good deal for name brand clothing. Where the product is actually produced is rarely even discussed with the shareholders, who tend to be more concerned about the return on their investment. For the consumers it’s clearly labeled, by law, in every garment we own: Made in Indonisa, Made in Guatemala, Made in Taiwan. The possibility that the companies that we are investing in could be harming others or destroying our economy doesn’t register for most.

For one company, this was not the case. It was the shareholders of Hugo Boss who helped keep their American factory in Cleveland, Ohio from closing. Hugo Boss has been producing its suits there for the past 23 years, in a garment factory that has been operating continuously since 1932. Recently, however, even this bright example has been tarnished. Last year, the company moved to shut down the factory. The Hugo Boss Corporation blamed consumer and shareholder demands for the decision to close. The company had issued notices to the workers that stated:

“Looking at the company’s goals, which were driven by our customer preferences and our shareholder responsibilities, it is our conclusion and decision that it is time to close the Cleveland plant…”

Image via blog.cleveland.com

The workers despaired, but turned to their union to rally against the threat of losing their jobs. It wasn’t until the union realized that a group of shareholders which had invested $150 million into the fund that owned Hugo Boss was an organization called the Ohio Public Retirement System (OPRS). When they were notified by the Union, they threatened to pull their funds out. Not surprisingly, Hugo Boss changed its tune and in the end the company agreed to keep the factory open – provided the workers take a pay cut from $13 per hour to $10 per hour. (Had these been workers in China working for one of the factories that Walmart sources with, no negotiations would be possible, and they might be paid as little as $.44 an hour, and $.65 hour for overtime hours, if they get paid at all.)

While the Hugo Boss shareholders’ interest appears to have been largely coincidental in favoring the plight of the factory and its workers, there still are some American companies so committed to keeping American manufacturers in business that they are willing to pay the extra cost of doing business here.

Images via Feral Childe Spring/Summer 11

Feral Childe is one such business. Says Alice Wu, one half of the design duo that makes up Feral Childe, “We definitely pay a higher price for Made in the USA. Saving in shipping does not compensate. We know there are manufacturers overseas that can do it at a fraction of the price, but it’s a conscious decision we make: paying fair wages, working with people we know, and doing it locally whenever possible. We’ve built a manufacturing community.”

Wu and her business partner, Moriah Carlson, are well aware of the global options, but choose to keep the operation in America regardless.

“It seems crazy not to look in your own backyard first to do business if you can. We have all the resources available to us right here – why would we do business in China when we can do it here with people we know?” she says. “Every step of the way there are people making the clothing – people we know, people we care about. You could say that everything we do is not only ‘Made in New York,’ but also ‘Made with Love.’ Everything is connected to our whole community of people and hopefully others will become aware of that.”

While she and Carlson have decided to do business in an unorthodox manner compared to the New York fashion industry, she does say that they run into problems from time to time with their homegrown model.

“We build our working relationships with manufacturers and the people we work with count on us to continue working with them to stay in business. They count on us to grow our business and therefore give them larger orders with each season,” Wu says. “They believe in us and that’s why the ones who are willing to work with small companies do it. We are all in it together, but we’re left in the lurch when mills and factories disappear overnight.”

This is something she and her partner have experienced on several occasions.

“One of the mills we’ve worked with for four years now recently went under (it was in Montreal), and a Texas mill that we were just getting to know folded before we had a chance to even work with them,” says Wu. “Our New Jersey-based textile printer closed up shop this past October after three seasons of working with them, just as things were starting to go smoothly and we had to scramble for a new printer and learn a new way of doing things.”

These issues arise as a direct result of many American fashion businesses deciding to move production overseas. If a mill or factory loses too many orders to manufacturers overseas, they can’t keep afloat, leaving no choice but to close shop. This in turn creates problems of scale for true American brands like Feral Childe. If they want to help keep their mills, factories, and themselves in business, they have to walk a fine line between large and small orders.

“The stakes grow higher as we grow which makes it difficult to finance and find consistent resources. Many fabric mills and textile printers don’t want to partner with the little guys, like us,” says Wu. “They want you to order minimums of at least a thousand yards at a time. We have great sewing contractors, but sometimes they get overwhelmed if we have more orders than usual. Manufacturing in the USA isn’t hard if you are just starting out or if you are a huge company, but it is difficult if you are in-between and growing.”

