So, You Wanna Learn More About Sustainable Fashion?
Sustainability in fashion is a complicated and opaque topic. The fashion industry is a multinational global economic endeavor.The issues around fashion and sustainability have a wide range of impacts from water usage, to sustainable farming, to labour rights and so much more. Thank the sustainable goddess for the internet because there are plenty of internet resources available for learning about, and buying sustainable fashion.
Websites like Ecouterre, and Eco-Chick.com, Inhabitat, are a great place to start as they specialize in sustainability, sustainable news, green fashion, and environmental activism. We suggest liking or following their different social media outlets to stay current on all things eco-fashion. Use this Social media resource, that Julia Anna Pollack and I put together, as a sort of Bibliography of Sustainable Fashion Information.
Ethical and Eco-fashion are a very much talked about subject in the fashion industry. The stories Every magazine, online publication, blog has taken a crack at figuring how to deal with the problems of ethics in fashion. Here are some people talking about it directly, and indirectly as brands, consumers, producers, defenders, and protesters, etc. Find out where you stand, and understand the industry as a whole.
The following list seeks to tackle questions about sustainable fashion:
If you’re asking yourself: “Who should I follow?”
Twitter #’s to search:
Twitter accounts to follow:
If you’re asking yourself: “Which Websites can keep me updated?”
Green Gretchen (whose blog has a great archive)
Center For Sustainable Fashion
Greta Eagan: Blog Fashion Me Green
If you’re asking yourself: “What should I Read?”
Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L Cline is a good place to start. Cline really delves deep into the way our clothes are made, and arrives to the horrible conditions in which garment workers are treated. Also, if you can’t get your hands on the book, Cline constantly updates the book’s facebook page with the latest news on ethical and slow fashion. Also a great resource is It’s Time for a Fashion Revolution by Sarah Ditty, and who can forget The Guardian’s “Top seven books on sustainable fashion.”
If you’re asking yourself: “What should I watch?”
The True Cost documentary is one of the most moving films on the state of fashion today. I would suggest everyone to start from there. But Youtube is a great friend in understand fast fashion. There are clips, long and short, from media outlets like Aljazeera to HBO’s John Oliver that discuss the dismal statistics of fast fashion, and at times provide viewers to be ways to be ethical in our purchases.
And who can forget, “So you want to be sustainable?”:
Check it out here: https://vimeo.com/54683260
PS: Remember that binge watching some of these videos, and reading these books may be quite disturbing. The Rana Plaza tragedy itself is infinitely overwhelming! Ease into it, and start by doing what you can.
Chrislande Dorcilus and Julia Anna Pollack