One half of the dynamic ethical fashion label, Feral Childe’s Alice Wu, chats with EcoSalon for an inside discussion on their work as made in New York City designers.

Designing all their prints by hand, the bi-coastal team, Moriah Carlson, in Brooklyn, and Alice Wu, in Oakland, are never short of eye-catching designs, easy feminine silhouettes and intelligent ethical values. We sat down with Alice Wu of Feral Childe to talk about their carefully sourced fabrics, ethical production and why having a keen eye for practicality matters for sustainability.

Juliette Donatelli: Feral Childe is best known for its prints and fabrics. Where are the prints made and is there a story behind them?

Alice Wu: Some of the prints are done right in Los Angeles. We use a sample dye house in Marin so we work with our dye guy to create the sample palette for the season. We have our printer print one color and do different dye lots. The same fabric comes out different ways so you get a nice tonal range.

This one is actually printed in Korea. So our silks come from either Korea or India. It depends on what fabric our suppliers have on offer. Everyone has different specialties and fiber qualities. We used a silk linen which was really nice. And for a really vibrant silk, this is digitally printed on a silk cotton.

So we make the image and then we try to find the right fabric partner to do it. Then you have to wrestle with the fabric to make it into the garment. But we try to make it fun altogether.

JD: And all the clothes are made in NYC?

AW: Yes, all the clothes are made either in midtown sewing facilities or we also have started working work sewing contractors in Sunset Park.

JD: When you have a buyer, or the general public come in and see the collection or see the clothing in a store, and then find out they are made in NYC, is that a selling point?

AW: It is. I think people like it. I think it is really wonderful to know the person who made your clothes, to say hello, and thank you for cutting my fabric and putting it together. It adds a very personal touch to something you are going to be wearing for a long time. That is something that is very important to Moriah and me–to try to work with people we can interface with. Even my fabric supplier from India I have met. The first time we worked together was over email, but about a year later he came to New York on business and we met up. It was really wonderful to put a face to all the email correspondences.

JD: How important is it to you to think about where and what fabrics you are using?

AW: For us it is very important to consider materials and where they come from at all steps of the design process. It is choosing materials that have meaning.

In the beginning, whether that meant discovering Garment District castoffs or remnant fabrics, we like to have a story to go along with the fabrics we find. Even though we aren’t necessarily working with remnant fabrics right now–we are creating our own–it is still important for us to have personal connections with the fabric suppliers that we are in contact with each season and to know as much as we can about where the fabrics are coming from, whether they are durable, and are they easy to care for.

It is less important that it is specifically organic — but we try to use organic whenever possible just because it is better for everybody. But for example, even though this is not organic cotton, [this fabric] is woven in Japan working with a small mill that has restored all this vintage production equipment. So you could say it is more of an artisan fabric or made by people who really care.

For instance, take [a product] blend of modal, cotton and polyester. There was a time where I thought, ‘I am never going to make anything with polyester again, I am only going to use natural fibers.’ But if there is a little bit of poly blended with natural fibers it sometimes helps to make the garment withstand more wear and tear. You can throw it in the washing machine, or we have customers that are vegan but want to look nice. So there are lots of things to consider.  But we certainly want to make things to treasure.

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images: photographed by Jonathan Hökklo for the brand

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EcoSalon sits down for a fun conversation with jewelry designer Natalie Frigo on her made in New York ethically sourced stones, the three kinds of fashion consumers and what it takes for people to change.

Juliette Donatelli: All your jewelry is made in New York. How important is that to your customer?

Natalie Frigo: I launched my first line in 2010 and I would say that it was made in NYC, and it didn’t matter at all. Nobody cared. There were, like, three people who cared. How could you not care about this? This is awesome! You don’t want something domestic? There would be a couple of stores that would say, ‘Oh, we love that. We will totally promote that.’

So, now people are more excited about it. And I have people who will contact me –buyers and retail customers who will contact me and say, ‘I love your designs, but then I saw it was made in New York, and I knew I wanted to get it.’ And it’s this thing that justifies it to them.

