Slow fashion for a sustainable lifestyle.
Slow Fashion is the movement of designing, creating, and buying garments for quality and longevity. It encourages slower production schedules, fair wages, lower carbon footprints, and (ideally) zero waste. Slow Fashion is an awareness and approach to fashion, which considers the processes and resources required to make clothing, particularly focusing on sustainability. It involves buying better-quality garments that will last for longer and values fair treatment of people, animals and the planet.
Ethical Clothing: The beginnings of Slow Fashion
The term Slow Fashion came about quite organically. It was coined by Kate Fletcherof the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, following the phenomena of the slow food movement. As with the slow food movement, Fletcher saw a need for a slower pace in the fashion industry. Slow Fashion opposes the fast fashion model that emerged around 20 years ago. And it’s fair to say Slow Fashion is 100% necessary, with brands like H&M burning 12 tonnes of unsold garments per year in spite of its ongoing sustainability efforts to close the loop in fashion.
Slow Fashion becomes a movement
Pre-industrial revolution, garments were locally sourced and produced. People would buy durable clothing that could serve them for a long time or make their own from the textiles and resources available to them. Clothing reflected the place and culture of the people wearing them.
Modern day Slow Fashion has seen some of these old ways come back into the picture. It encourages us to buy less garments at higher quality, made from more sustainable processes, less often. It also puts emphasis on the art of clothes making and celebrates the skills of the craftspeople who make them.
“Slow fashion” is a trendy term in a lot of retail circles. The history, weight and importance of the Slow Fashion Movement proves that it is much more than just a trend — it is here to stay and may lay the foundation for the future of fashion.
Fast Fashion Facts
1. It takes around 2,700 liters of water to make a single cotton t-shirt.
2. The volume of water consumed by apparel production each year is currently the equivalent to 32 million Olympic swimming pools.
3. Approximately 7,000 liters of water are needed to produce one pair of jeans (the amount of water one individual drinks in 5-6 years).
4. Compared to 16 years ago (2002), the average person buys 60% more clothing and keeps them for half as long.
5. Farmers close to garment factories can predict the color of a season by seeing the color of the water ways and rivers nearby.
6. Only one industry is considered dirtier than the fast fashion industry: Oil.
7. Most workers in the fast fashion industry earn less than 3$ per day
8. 80% of workers work until 8pm or 10pm, after starting at 8am – in excess of the legal limit on working hours
9. Wage of a CEO in the USA =16,000 Bangladesh workers’ wage.
Ethical Clothing by Brava Fabrics
Responsibility to our environment and respect to the people that create our apparel is not an option but an obligation. For us slow fashion is more than just a trend. We rely on ethical clothing, carefully desgined and sustainably produced in Spain and Portugal. Discover our fair fashion collections for him & her.