fashion

Bangladesh Bans Business Suits

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Bangladesh has decided to change their dress code to reflect their local climate and save energy. By dressing for the weather it is expected that the country will consume less energy by using air conditioners. Wouldn’t it be grand if people dressed for the weather?

Read all about at the BBC.

Bangladesh’s official dress code has been rewritten – after Sheikh Hasina ordered government employees to do more to ease the country’s energy shortage.
Even ministers now will no longer be expected to wear suits and ties.
During the hot months between March and November, men have been ordered to wear trousers and shirts instead, and these do not have to be tucked in any more.
Officials and ministers have also been told not to turn their air-conditioners below 24C.
In June, the government introduced daylight saving, and the clocks moved forward by one hour, in another attempt to cut energy consumption.

Good Underwear

- Adam Clare

Change the world by changing your underwear!

PACT blends social and environmental values throughout its materials, supply chain, packaging and more. The company offers a range of men’s and women’s underwear styles in three designs. Each design is aligned with a nonprofit organization, with 10 percent of each design’s sales — yes, sales, not profits — going toward its associated organization. The underwear ranges in price from $22 for a thong to $28 for boxers.

Behar made the initial three designs for the underwear, creating images to sync up with the first three nonprofits with whom PACT is working: 826 National, ForestEthics and Oceana. PACT plans to add more nonprofits with new designs from other artists and designers, topping off at about eight, Kibbey said.

The underwear is made of 95 percent organic cotton, and 5 percent elastane (a.k.a spandex). They could have gone with 100 percent cotton, which would have made it easy to settle on an end-of-life solution, Kibbey said at a roundtable discussion at Fuseproject’s San Francisco offices today. But they added the elastane in order to give the underwear some stretch, keep it from getting baggy too quickly, and to extend each pair’s life.

LED Cycling Jacket is a Winner

- Adam Clare

I have lights on my bike and I’m a safe rider; however, there is always room for improvenment. An inventor has created a jacket for cyclists that uses LED lights. The lights communicate to other cyclists and most importantly car drivers what the cyclist is doing. The jacket recently won an international design award. The BBC has the scoop.

The jacket uses an accelerometer to sense movement, changing the colour of LEDs on the back from green when accelerating, then to red when braking.

A tilt switch in the jacket also makes LEDs in the arm flash amber when the wearer lifts their arm to indicate a turn.

A Good Yarn for the Environment

- Adam Clare

No, this isn’t a long rambiling post kind of yarn, as the OED says that yarn can mean “a long or rambling story, esp. one that is implausible.” I mean yarn as in “a spun thread used for knitting, weaving, or sewing.”

Yes, that’s right, today’s Blog Action Day post is about yarn and how people who are into spinning thread can help the environement too.

The Hook and I blog has a list of ten things that yarn enthusiasts can do, here’s number nine:

9) Use your stash. Not buying new materials is probably the best way to reduce our environmental impact. It’s hard for me to say this–I love yarn companies and the people involved, many of them have strong environmental missions themselves, but it can’t be avoided that lack of consumption is better than consumption when it comes to the environment.

Wear Clothing That Cleans the Air

- Adam Clare

neat I’ve never been one for fashion, but I think that has just changed with the introduction of clothing that eats smogs and kills bacteria. Olivia Ong, a design student at Cornell, came up with the idea of making a jacket that protects the wearer from bad things. It uses nano-materials (pictured) to do its thing, which makes the material itself very very expensive. Just imagine a world in which clothing actually makes the world better.

Ong’s dress and jacket, part of her original fashion line called “Glitterati,” look innocently hip. But closer inspection — with a microscope, that is — shows an army of electrostatically charged nanoparticles creating a protective shield around the cotton fibers in the top part of the dress, and the sleeves, hood and pockets of the jacket.

Scroll To Top