Image via MadeinMidtown.com

When asked what she thinks would improve the situation, she emphasizes consumer awareness and local pride.

“I’d put fashion manufacturing on the map. I think that the garment centers in different cities need a visual representation. They should be put on some kind of map so people know these are major manufactures within their cities,” she says. “New York, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago – all the major cities in the States have manufacturing facilities and the locals as well as the tourists should know about them, and understand the economic and social value of that. So instead of looking at old factory buildings and thinking ‘industrial wasteland’ or ‘real estate land grab,’ they should think of the rich history of a once-thriving industry. And they should be conscious of the industry which is still thriving”

Wu takes a moment to reflect. “I just wish people had a greater appreciation for where their clothes come from. People now are so removed from it. I’ve met people who are surprised when I tell them we make everything in the USA. They say ‘Where?'”

Fortunately, Made in Midtown has already started a map of this sort, with interactive images of buildings in the garment district to show what is manufactured in the Garment District buildings.

Editor’s note: Louise Lagosi is not the author’s real name. Catch up on Part 1 in this series here.

The post Made in the U.S.A., Part 2: What Goes on Behind the Business of American Fashion appeared first on EcoSalon.

Shopping ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ isn’t really so patriotic…or is it?

When you look at clothing labels while out shopping, you likely see more Made in Sri Lanka, Made in India, Made in China, and Made in Guatemala than Made in the U.S.A. labels. It seems just about every country in the world produces clothing except America. How can this be? Americans like to buy clothing more than any other nation in the world, so wouldn’t it be suiting that we like to make it, as well?

Unfortunately, American factories have been closing down at a steady rate, with 90% of our garment factories’ production being outsourced since 1955. Skilled and unskilled labor jobs are disappearing at startling rates. And since the 2008 market crash, American fashion companies have been downsizing the staff even in their corporate offices.

“If we’re going to be competitive with the global market, we need to focus on innovation and coming up with new ways of developing and producing product while maintaining and passing down the traditional skills of sewing within this country,” says Erica Wolf, of Save the Garment Center.

While most American fashion companies still hold their design and operations offices here, much of our customer dollars go to the countries that make the clothes; paying their taxes, developing their nations, building their economies. We expect our politicians to solve America’s rising deficit, meanwhile when we go out shopping, we spend our money supporting just about every country but our own. There seems to be a disconnect here. Aren’t there still values and standards that we as Americans believe are worth saving? If you can’t find what you want with a “Made in the USA” label in it, is it wrong to buy it if it is made elsewhere?

There are those who would forgo such non-American purchases; they tend to be the patriotic individuals who post American pride all over everything they own. They proudly sport American-manufactured clothes and equate shopping with the survival and promotion of their values; keeping jobs in America, putting food on the table for their families, looking out for their neighbors, pride, and better-quality clothing.

For over a century, progressive Americans have worked to protect U.S. workers’ rights. Our nation set up some of the first and most effective labor unions, some of the strictest labor rights protection laws and environmental protection standards enacted in the world. These standards have improved over time, and help to prevent more tragedies from happening like the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. Americans fought for their rights, the government responded with appropriate laws, and all the while we never would have suspected our continual raising of the bar would over time lower the amount of jobs available to American workers.

Today, we have some of the most stringent factory standards on the planet. While the job of sewing operator is still no walk in the park, at least American technicians don’t have to work long hours without breaks or overtime pay. Modern day U.S. workers now at the end of the day get to go home to see their families, something that is unfathomable to the workers in the labor camps of China.

David Riley of americansworking.com has a theory that large companies have figured out how to operate business as usual regardless of the U.S. protection laws we enact: If they can’t do it here, they will do it somewhere else.

“We have outsourced all of our pollution and human suffering. America has made so many laws protecting the environment, the people, and our company trademarks here, that we can’t do business competitively in our own market. We are making American workers and our factories compete with those in countries who have none of the laws or standards that we must uphold,” says Riley. “We would never allow a factory in China to operate here. But we allow them to sell in our market, so in a sense we are allowing them to operate here anyway. We would never be able to compete.”

But amidst our fiercely competitive and, at times, cannibalistic business culture, our values continue to play a powerful role in the world of good. In 2006, American businesses and individuals were reported to have given more than 4.5 times what all of Europe, Australia, and Japan combined in private donations to charities and philanthropic causes that gave aid to developing nations. Granted, our donations are tax-deductible, but if we can afford to help others, why can’t we spring to support our own – at least with our shopping habits?