If you are interested in that it matters, but this is not going to convince you to be interested in that.

I definitely still get from buyers, they seem to understand it more, but I do get a resistance on price because my stuff is made domestically. And my stones are ethically sourced. If you don’t know where your stones are coming from, it is like apparel, a little child cut that stone. There is no question in my mind. I would put money on it. Awful. My stones are not like that. They cost more money–two to ten times as much. And so some people are like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s all great but our customer won’t pay more.’ They like the designs but there is a price resistance and they would just rather have a cheaper good. As much as they think that it’s great that it’s made domestically, it’s not worth it to them, or they don’t want to educate their customer or try to get a new customer base.

JD: What do you think it would take?

NF: Really. What could it take? How much more information do you need to make things domestically? The economy fell from underneath us.

There was a woman who came in [to Market 605], she was dressed pretty cute, and she started going through the clothes. I was wearing something from Feral Childe, and I said ‘I love this jacket, I just bought it.’

And she looks at the tag and it’s a four hundred dollar jacket and she’s like, ‘Oh yeah. That’s too expensive.’

And I said, ‘Well, you know, it is an investment piece. I am going to have it for a really long time, it’s very classic, this isn’t going to go out of style.’

And she said, ‘Yeah, I don’t shop like that. I buy multiple things every season and I never invest in anything. I have friends that do that, I am so impressed. But I can’t do that.’

You can do that right this second! You could get that one thing right now and just start. So people who shop like that are also the buyers.

What does it take to change a person?! I feel like some people are just never going to think it matters. And then there are people on the fence, and the more they learn about it they get super excited. And then there are people who have always known about it and they’ve always been into it and they are all about it.

I would say most of my accounts are galleries or local stores that have been in their communities for a long time and are interested in developing relationships.

JD: It’s all about the relationships we build.

NF: Yeah. You don’t have to have everything made domestically but you could have some things. People want to buy domestically, but they are so used to not having to pay for things on that level.

JD: Getting the conversation started is so important. If Michelle Obama, someone who is always being asked who she is wearing, made a simple statement about where it was made, because it was probably made in the USA because of the designers she wears and the quality of the pieces–a little awareness like that could go really far. 

NF: Yes, we need good fashionable ambassadors.

I got into a conversation with this guy, he was one of the workers at a show that I was setting up for. He came over to my booth, and said, ‘Oh your stuff is really cool,’ and I said thanks, it’s made in NYC. He said, ‘That’s awesome. I had to stop buying Carhartt because they don’t make it in America anymore, they make it in Mexico.’

He was amazing! Just this regular guy wearing t-shirt and jeans, and he’s all mad because Carhartt stopped producing domestically. You need people like that in all walks of life. He’s probably lecturing his friend non stop about wearing something made in China!

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images from the brand

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The Copenhagen Fashion Summit for 2012 tackles the future of sustainable fashion.

With initiatives aplenty directed at minimizing the impact of the fashion industry and to making it more sustainable, what is needed is probably a truly official and international effort to bring the most relevant ones together, and give them global resonance. Enter the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, a one-day event filled with the most prominent and prolific movers and shakers gathering to exchange knowledge and plans of action.

The outcome of the event was the actual presentation of a major initiative, highlighting a growing commitment of government bodies and major industry players alike, towards the creation of a truly sustainable future for fashion. The Copenhagen Fashion Summit was the platform for the launch of the first-ever sector-specific global initiative, the NICE Code of Conduct and Manual, under the Global Compact Programme.

NICE stands for Nordic Initiative Clean and Ethical, a joint commitment by the Nordic Fashion Association and its partners, to take a lead on social and environmental issues.
NICE has worked to create a framework for engaging consumers in sustainable consumption of fashion, which was recently handed over to the Danish EU Presidency and the European Commission. The framework will also be presented at the UN conference Rio+20 negotiations in June.

