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From Fast Fashion to Sustainable Style

- Adam Clare

Fast fashion relies on mass production and mass consumption in order to survive. The fashion industry as a whole requires a lot of energy, water, and logistics to function in its current form, which means the days of current fast fashion will have to come to an end. People are catching on that disposable clothing isn’t good for the environment or for your bank account. To circumvent fast fashion consumers are turning to vintage stores for clothing and some new styles that come out of combining old fabrics into new styles.

Clothes come and go at the Basingstoke home of Sarah Fewell, too. In fact, so many parcels come and go that she knows her postman by his first name (Jay). Fewell has always loved cutting up old clothes, sticking on studs, even at 14 when most of her friends were into Hollister. But now she has turned her passion for preloved clothes into a sustainable version of fast fashion.
Fewell runs a shop called Identity Party on the website Depop, which since being established in 2011 has offered its 10 million users a blend of eBay-style trading with Instagram-style posting.Her brand is “a lot of 80s, 90s, quite bohemian, grungy”. She especially loves “selling things with animals on, a good old ugly jumper and anything by St Michael.”

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Reduce Your Wardrobe

- Adam Clare

It’s easy to acquire clothes nowadays and the consumerist society which we have created encourages us to continually update our clothes for the latest fad. This can be expensive and it has a negative impact on the environment. Reducing your wardrobe to only needed and fashionable items can reduce stress, but it’s hard to get accomplish. Luckily, Becoming Minimalist has a great guide!

  1. Embrace the idea of one. When one can be enough, embrace it – one black dress, one swimsuit, one winter coat, one black belt, one pair of black shoes, one pair of sneakers, one handbag… insert your own based on your occupation, lifestyle, or climate.
  2. Donate, sell, recycle, discard. Depending on the size of one’s existing wardrobe, an initial paring down won’t take long. Make a few piles – donate, sell, or recycle. Start with the clothes that you no longer wear. You’ll be surprised how much you can remove.

Read more here.

New Ways to Style Denim

- Adam Clare

Sandblasting jeans seems to be the cool thing to do nowadays. I’m not big on fashion so this is all strange to me. Well, as you can probably imagine sandblasting denim is not good for the environment so some smart people have figured out a better way to blast your jeans.

Blue denim jeans are one of the most popular and iconic fashion items in the world; now a study published in Biotechnology Journal reveals a cheaper, more efficient and eco-friendly method for treating dyed denim. The process of ‘surface activation’ used to wash-down the denim following dyeing could also offer an alternative to the dangerous, and internationally banned, sandblasting technique.

“The global production of denim is estimated at 3 billion linear meters and more than 4 billion garments per year,” said Thomas Bechtold, from the Research Institute for Textile Chemistry and Textile Physics at the University of Innsbruck. “To create blue jeans denim is dyed with indigo an organic compound which is estimated to be produced in quantities of over 30.000 tons per year.”

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I still don’t get why we need sand in our jeans.

Pollution Dress is Stylin’

- Adam Clare

A fashion designer has made a dress with a CO2 detector in a dress then lights up using LEDs depending on the concentration of CO2 in the area.

The Climate Dress is made of conductive embroidery, over hundred of tiny LED lights inserted into the embroidey, a CO2 sensor and an Arduino Lilypad microprocessor. The LEDs visualize the level of CO2 in the nearby surroundings and are powered trough the embroidery!
For The Climate Dress we used soft conductive thread that has a similar consistence to the kind of thread used for traditional and industrial embroidery production. This way it is possible to make embroidery that become more than an esthetical element in clothing and interior textiles.

The embroidery becomes functional conveying electricity and computer information and thereby give “power to the dress”. The dress senses the CO2 concentration in the air, then accordingly creates diverse light patterns varying from slow, regular light pulsations to short and hectic. The technology, which integrates ”soft circuits” into the production of embroidery, is an innovative process. It is the result of a fruitful collaboration between Copenhagen based design studio diffus, Swiss embroidery company Forster-Rohner, the Danish research-based limited company Alexandra Institute and finally the Danish School of Design.

See the dress here.

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