Stella McCartney Admits That Even She's Not 100% Eco-Friendly. In late April, the Financial Times’s (and soon to be New York Times's) Vanessa Friedman gave a speech at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit on the paradox of sustainability in the fashion industry. With designers piling on season after sub-season, the imperative to push new styles stands in opposition to any notion of permanence, Friedman argued. There are a few sides to sustainability in fashion. One is the manner in which a product is made — be that environmental practices or the treatment of workers, the failing of which was tragically exemplified in the Rana Plaza factory collapse last year.
The other is the rate at which consumers are expected to replace that product with the next, more stylish thing. Both are dependent on fashion’s attitude toward values-driven business, which, Stella McCartney noted in an interview with Friedman at the FT Business of Luxury Summit in Mexico on Monday, is a notoriously fickle thing.
That’s just it. Watch McCartney's full interview with Friedman, below. H&M on Conscious Materials. Sustainability in the Fashion Industry - Supply Chains Effect on the Environment. As one of the biggest players in the global economy, the fashion industry has a responsibility to help protect the environment. We’re commemorating this Earth Week by asking some tough questions about our impact on the planet and what we can do about it. We’ll also be profiling people and companies who are instigating change. We’re calling the series “,” and to kick things off, Maya Singer takes a look at the harsh realities of the fashion supply chain.
I used to have nightmares about plastic. Back in 2008, I spent New Year’s Day immersed in The World Without Us, Alan Weisman’s thought experiment about what would happen to Earth if the human race was suddenly raptured off the face of it. There’s a ton of fascinating data in that book—including some frightening facts about cats—but the chapter that really stuck with me was the one in which Weisman describes the giant garbage patches forming in ocean eddies.
The World Without Us is one of the seminal texts of my life. “Supply chain.” Russian mink farms where thousands are slaughtered and left to rot to make $1m coats. These disturbing pictures expose the macabre truth about the fur farms in Russia and China which supply the fashion market in the world's leading cities, including London, Paris and New York. Across ten time zones, the images show the reality of mink and sable gulags - many set up during the harsh Communist past - where prized animals are bred for slaughter, bringing in millions of pounds to the Russian economy every single year. An investigation by MailOnline also reveals the appalling conditions in which wild animals, including different types of fox, are captured and killed, from being skinned alive to being poisoned by the faeces in the air, and reveals the heartless farm owners who can't see beyond their profits.
And there are certainly profits to be made: a sable 'blanket' sold for a record-breaking $900,000 to a royal just a few years ago, while a coat at last year's Fendi show was rumoured to have a price tag of $1.2million. Animals forced to suffer and starve in Russian fur farm. Copenhagen Fashion Week Spotlights Sustainability. Copenhagen Fashion Week, which began Wednesday and runs through Friday, is giving sustainability some good play. The event held in the wake of the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, which drew 1,250 industry delegates last May, had sustainable label Fonnesbech on its first day — Crown Princess Mary of Denmark sat front row at the Fonnesbech display — and two Swedish brands with a sustainability perspective on day two: House of Dagmar and Uniforms For The Dedicated, two newcomers to the Copenhagen calendar. “The vision is the gap that Copenhagen could fill: to take the position as the sustainability destination and bring together the brands from all over the world who want to work on sustainability,” said Eva Kruse, chief executive officer of Copenhagen Fashion Week, noting that she would like H&M to reveal its Conscious Collection during Copenhagen Fashion Week, as well as draw such players as Stella McCartney and Prada, who both have an ethical point of view in terms of production.
Faux Fur is More Than a Faux Pas, it's Poison. One of the arguments most beloved of the anti-fur lobby is that fake fur is actually better for the environment than the real thing. That argument, however, is as fake as the apparel it supports. And some new research has thrown the whole issue around man-made fibres more generally into the limelight. Specifically, researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara have found that, on average, synthetic fleece jackets release 1.7 grams of microfibers each wash. and that this is having a devastating effect on our rivers, oceans and marine life.
It also uncovered that older jackets shed almost twice as many fibres as new ones. What are these microfibres? They are tiny bits of plastic with the potential to poison the food chain. Their size allows them to be readily consumed by fish and other wildlife and from there they can bioaccumulate, concentrating toxins both in those fish and in the bodies of larger animals higher up the food chain. Faux Fur is the Only Responsible Choice. A response to Mark Oaten’s article “Faux fur is more than faux pas, it’s poison”. Real fur sales are experiencing a dramatic drop since 2014 while the faux fur sector is enjoying a remarkable boom with a 10% increase in demand.
This might explain why Mark Oaten, head of the International Fur Trade Federation, has been constantly trying to denigrate the faux fur sector. More and more fashion houses and even luxury brands are falling in love with faux fur. New technologies make it more lustrous and softer than ever. As the founder of a website and a blog dedicated to promote the use of faux fur in fashion, I had the opportunity to meet students in fashion schools to talk about faux fur in order to breakdown prejudices associated with that fabric.
Although avoiding factory farming is a significant step for many of them the question of the environmental impact of faux fur remains a crucial factor. Faux fur is a smart choice Mark Oaten said faux fur is poison.