The Code of Conduct was developed as a multi-stakeholder effort, developed in close consultation with industry representatives, and the UN Global Compact Office. The objective? To take inspiration from the Compact Office’s 10 principles, but to also integrate them with more sector-specific content. The result is a 16-principle document that aims to assist fashion and textile manufacturers to ensure continuous improvement toward ethical and sustainable practices – a milestone in the evolvement of the future fashion industry that many want to see.

But what’s also remarkable and innovative about the NICE initiative, is that it doesn’t only address major industry players in a closed-loop, industry-only discourse. Mainly, it aims to highlight the consumer’s key role, and strives to create guidelines for the industry to educate the users towards a more responsible consumption of fashion.

This issue was indeed the subject of a Pre-Summit, which took place on May 2nd, ahead of the main event. Around 100 professionals, already involved with creating a better future for fashion, were invited to create an interactive workshop, going by the tagline of “Breathing Life into the NICE Consumer.”

Cody Sisco, BSR

The two-fold purpose for the gathering was to discuss NICE’s “Framework for achieving sustainable fashion consumption through collaboration,” as well as to devise practical ways to put the framework into action, by integrating suggestions from summit participant.

The subject of the relationship between industry and the consumer was approached from a multitude of angles. From designing for sustainable consumption, to engagement with consumers on responsible care and disposal of garments, and from awareness raising and consumer education to business model innovation. Facilitators such as Anne Prahl of WGSN, Holly Dublin of PPR (the holding behind major brands such as Stella McCartney and Puma), Allanna McAspurn of Made-By, Johan Ward of H&M, Orsola De Castro of From Somewhere, Kate Fletcher, author of Slow Fashion, Giordano Capuano of Vivienne Westwood and Lucy Siegle of The Guardian, among others.

But then again, the true impact of the event could truly be felt on the main day of the conference. Held at the beautiful venue of the Copenhagen Opera House, this saw more than a thousand industry and press attend, from 27 different countries.
And the line-up of speakers was utterly impressive – in NICE’s own words: “from Gucci to Greenpeace.” Once again, a wide range of perspectives were presented, from the luxury industry to the mass market, from trend analysis to statistics, from the next designer generation to NGO and policy level.

Certainly a nice touch and a breath of hope were brought on stage by the 100 students that took part in the Youth Summit. Arriving from 16 European design and business schools, they drew up a range of specific demands and recommendations on what the fashion leaders should be doing now to shape the industry they will one day be taking over. It was a moment which felt very true, with the students remarks sounding very aware and not at all naïve in their vision of the future.

After such an intense day, a touch of real fashion glamor was added to conclude the day in style, with a proper catwalk show, which was held outdoors, in front of the Opera House.
Naturally, a lot of thought had been put into this moment too. Not just a generic runway show, but one generated from a Design Challenge thrown at 15 Nordic fashion houses, whose test was to demonstrate once more what standards can be achieved through the use of sustainable textiles. And prove it they did.
The designers were provided with the highest quality fabrics by C.L.A.S.S. (Creativity, Lifestyle and Sustainable Synergy), the leading platform for sustainable textile sourcing and innovation, which promote materials such as Ingeo and Newlife (the new patent  recently used by Giorgio Armani to produce the Oscars gown for Livia Firth to wear during her ongoing Green Carpet Challenge, now in its third year).

designers were also allowed to incorporate cut-offs, leftover and recycled fabrics in their creations. The result was a truly creative catwalk, which would have been perfectly apt for any of the major international fashion weeks.
The challenge was won by Susanne Rützou, and the prize presented to her by supermodel Erin O’Connor, who graced the catwalk with her understated presence, and reaffirmed her support for a sustainable fashion industry.

Here are some of our favorite looks from the runway:

Baum und Pferdgarten

Hanna Petursdottir

Nanso

Ivana Helsinki

Marimekko

Mika Modiggård

Asta Creative Clothing

Nolan

Camilla Norrback

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