The majority of American fashion businesses default to China for production, claiming the cost of labor here is generally much more expensive than what American consumers are willing to pay for.

But according to Erica Wolf, of Save the Garment Center, this is not entirely true.

“With prices shifting, and China becoming more expensive it would benefit a big retailer to have their production department, at the very least, examine the prices at domestic factories. On certain garments the pricing is now comparable if not less domestically. And of course this additional business to local factories would help support American jobs,” she says.

Instead, businesses have learned to take advantage of the world market by outsourcing production to countries with cheap, exploitable labor to cut costs while keeping the prices of their goods low. The truth of the matter is that if a brand can’t dictate to us what we want through advertising, then they are forced to listen to what the consumers demand, and if we look for, request, and buy clothes that are Made in America, more companies will make clothes here.

However, for the average American consumer, fashion is frivolous, and has little to do with values or morals. It is less about the quality or where it is made and much more about the brand name on the label.

Riley says, “So much money goes into and comes from the marketing of high fashion brands; the image of high fashion is where they invest. The money spent there has to come out of something else, and I think that something is the cost of labor and product quality. They’re replacing the dollars for production and spending it on branding and marketing instead.”

With most American consumers so heavily influenced by the intoxicating spell of fashion advertising, most of our consumer drive comes from what we see in the media, rather than from the desire to choose items that represent our traditions or values.

Of course, there is one little company that challenged the standard formula and decided to go completely against the grain. In its 22 years of business, American Apparel has been surprisingly successful at building an American-produced fashion business using a vertical integration model that allows them to do nearly everything from design, to advertising, to production all, more or less, under one roof. Here is a brand that has taken great strides to give “American made” a new image.

If you can get past their ads, the company is all-American; proudly promoting their sweatshop-free, Union Made, U.S.A. produced, vertically integrated business, their charitable donations to natural disaster victims, and their political support of civil rights.

American Apparel isn’t the only contender willing to take on the global market while maintaining American production. There seems to be a new revival on the “Made in the U.S.A.”  fashion front. As Wolf notes, “There are designers doing production in the United States. For example, Nanette Lepore does 80% of her production in America.”

And quite recently, the American menswear company Brooks Brothers has made great efforts to bring it back home, complete with a luxe denim collaboration with American classic, Levi Strauss, and a heavily publicized marketing campaign to help equate “Made in America” with the luxury and quality that their brand stands for.

The Olsen Twins’ incredibly successful line, The Row, is yet another high fashion line that is primarily produced in the country. These brands have the marketing muscle and savvy and the will to bring the fashion-minded consumers once again back to getting behind American-made clothes, providing high end fashion that Americans can be proud of.

Image: Chevroletpedia, nycgo.com, America in the World, China Digital Times, Chicagomag.com, fashiongearlive.com

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Recycled saree fabrics bring new meaning to a well-heeled existence.

Following on the heels of Louise Lagosi’s in-depth investigation into the destiny of cast-off clothing, it seems fitting that a query into summer sandals of the endlessly chic variety would be essential fashion beach reading.

I never know how to identify the perfectly stylish sandal that will last beyond one season. Given the wear and tear that I put my trusty shoes through, a durable heel with some amazing flirty detailing seems like the impossible find. Enter Mohop Shoes and their new ready-to-wear Saree Collection. Crafted out of recycled saree fabrics from a bold non-profit enterprise in India as well as sustainably farmed Pará rubber tree wood, these interchangeable lace-ups are all about empowerment for the user and everyone along the way.

Designer Annie Mohaupt takes on sustainable fashion in fearless style

Sandals are an age-old fashion staple, and now that the gladiator sandal is old news, it’s time slip on some heels that really take you places, both on foot and in mission. Annie Mohaupt of Mohop Shoes has considered every last detail when it comes to her goal of creating the most eco-friendly shoe available. This architect turned shoe designer has had her toes in the soil from the very beginning, as her upbringing on a small sheep farm one hundred miles west of Chicago primed her for life as a some one attuned to the resourceful use of materials as well as the life cycle of her designs.

