Is the time right for Slow Fashion?
By Tim Holt Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor / February 10, 2009
The Slow Fashion/Slow Clothing movement is a patchwork of the old
and the new. It borrows heavily from Slow Food ideas of knowing more
about what you buy, finding out who produced it, and using that
knowledge to buy quality and to make socially and environmentally
responsible choices.
You’ll find Slow Fashion on the gritty north side of Burlington,
Vt., where men and women working on rented sewing machines make
customized garments out of discarded clothes and fabrics. And in the
fashion design studios of San Francisco, where "green" is the buzzword
and high fashion is spun from recycled and organic materials. It also
comes to the US from Bolivian villages high in the Andes mountains,
where women knit sweaters made from the coats of free-range alpaca
herds.
Slow Fashion can be your own customized dress reworked from one
bought for $5 at Goodwill, or one of Miranda Caroligne’s $700 handmade
jackets crafted from clothing factory scraps.
Slow Clothing surfaced in 2006 as a spinoff of Slow Food, and has
since evolved into a somewhat less homespun Slow Fashion movement
embraced by rebellious clothing designers in the US and Europe. The
phrase "Slow Clothing" appeared in a December 2006 essay by Sharon
Astyk, a writer who lives on a small farm in upstate New York. Her
essay, appearing in the online Groovy Green Magazine, outlined in
forceful language a program of independence from the
multibillion-dollar clothing industry and "its exploitation of poor
people, toxic pesticide use and the inhumane treatment of animals."
Ms. Astyk challenged US households "to create a single outfit for every
man, woman, and child that is homemade." Harking back to a simpler era,
she also urged families to mend their clothes and buy fewer new ones.
"If we can radically reduce our clothing purchases, there will be no
reason to buy cheaply made, imported, sweatshop clothing from
Wal-Mart," she wrote. 'We will be able to afford to purchase high-
quality, environmentally sound clothing."
Astyk wasn’t calling for anything radically new, but rather for a
rebalancing of the old and new toward time-honored stitch-and-mend ways
as opposed to a buy-and-throw-away ethic.
In fact, Astyk does knit socks for her family and is teaching her
young sons basic sewing skills, but she admits that, up until now, this
do-it-yourself approach has been a tough sell.
One intermediate step is to recycle clothing. "The older the better"
is the motto at the Bobbin Sew Bar in Burlington, Vt., where you can
buy recycled clothes stitched into new ones at reasonable prices, or
rework them yourself on one of their vintage sewing machines, which can
be rented for $8.50 an hour.
Another approach is taken by designer Miranda Caroligne, who
specializes in "turning garbage into high fashion," as she puts it. She
scavenges discarded fabric from clothing factories in the San Francisco
Bay Area and transforms them into colorful outfits.
Ms. Caroligne’s creations don’t come cheap, and much of Slow Fashion
can be pricey: An organic cotton dress at the Atomic Garden boutique in
Oakland, Calif., runs around $200. A woman’s top made from recycled
men’s shirts goes for $345 at Eco-Citizen in San Francisco, and a
handmade alpaca sweater from Vermont-based Kusikuy is going to cost
about $185.
But consumers can take comfort from the fact that the sweater was
produced in a Bolivian village by a knitter paid three times that
country’s minimum wage, according to Kusikuy owner Tamara Stenn. She
prides herself in paying her knitters a living wage and selling
sweaters that last an average of 10 years.
Slow Fashion can be defined by what it is "durable, made from
recycled or organic materials, and made by someone paid a "living
wage." It is also sometimes defined by what it isn’t. It’s the opposite
of what some refer to as "Fast Fashion" "the churning out of large
quantities of clothing under intense time pressure and new fashion
lines every two months produced by underpaid overseas laborers."
Not long ago, Ms. Stenn found herself and her knitters veering into
the Fast Fashion lane as demand for the sweaters and other alpaca
garments soared. She got caught up in a frantic schedule of trade shows
and meetings with retailers all over the country. Her company was "losing its heart and soul," she felt, with stepped-up production
schedules and stressed-out knitters.
So Stenn made the decision to slow down, to stop going to trade
shows, and to cut back production by more than half. Now she feels
she’s back in touch with the true spirit of her company.
Kathie Sever of Austin, Texas, is another refugee from the world of
Fast Fashion. She designed a line of children’s clothing and soon found
herself embroiled in an endless series of meetings with sales reps and
1,400-mile journeys to a clothing factory in Los Angeles, plus what
she describes as an appalling "ton of waste" generated at the end of
each clothing cycle.
Ms. Sever decided to walk away from all that, reconnect with her
creative side, and indulge in a longtime "fetish" for Western,
cowboy-style clothing. She’s been comfortably situated in the Slow
Fashion lane for 3-1/2 years now as the owner and sole employee of
Ramonster, producing handmade, customized shirts and women’s dresses.
The shirts are definitely pricey, running $350 to $500, and featuring
hand-embroidered images from the purchaser’s life. One movie director
proudly wears a Ramonster shirt featuring images from the classic John
Wayne Western, "Rio Grande."
Sever offers a high-end alternative to the throwaway ethic: A
customized $500 shirt isn’t likely to end up in the landfill anytime
soon, and not just because of the price. Sever’s shirts have what
fashion-industry people refer to as "emotional durability," a personal
connection that makes it likely they’ll not only remain in one’s
wardrobe but get passed on to the next generation.
The same can be true, of course, of something you make for yourself,
or that a friend or relative makes for you. Homemade clothes may indeed
work for some, but the broader goal of Slow Fashion is to get consumers
to think more about what they buy.
Should we buy cruelty-free leather belts made from South American
farm animals who died of natural causes, and handbags made from
recycled candy wrappers by juvenile delinquents in Mexico, or the same
items made with less ethical content but shipped a shorter distance? A
sweatshirt made of organic cotton or of recycled soda pop bottles?
Slow Fashion says: Let the debate and discussion begin.
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