“Ethical” fashion

To The Independent

In Sirena Bergman’s piece on ethical fashion, one suggestion for embracing a more sustainable approach was missed – buy less. If you want to reduce the impact your buying habits have on the planet, this is the only certain tactic.

But the subject of ethical fashion is indeed complex. We throw around terms like ethical, natural, chemical and sustainable without properly understanding what they mean, and the article did contain some errors. For example, it highlights silk, linen and bamboo as more sustainable fibres, but harvesting silk causes the death of the silkworm part way through its life cycle; bamboo requires some fairly hostile chemicals to turn it into a textile fibre; and if you like white linen, this needs some quite robust chemicals to achieve.

Most modern dyes are better than vegetable alternatives; they are increasingly designed to be applied at lower temperatures, and with as little water and as short a dye cycle as possible. Vegetable colourants often need huge amounts of water to apply evenly, still need toxic chemicals to get them into the fibre and will look faded more quickly.

On the face of it, sourcing locally seems a great ethical choice (lower carbon footprint, not exploiting cheap labour). However, we have to recognise that any fashion item will involve a global source somewhere: we don’t grow cotton in the UK and we don’t manufacture enough fabrics here to sustain the fashion trade completely. David Maddison