Mohop Shoe’s high wedge sandals with recycled saree fabric

When I asked Annie what makes her shoes such knockouts, besides their chic design appeal and the cool versatility of the interchangeable saree ties that easily lace up through elastic loops, she had this to say about each of Mohop’s Saree Collection components:

Recycled Saree Textiles

“The Saree Collection is pretty exciting due to our new collaboration with Jhoole, a non-profit social enterprise in India. Each saree sandal tie is made from re-used sarees, which are brought to life again as colorful, scarf-like ties for our sandals. Indian women receive fair-trade wages for this textile production work, enabling them to support their families and educate their children. Mohop also donates 100 percent of the price for the saree ties towards the construction, maintenance, and training required at the computer lab for girls and women at Jhoole’s new facility in Maheshwar, India.”

Pará Rubber Tree Wood

“Our sandals are composed of wood from Pará rubber trees. Our trees spend the years prior to their pre-footwear life cleaning the atmosphere of CO2. Pará trees are grown on plantations in tropical regions. The trees are tapped just like maple trees for their latex, which is used for rubber production. After twenty-five years or so, the trees can no longer produce latex, so the wood is reused for a secondary purpose: shoes.

Pará rubber tree plantations are an income-generating crop for families in tropical regions, discouraging locals from clear-cutting forestland for livestock or other less-sustainable crops. Rubber wood plantations mimic indigenous tropical forests and provide a natural habitat for plants and animals, some of which are severely threatened or endangered.

The rubber wood undergoes very minimal processing to be carved into footwear, and all scraps and even sawdust is re-used. Our shoe wood is colored with water-based dyes and will eventually decompose naturally (after its life as well-loved shoes). Additionally, most of our other footwear materials and packaging contains recycled content.”  –  Annie Mohaupt

The complex and textured story behind sustainable design is an increasingly important part of the environmentally friendly and conscious fashion equation. In order to reach beyond a checklist of materials and mission guidelines, it seems essential that designers also engage their followers in the process of what it takes to get dressed or accessorized.

Mohop Shoes takes this one step further by making sustainable fashion interactive and even playful in an effort to bring us back to the source of what “well heeled” really means. A display of true wealth comes from both stylish decision-making and ethical fashion awareness. It’s all tied up, no matter how you choose to look at it.

Images: courtesy of Mohop; designer portrait via Archinect

The post Recycled Saree Sandals by Mohop Shoes appeared first on EcoSalon.

Undercover writer Louise Lagosi helps us track our cast-off clothing.

Ever wonder what happens to your clothes when you just have to let them go? Maybe you were kind enough to spare them from ending up in a landfill by donating them to a thrift store for a tax credit; maybe you were even clever enough to “new-life” them into cut offs, a mini-skirt or something else relatively simple to make.

There are many ways to keep our clothes from contributing to landfills and pollution, and according to Dr. Jana Hawley, whose focus is on finding solutions to textile waste in fashion, “Our clothing is 100% recyclable.” So why then, according to SMART, a textile recycling organization that partners with Goodwill and The Salvation Army, do roughly 75% of our discarded clothes get put in the trash and end up in landfills?

Clothing has an enormous, toxic, environmental footprint, one that gets bigger when it is unnecessarily wasted and not given the opportunity to live up to its fullest capacity through multiple lives, multiple owners or textile recycling.

While we may never consider our clothes after we’ve discarded them, our cast-offs go on exciting adventures around the globe. Thrift stores are simply the first of many depositing and sorting grounds. Which part of the world they land in really depends on what shape and quality they are in when they leave your hands.

When your clothes arrive at the thrift store they get sorted, and provided they’re not terribly damaged, they are put on the racks. The premium grade used clothing has several possible fates in the drop-off store, one of which is purchase for resale at international vintage shops.

Vintage store owners around the world have been mining American thrift stores for cheap vintage, only to resell our cast offs back to us at premium vintage prices. Americans in particular get rid of some of the nicest digs in the world. In Paris you’d never find designer vintage on sale anywhere outside a pricey vintage shop. But here in the States, mint condition, vintage Gucci dresses on Salvation Army racks sell for $19.99. It’s no wonder that the world comes here for it’s vintage. At $5-$10 a pair, beat up old Levi’s might collect over $500 by a vintage dealer in Japan. And the hat your grandmother painstakingly hand knit you could easily end up in a Swedish or Dutch vintage boutique.

