Alden Wicker, a prolific and deeply knowledgable journalist, has written a piece for Craftsmanship Quarterly that lays out the context of our choices in the ever more complicated world of “sustainable” fashion.
Everyone in the fashion world wants to find a more sustainable, environmentally friendly way to make cotton clothes — or a benign (and comfy) alternative. Some are on the brink of succeeding. But almost no one understands these innovations’ social costs.
“Today, the agro-industrial complex that has grown up around cotton has been dogged with everything from human rights abuses to its own environmental harms. Just the farming of cotton depletes increasingly scarce water supplies and spreads pesticide residue. The half-dried-up Aral Sea has been a public relations nightmare for the industry. So have child labor and farmer suicides in India. Forced Uighur labor in China is just the latest cotton indignity.
Not surprisingly, fashion brands would rather not deal with cotton’s PR problems, or its fluctuating costs; thus, the rise of polyester and rayon. Now comes a company like re:newcell with a more efficient way to recycle cotton clothing. But its process is still dependent on cotton. So everyone’s still searching for the innovation that all the fashion brands desperately need: a soft, high-performing, non-polluting material that can truly replace cotton.”
Coincidentally, the same week Alden’s piece was published, Adele Peters covers some of the same ground in her piece for Fast Company
This new H&M dress is made from wood and recycled jeans. The fabric, called Circulose, is a new innovation that lets old fabrics be turned into new thread.
“If you buy this new blue dress from H&M once it hits stores in March, it might be made in part from a pair of jeans that you recycled last year. The retailer is the first to use a new material called Circulose that makes it possible to recycle old clothing into a textile that looks and feels completely new.
For Renewcell, the startup that makes the new material, it’s a first step in changing the environmental footprint of clothes. “Our play is really for the wider market,” says Harald Cavalli-Björkman, Renewcell’s chief marketing officer. “We want to shift this entire industry to circular materials and start weaning fashion off of virgin materials, be it cotton or polyester.””