Email   Print

Six eco-trends reshaping the fashion industry

Major brands and young, globally minded designers alike are asking the question: How do you come up with a garment that is sustainable, that can stand on its own and not rob from the future? Here are six trends that eco-designers are currently following.

Slow designers like Natalie Chanin make handcrafted garments, like this camisole dress, rooted in traditions of craftsmanship and quality.

Photo: Alabama Chanin

Designer Natalie Chanin remembers the exact moment her fashion paradigm shifted. "I was standing on a street corner in the [New York City] Garment District holding this old T-shirt that I had ripped apart and sewn back together myself," she says. A 20-year veteran of fashion and costume design, she’d spent the day meeting with manufacturers, asking them to do a hand-sewn line of her reconstituted T-shirts. People kept giving her "a cockeyed look, like I was from outer space," she recalls. Standing at the corner of 37th and 8th after one meeting, Chanin realized she was finished with New York and with the industry status quo of fast and cheap production. "I looked at the stitching I was using and it looked like quilting stitches. That’s when I realized I should go back home."

Chanin’s hometown is Florence, Alabama, once known as the T-shirt capital of the world for all the cotton milling, weaving and T-shirt production that went on there. When she returned in 2000 after her epiphany at 37th and 8th, the town was still adjusting to the sudden loss of 5,000 textile jobs as a result of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. Seeing the vacuum left behind in her community, Chanin questioned a business model that treats people like commodities, as disposable as the cheap garments it produces. Soon she started her own company, called Alabama Chanin, which operates on a more sustainable model, employing local sewers, creating hand-finished garments built to last, and striving to run a zero-waste operation by "upcycling" (i.e., re-using) production leftovers.

Chanin isn’t alone in her ambition to radically rethink fashion. Since the early 2000s, a growing number of designers and apparel companies have embraced ethical alternatives to the industry’s resource-intensive and wasteful practices. And it’s not just diehard Al Gore fans making hemp yoga clothes. Fashion shows in major cities have started to include sustainable designs from major labels, and hundreds of new eco-fashion companies have come onto the scene. The last time eco was this chic, back in the early 1990s, the focus was on materials, like unbleached organic cotton. Today’s ethical trends reflect a deeper commitment to make the entire production process more sustainable.

In the early 1990s, the first eco-fashion line from a major label was Esprit’s Ecollection, designed by Lynda Grose, who today teaches sustainable design at the California College of the Arts. At the time, Grose says, it was hard to get management even to understand the value of organic cotton; today, many big-league retail brands not only offer organic cotton lines but have taken giant steps to address labor issues, pollution, recycling and sourcing of raw materials. "This is a long-term trend that will continue to grow," says Grose, citing the collaboration of clothing companies Gap and H&M with the Cleaner Cotton Initiative; the improved labor standards of Levi Strauss & Co. and Nike; and the investment of upmarket U.K. department store Marks & Spencer in fair trade.

In 2005, Nike started assessing all design decisions through the lens of sustainability in a program called Considered Design. The goal: to reduce waste and increase the use of environmentally safe materials by 2020. The firm gives designers instant reporting on the environmental cost of their decisions so they can find cleaner ways of doing things right from the drawing board. "Nike is trying to move as quickly as we can to reduce our environmental impact, and the best way to do that is to include the designers in the process," says Lorrie Vogel, general manager of Considered Design. "They’re our visionaries."

Despite progress like this, industry leaders are well aware that there’s still more to do. "When you start accounting for the full cost of production," says Jill Dumain, outdoor apparel company Patagonia’s director of environmental analysis, "the question becomes, How do you really come up with something that is sustainable, that can stand on its own and is not robbing from the future?"

Luckily, major established brands and young, globally minded designers alike are coming up with answers to exactly that question. Here’s a look at six trends that are bursting the seams of fashion’s old business model and creating a more sustainable future.

1 2 NEXT >>
view as a single page