“We get all of our vintage from the States. The store owners take a 4-6 week long summer vacation in the U.S. visiting the same favorite routes to thrift stores year after year. Within a few weeks, they’ve more or less made the annual store inventory,” says an employee from Zipper, a vintage shop in Amsterdam.

Of course, all of this can be found on thrift store floor racks, where meticulous and discerning shoppers have the opportunity to snatch up the premium second hand at thrift store prices before they reach the vintage dealers provided they are willing to dig through racks. Sometimes, this pursuit can seem more like archaeology than shopping, sifting through cross sections of society’s discarded duds to find the rare diamonds in the rough.

A slightly rarer fate for some of our clothes are landing in the hands of crafters and upcycling designers, like JoAnnBerman, DominikaNaziebly, and LuFlux, all of whom choose to pull resources from thrift stores and used markets, upcycling finds into new one-off designs. These designers choose to make couture out of our rags.

Lu Flux

Lauren Lawson, Goodwill’s Media Relations Manager, says an item has about a month’s time to prove its worth on the floor before it is removed and redistributed to lower income sales channels; first at the Goodwill’s most affordable stores, where they provide clothing sold by the pound in American low income communities. If still not sold there, the clothing will get passed onto Goodwill’s partners over at SMART, who help divert two billion pounds of clothes from landfills annually through worldwide distribution and textile recycling. In the SMART sorting facilities, the clothes  are sorted into many different categories: tropicals, cold weather, denim, cotton, mixed rags, A grade and B grade.

While a sliver of thrift store leftovers get cut into rags and sold to mechanics, window washers and the likes, the bulk of all of our discarded clothes get shipped to third world countries for resale. These clothes are sorted, bundled and sold by bale or by the shipping container by companies like TransatlanticMixrags, who export American used clothes in an effort to reduce post consumer landfill mass, to provide affordable clothing to the poor in developing countries’ markets, and all the while making a pretty penny selling our trash.

The international customers take a gamble on what they are getting however. Unable to see the product until their package has landed and is paid for, they must accept whatever they get. The product is then distributed in street markets across the countrysides of impoverished nations and will be consumed and absorbed by people looking for any clothing they can afford.

Which would explain this how this t-shirt landed on this Sierra Leonean.

This can cause quite the controversy. Some believe that exporting westerner’s discarded clothes to poorer developing nations is the same as exporting our consumer culture. The point has been wrestled with over and over by human rights activists and fair-trade advocates alike; hand made, traditional indigenous dress is being replaced by cheap western rags as capitalism spreads across the globe like a rash.

Whether or not we should be passing off our waste products to third world nations is debatable. The devil’s advocates of Capitalism will argue that the poor people in third world nations cannot afford new clothing and want cheap clothing available to them.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and for some in countries like Mexico, Jakarta, Brazil, and Bangladesh, landfills provide a meager income to garbage pickers sifting through trash in search of items that are reusable and recyclable. If old clothes are too ragged to wear, they might make good pillow or mattress stuffing. In countries where resources are scarce, even garbage can be valuable.

Which brings up the second most common use of our discarded clothing: recycled, post-consumer waste products. Forthcoming, green-minded entrepreneurs, like the geniuses behind BondedLogic, a company which makes insulation out of recycled materials sees the issue of post consumer waste as opportunity.

Bonded Logic’s claim to fashion-reuse fame is Ultra Touch denim insulation. Made of 90% domestically sourced post-consumer, recycled content, it is processed and manufactured entirely in the USA, and diverts approximately 300 tons from landfills monthly.

“We’ve been using recycled paper to make a cellulose insulation for over 35 years, and we wanted to make a batting form of insulation out of some post consumer fiber. When we researched the amount of waste available in the garment and textile industries, and especially with the abundance of waste denim available, it just seemed like the perfect solution,” says Sean Desmond, Bonded Logic’s Marketing Manager.  “If you go back even six years ago, a majority of textile waste was being landfilled. We saw this as a viable, abundant, resource and thought, why not use it?”

Insulation is just one of many recycling options for clothing. Textiles can be processed into car flooring and seat filler, roofing materials, punching bag padding for boxing, mattresses, and of course cleaning rags.

Before the 1900’s, most households generally had to make the most of the clothes they wore from scratch, altering and handing down items between family members as they grew out of them. They had to manage every scrap of waste they created to save their resources and energy and to prevent the garbage from piling up around them.

