why white is wicked. under the fabric of the fashion industry

it took 700 gallons of fresh water to make my cotton t-shirt;

it’s partly down to me that 85% of the Aral Sea In Uzbekistan has disappeared because its water was used to grow cotton in the desert;

a quarter of all the insecticides in the world are used on cotton crops;

buckets of hazardous sludge are generated during the coating process of the metal buttons on my jeans;

white is energy-intensive because of all the bleaching;

being clean, and wearing white to prove it, has weakened my immune system;

I‘ll use six times more energy washing my favourite shirt than was needed to make it;

nearly all the textiles in my life will end up in landfill – garments, household textiles, carpets, the lot.

The book from which I took these offcuts is neither alarmist, nor moralizing. On the contrary: Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change, by Kate Fletcher and Lynda Grose, examines the environmental and social impacts of fashion system calmly. This matter-of-fact tone – together with its masses of well-selected examples – make the book impossible to dismiss as mere advocacy.





Kate Fletcher’s ‘map’, below, charts the types of fibre that had the greatest potential to the produced in a sustainable way.






“many fashion designers find the technical complexity of textile processing to be bewildering”. As Paul Hawken writes in his introduction, although designers are incredibly knowledgeable about style, cut, fabric, colour, and design – “they know far less about back story of fashion – the technology behind the cut, the fibre behind the fabric, the land behind the fibre, of the person on the land”.

The significance of this important book is that fashion’s back story can no longer be ignored. It marks the transition from years of awareness-raising, until now, to years of remedial action to come. It will no longer be an option to plead ignorance, or feign surprise, at the fact that design decisions impact on watercourses, air quality, soil toxicity, and human and ecosystem health, in other parts of the world.


http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/why-white-is-wicked/34618/