Sustainability and Ethics for Beginners

The New Rules 

Tips for Sustainability and Ethics for Beginners (the Dr. NO Way) 

http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/how-sustainable-is-your-wardrobe

http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/gucci-equilibrium

So great to see Vogue discussing ethics and Gucci making sustainable decisions (see links above) but what are magazines and brands now telling us so they can now sell to us (someone's gonna steal that for a song, just remember you saw it here first)? 

What started off years ago as an honest look and review of the horrors of cheap (and not so cheap) fashion 

1.  As we all know by now new fashion looks remarkably like the old fashion. Apart from every gen. of new designers 'designing' what they liked best in their mother's wardrobe there is a tipping point from exclusive to mainstream to naff that fashion needs time to forget. 

1A. Hit 35? Steal your own mother's wardrobe from 15-20 years ago, mothers being mothers will have got rid of the tat and kept the good designer stuff that cost a packet.  Gotta be some advantages of being Gen. Y rather than Gen. Z. 

2. Gold is a sore point. Mining is never environmentally friendly (unless you panning for it in the beginnings of the Clyde, in the Southern Uplands, Scotland).  

2A Instead of scrapping all your old gold earrings (including the odd ones) and investing in Phoebe's last collection of brass bits for Celine for the same money (you may have to top-up ;-) ) and helping replenish saintly Gucci's quest for ethically sourced gold stocks. just wear the ones you have already. I know ingenious! Besides, Celine's are mostly all, all sold out and may turn your ears green.

3. Fur! OMG! Apparently mink are much more precious than cows... or python. How can I break this to people gently, that their suede, leather, nubuck and other dubious material shoes are made out of animal. What about the poor silk worms (one to ask Stella when you see her)? So those so-soft acrylics or nylon puffers, no animal suffers from the environmental 

3A. Before you beat yourself up, go to confession and rush over to PETA to off-load your sables so they can kit out the homeless of NY, how about just wearing what you got. 

4. Anybody else noticed how Indian-inspired Gucci's fine jewellery is getting? For a House famed for its Florentine workmanship it's looking decidedly non-Italian. Not sure how many air-miles  are being clocked-up in the process.

4A Buy beautiful Indian jewellery straight from the source, Jaipur is renowned for it's artistry and where it's at, and you'll help Gucci lessen it's environmental impact even more. Another option is to buy from companies that only employ local craftspeople (of course you may have to check they're not flown in to a sweat shop and had their passports locked away). 

Let's not kid ourselves. What is the promise now? If we can all wear what we like whenever and whenever the only reason to buy clothes is either to replace them from being worn-out  (yeah, right!) or make us feel so guilty about what we have already we feel embarrassed enough to chuck everything away (pretend it never happened) and start over. It's a bit like reading 'free-range milk' at your supermarket (shouldn't that be farmers' market?). Once you see it, you suddenly think every other carton without it written on must be from battery-cows (and why are you still drinking milk from animals anyway?!!! Shouldn't the country side be filled with plastic starter homes and terraced solar fuel panels? ) A label or a pledge often doesn't mean a thing.

If ethical dressing and equilibrium don't shift units and make the shareholders happy, all that is holy-Millennium talk will be trashed and discarded and sent along to the landfill sites. Don't expect the big fireworks or write-ups when Gucci ditches the nylon and polly-blends and brings back the silk-lined mink. When people start thinking why they're paying thousands for the same stuff as down the market and it doesn't matter how GUCCY is spelled, ethics will be the last of  Marco Bizzarri's problems.