Since the Industrial Revolution took it’s hold on society, we’ve become so free with our fashion consumption habits we scarcely know what to do with all the waste flowing through the doors of our closets. Christina Salvi of GrowNYC, a group that organizes weekly clothing deposit drop-off spots at the New York City green markets was surprised to see how often people would donate from their closets.

“We weren’t expecting to have people returning every week with clothing deposits, but we have regulars who come with something to donate week after week. We also see visitors who will drop off big loads right after the spring cleaning,”says Salvi.

Since the launch of their clothing recycle program in 2007, GrowNYC has collected over 1 million pounds of clothing. With New York City’s annual post-consumer garment waste estimating at around 193,000 tons per year, New Yorkers have their work cut out for them to find alternative ways to divert their “trash.”

One thing is for sure, no clothing should be going into a waste basket.

Images: Brad K., Yikes Machine, Boardroom Eco Apparel, 1900s.org

The post EcoSalon Investigates: What Happens to Our Cast Off Clothing? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Your fashion choices reveal your political views, whether you want them to or not.

There was a time when tags like “Made in the U.S.A.” meant something. During war times, when buying cotton was limited by choice to only the bare necessities (unless you wanted to be considered unpatriotic by your neighbors), we could directly trace how our consumption habits related to our society’s values. Since then, flag waving morals within fashion have more or less disappeared along with the great American garment factories. With the internet, the world is a much smaller place and sadly, our sense of social values and our concern for our neighbors seems to have shrunk, as well.

The “Made in ____” label actually means a lot on the front of world politics. It relates to tariffs and trade agreements, which government worker rights and standards you support, and the bottom line: the price. The reality is that we haven’t been paying the real price of goods for decades. Whether it’s our own government that has been manipulating the price of our products through trade agreements and tariffs, or the Chinese government subsidizing their labor costs to dominate the world’s production market, it’s all coming back to us. We’re starting to pay for it: prices are going up, jobs have been lost, the environment is at risk, and fashion is once again on the center stage of politics simply by what we choose or don’t choose to wear and how we acquire goods.

Flash Sales

As of late, it seems there are very few things besides sales that get consumers excited to buy more clothes in the middle of a recession. For fashion, an economic recession translates to a mad rash of online flash sales.

According to industry reports, in 2010, on average, flash sale sites reported a 300% increase in sales even though the economy had not nearly recovered. The frenzy these exclusive, one day only, sample sales stir up in consumers (who are fearful of missing out on getting the last designer bag at sample prices), runs parallel to the fears the economy stirs up in times when everyone is fearful of losing their job. The general philosophy behind these shopping patterns is to get as much as you can while the getting is good.

While flash sales encourage cut-throat consumer shopping habits, the fashion industry’s ever cheerful motto continues to be “It’s just fashion, no one’s dying over it,” but the truth is that people are dying over it.

Last December, 25 workers were killed and another 100 were injured in a factory fire in Bangladesh, and that is a highly visible case where the workers died directly because of poor safety standards in the factories. Most factory workers end up severely crippled with chronic health disorders related to a life of hard labor working with toxic materials. In China, by law, the media is forbidden to report on human rights issues. However, recently the Chinese government has made great efforts to clean up its act and provide better working conditions in factories for their people. If you consider factory labor camps where workers are required to take two hour naps on cots underneath their machines mid-day so that they can last the whole 18 hour shift to be humane working conditions, you’d be wrong, but you’d also be part of the status quo. This might be the reason for the other hot trend in fashion sales this year: fashion philanthropy.

Fashion Philanthropy

Clearly, people are concerned about the human condition and want to put their dollars toward something meaningful when they buy their clothes. So, for just about every cause, there is a fashion company doing double-duty selling products to raise money and awareness.

Designers, from Vivien Westwood and Stella McCartney, to companies like the Gap in collaboration with Bono’s Red Campaign, have made huge waves in social awareness by fundraising and sales through profit sharing and partnering with philanthropic causes.

In 1983, Katherine Hamnett launched her line of political fashion tees. While Hammett’s flavor of fashion politics is now outdated, her company was one of the first to market giving a percentage of the profits away to charity, and for this reason she’s considered a pioneer. Luckily, savvy social media experts, marketing campaigns, and branding have allowed fashion philanthropists to become subtle yet clearly recognizable in their charitable product placement. Today, the hint of a rubber bracelet hanging just below your shirt cuff is enough to let people know where you stand.

