BIAS
CONTRIBUTORS
We asked our contributors: How they keep their wardrobe green?
Making ethical choices can be a challenge for even the most informed consumer. We are surrounded by so many brands claiming ethical credentials that it is difficult to cut through the hype and find products with real integrity. This issue Sass Brown guides us through the jungle. My vote, for what it’s worth, is with the buy less buy better lobby, and to repair and repurpose garments to extend their life.
One of the side effects of the technology revolution is the renaissance of making. In this issue we see Amy Revier hand weave coats, Abigail Booth hand stich quilts, Huda Baroudi and Maria Hibri reupholster furniture with recycled materials; all of whom make aesthetically beautiful products and almost unconsciously engage with an ethical agenda by managing the integrity of their materials through every stage of production. This movement engenders an optimism for the future as it injects aesthetics, the absence of which has blighted ethical manufacture for decades.
SASS BROWN pg66
Textiles have value because of the time and skill necessary to construct them. If we were able to educate and re-skill our population in garment construction then surely responsible consumption would follow. TV programmes such as the Great British Sewing Bee are helping - I just wish they would use better cloth!
CATHERINE HARPER pg28
Cloth is not a neutral material: it is steeped in cultural connotations, none less so than checks. In this issue we explore the migration of checked pattern around the world and look at how artists have commented on the meaning of the inexpensive nylon checked carryalls we associate with displaced peoples. I urge you to go green when considering your winter wardrobe.
Polly Leonard, Founder
LIESE VAN DER WATT pg52
I try and keep my wardrobe green by supporting local and emerging designers. I buy vintage. I always mend and repair the things I love, to the extent that I have things with more repair than thing, but that only makes them of greater value to me. I try only to purchase things that I really love, not just like, and that I can see myself wearing decades from now. I love to buy items that reflect tradition, culture and artisanship whenever I travel, and to quote Vivienne Westwood, I buy less and buy better.
My Irish heritage makes green eternally charged. It’s a colour I rarely wear. But I do wear a green shamrock on my lapel, and my sacred heart on my sleeve, on St Patrick’s Day. Other days, there’ll be a charity shop purchase somewhere – today a voluminous silver coat, yesterday a strict and lean black dress, tomorrow fake red suede stack heels and a leopard print collar. My contribution to the ‘green’ economy of re-use, re-make, re-cycle is indulgent: I love the seamstress-laundress in me who changes buttons, irons out pleats, lifts hems and dyes new shades - never green!
I once mailed my wedding dress to my mother in South Africa in an A4 envelope. We were living in New York, planning to get married on the beach in South Africa and I spent my entire teaching assistant stipend (a small fortune for an art history grad student) on a glamorous golden Pleats Please Issey Miyake dress that I have worn numerous times since. Like dressing my son in his sister’s frilly hand-me-down pyjamas way beyond his fourth birthday (for which he has still not forgiven me), I believe clothes - like people always deserve a second chance in life.
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