Clothes. We wear them every day; they are an expression of our identities and they keep us warm, but other than that, what we wear doesn't really affect us. Or does it?
Eco fashion, which uses sustainable materials ie: Organic Cotton, became a huge hit around two years ago with the emergence of cloth shopping bags with labels such as "This bag is not plastic" or "This bag is green". However, it looks like this trend is here to stay as more and more designers are switching to organic/earth-friendly materials.
A goal for Michelle Lynn Johnson, a local designer, is to work towards using organic materials for her line of clothing. A seasoned veteran of the retail industry, she started out in 2002, making jewelry to sell on the corner of Queen St. W and Spadina. Now, she has her own store on the same street (Queen West), in the ever-popular Black Market Warehouse. Her company, The Fairies Pyjamas, specializes in quality fairly-traded ethical clothing, another growing trend.
She travels to Nepal and India every winter to source fabrics and to spend time with Fair Trade Manufacturers, making sure the working conditions are ethical. "With the Fair Trade manufacturing facility that I work with these workers are paid a fair wage, are on regular shifts of 8hours, have clean washrooms, a fire exit, safety checks on machinery, to progress in the career, all their children go to school and can learn English, and it is a wonderful positive complex that everyone works in. That makes me feel excellent about creating jobs, designing clothes and selling them with confidence to like-minded people."
Caterina Mazzotta, designer and owner of Kali Clothing, a Toronto-based street wear company has been using sweat-shop free materials for all of her designs. She has also worked with organic cotton and bamboo materials. Her next project involves recycled fabrics."I'm really excited about working with this new fabric! [It] is just as soft and durable, [and is] made from cotton fabric scraps from factories that are sorted by colour, then mulched into a new cotton fiber. Plastic bottles are then used to create a poly yarn and the two are weaved together making a totally new fabric!"
With so much enthusiasm from the designers, one can only hope that the rest of the world catches on to this eco-trend. By spending money on eco-friendly and ethical clothing, consumers are telling corporations that they care where their clothes come from and how they're made.
Johnson sums this up quite well: "The change in this world will only come from us making change."