These affordable tokens serve as status symbols among the high ticket donating entrepreneurs and socialites alike.

The Political Implications of Stepping Out

Just stepping out in a cheerful frock from H&M seems to have political implications these days. We used to be able to buy clothes without a care in the world about who made them, what they were made of, and how the world might be affected. Today, what you buy says quite a lot about who you are and what you stand for. Want to really know where a fashionista stands on political and social issues? Just look at her feet. Shoes are one of the most coveted and telling items in a woman’s closet. You can really tell a girl’s views, values, and how far her morals go just by looking at her footwear.

Take, for instance, these shoe made by Osborn, a company that works with a fair-trade organization in Guatemala to employ traditional craftsmen who are paid a fair wage for their work. At just a glance, these shoes belie a wearer who has a creative lifestyle, who generally stays current with what’s happening in the world of art and design, but who has some rebellious, hippie-heritage deep down leading her to choose to support skilled craftsmen and favor ethnic chic patterns in her fashion statements.

Then there’s the vintage shoe. Their owner is practical, well educated, frugal, slightly sentimental, likes fashion but does not follow any known trends, and probably could be pegged as someone who reads a lot of books. Her old school, working-class-Americana political views are reflected in her subtle lifestyle choices which she carefully cultivates at great pains. When asked about politics, she has well-informed opinions that she exercises at every election when she faithfully votes at the polls.

Next, take a Tom’s Shoe. Similar to the Fair-Trade Osborn model, Tom’s is far more successful in sales and recognizable on the street. This is the Prius of shoes, and like the Prius, it gets twice as many miles to the gallon. For every shoe you buy, Tom’s gives a pair of shoes to a barefooted child in a third world country. Anyone found wearing this shoe chose to support Tom’s cause just by buying these slightly homely slippers. The owner of this shoe proudly reads The New Yorker, is educated, social, political, cares about others and also, about what others think. Even if her interest in philanthropy is ever so slightly pretentious, she is making a conscious choice to do good through her fashion choices, and she feels that’s better than most can say.

Next, there’s the Ferragamo shoe. This is a shoe that is hand crafted by highly skilled craftsmen who have refined fit and quality to an art form over the past 100 years. These heritage shoes are built to last. Women who have known the Ferragamo shoe covet them as heirlooms from their mothers and grandmothers. Even to the average eye, these shoes equate class distinction and old money. To a more critical eye the wearer of this shoe has discerning taste in quality, comfort, and luxury, and is educated but conservative in her world views. Politics? She’d rather not say; she generally keeps her opinions on such things to herself.

Several steps down in class, but not in price is the Louboutin shoe. The higher the stiletto, the higher maintenance the girl. Her greatest aspiration in life appears to become a life size Barbie doll in a Barbie McMansion married to Ken. This kid is a Freudian field day if you can crack the lacquer. She likes flashy cars, big cigars and diamond rings. Politics never come into conversation with this one, and she only attends high-brow charity events as arm candy or with her best friend (the other hot girl). Just don’t take her for stupid; she knows exactly what she’s doing, what she wants, and nothing is going to get in her way.

There are millions of other shoes out there, all of which have something different to say about their wearer, but on the political front of fashion these are just some prime examples of what your shoe choices alone might say about you. What does the rest of your wardrobe have to say? What if every new item you bought was seen as a vote for the ethics in which you want the future to follow, if every time you saw a college student ready to go out in a Forever 21 frock you were reminded that she supports work camp labor? And while choosing to wear a skimpier swimsuit at the swim club could cause a scandal in uptight social circles, in the material world, it certainly could help reduce fabric consumption.

Even if we never return to the glory days of WWII rationing, as fashion continues to get dragged through the trenches for wreaking havoc on delicate planetary ecosystems, one can only hope our wardrobe choices become a lot more thoughtful and truthful, to protect them.

Image: blog.compete.com, www.sometimefriend.com, www.gliving.com, www.thriftaholic.blogspot.com

Editor’s note: Louise Lagosi is not the author’s real name. Catch our fashion industry insider’s insights and revelations every Friday at EcoSalon.

The post From Flash Sales to Philanthropy, It’s the Politics of Fashion appeared first on EcoSalon.