Fashion Takes Some Action

I went to the second Fashion Takes Action gala this Saturday.

The gala was much the same as other events – the usual crowd, the usual venue, the usual designers. I was happy to run into a couple familar faces. The event consisted of a live band, a fashion show and a silent auction.

I went to this gala with a lot of optimism. I’ve always been very skeptical of the consumer-level-goods green movement – the movement was so quickly adopted by advertisers to sell SUVs and condos and most of the celebutards pitching the movement are usually glutted with hypocrisy – but I decided to give the whole idea another try. My carbon footprint is retardedly high given my business and leisure travelling and I’ve been doing ABC analyses to see what wasteful activities I can cut. Watching what I consume and paying a little bit more for the sake of being the slightest more environmentally friendly is something that I’m interested in investing in – so long as the effectiveness of the change in habits has been proven to be effective.

I have never previously focused on reducing my footprint via a change in textile-consumption habit for two reasons. Firstly, during my research, I found out that

• Buying second hand clothes creates 0 tonnes of carbon
• Buying new clothes when you need them creates 0.1 tonnes of carbon
• Buying new clothes regularly to have the latest fashion creates 0.2 tonnes of carbon

Provided my source is correct, even taking into account the fact that my wardrobe maybe slightly larger than average (although I really doubt it – the average American consumes 15 kg for textiles a year and while I do buy higher quality clothes that most likely require more processing, my purchases are of a lower frequency than average), the most I can reduce by changing my shopping habits would only decrease my carbon footprint by 1-3%.  That isn’t the biggest bang for my buck and if I was to invest in something, I obviously want the biggest bang.

Secondly, eco-friendly designers should adhere to my overall lifestyle requirements. I want to purchase business suits, cocktail dresses, evening gowns with colours that don’t look perpetually faded and don’t look like it came from the Friendly Stranger or the local dumpster or smell like it came from Paper Bag Princess. I need sustainable fashion to look fashionable.

With those two problems in mind, I was ready to see what Fashion Takes Action has to bring to the table.

I was somewhat disappointed with the results.

I suppose the first item can’t really be helped. I didn’t conduct a survey but I would guess that the demographics of the audience that are not a part of the local media seemed to be either well-heeled gala butterflies or business people and both subsets most likely have to travel just as much or more than me. A lot of the people I met were from teh suburbs. Fashion purchases would probably be less than 1% of their overall footprint. This also applies to the (barely-recognizable) celebrity models and more established media personnel – if they cancelled one trip from Toronto to New York or LA, they would be saving 0.3 or 0.98 tonnes of carbon. Depending on their clothing habits, changing their travelling habit would be 150% to 980% more effective.

Another thing that bothered me was that no information was ever given on the carbon footprint of the clothes in the fashion show. Maybe it is just the way I need information to be presented to be to receive my buy-in, but it would have been really effective if the gala put some effort into calculating the footprint of an outift from the mall then compare it to an equivalent outfit made from an eco-friendly fabric. You don’t come out of the gala knowing how much difference would the purchase of eco-friendly fabrics actually make. If you were to switch to purchasing only the clothes recommended by the gala event, what would be the percentage change in your footprint? What if you were to buy eco-friendly clothes for every season? I did notice that Fashion takes action does intend to have education seminars so maybe my questions would be answered then.

The next problem was the clothes. I don’t know about the rest of the people, but I went into the event in a “buying” sort of mood. I wanted the fashion show to show me beautiful, wearable clothes that would help rid me of my tiresome bonus weighing down my wallet. A lot of the clothes, while beautifully constructed for the most part, there was something really low quality and clumsy about the fabric. I saw a lot of what looks like the blue bamboo cloth that Chinese peasants use and I wasn’t about to buy that for a special occasion. (And there were obvious hanging threads on the sleeves of some of the pieces). During the show, I was looking for something that I could wear for a dinner but only one designer had clothing I would consider purchasing. The show’s buyable statistic (10%) wasn’t enough to convince me. The designers just weren’t able to glamorize eco-fashion enough for me.

The second thing is that there were no shapes that I can visualize wearing for work. The majority of the pieces submitted were too Queen-Street-East/West West-ish for the crowd that they could not possibly convince any consumer group other than the latest crowd posing for club photographers at The Social to change their habits. I figure that most women are like me and don’t party every day and need some practical clothing. The gala needed an eco-friendly version of Melanie Lyne.

It seems what made the gala ineffective was the fact that it was an event designed by the Queen Street set for the Queen Street set but the only people that can afford to show up other than the media were the Yorkville/Suburbs crowd. The age of the people that actually bought tickets was probably 40 plus but the designers were designing for people under than 25. I was also disappointed that there were no second-hand or re-tailoring vendors represented at the gala. I’m sure they would have been at the show earlier that day but it would have been help for those that didn’t have time for both events with the contacts were made available.

What was also interesting to me was that this event provided my first glimpse of a value correction for Canadian design. The best item available at the auction was a customized dress designed and tailored by Canadian label Greta Constantine. According to the auctioneer, this was valued at $4000. I really wanted this oppurtunity (I love Greta and have a lovely cocktail dress by them) and I bid up to $600 and followed along up to $900 before I decided that it wasn’t worth the money. The item sold at $1000, 400% less than its suggested value. This really brought home the reality that firstly, the sticker value of Canadian fashion is over-estimated and secondly, the public most likely to purchase such items is not willing to pay the price any longer. Greta is one of the most respected Canadian labels and if they dropped value 400%, I am not sure how the rest of the Canadian labels hold up. Likewise, many of the items in the rest of the auction had low bids or were not bidded on at all. Is this a sign of the recession or that the price of the items exceed the quality of the item?

What will this mean for Canadian design?