Monsoon Love

Monsoon sponsor Estethica, and have done so for years. They will soon be bringing out an ethical range of ethereal garments (lots of dresses) made from left over fabric from their main collections, and organic fabrics, as well as recycled glass beads. The completely white Love Monsoon Range 2011 will be in shops from feb next year and priced roughly around £120. Truely beautiful . .

Mulberry S/S 11

Mulberry S/S 11 photos. 70s vibe, garden set, paper bullbogs guarding the seats!

Estethica/EcoLuxe

As well as Estethica, I also went to the EcoLuxe exhibit at the Aldwych Hotel, which showcased ethical labels away from the LFW exhibition. One new brand that I completely fell in love with is Olga Olsson, gorgeous ethical swimwear. The brand definitely fills a gap for ethical sexy swimwear, produced by women and young artisans in Rio de Janeiro.

Outsider was a womenswear brand I hadn’t seen before. Perfect for an ethical work wardrobe they showcased organic blouses, shift dresses, jackets and skirts. They also use natural colour cotton in the collection (cotton originally was not white, but grown in shades of brown, green and rust red. “We believe ethical fashion should just look like fashion”.

London Fashion Week!

I was very excited about my first time at London Fashion Week. All I wanted to do was see how it all worked and soak up the atmosphere, anything else was a bonus. I went up for two days, and boy was it fun, but tiring. I didn’t last very long in heels, luckily I took flats. I hadn’t realised everything that goes on away from Somerset House – invites to shows and exhibitions in various areas of London. How anyone can run around all day in heels puzzles me. Anyway, I only went to one show – Mulberry salon show. It was so lush! It was Claridges Hotel and they gave out cupcakes. It was packed but the only person I recognised was Olivia Palermo. All the models had beautiful red hair (wigs, but looked really sweet) and a dog walked down with one of the models. I guess the whole show had a ‘walk in the park’ feel, with floral centrepieces, and a bird song sound track pre-show. The clothes included the classic trench, coral shift dresses, a bit of floral and a ruffle skirt. I took photos off my two days but I can’t get them off the camera at the moment, which is very frustrating – I should be able to add them at some point.

Fair( )trade

Fair trade: The more I think about it the more confusing it gets. I learnt a lot more about it at the social labelling conference from people who work for the key fair trade organisations. First there’s the fact that fair trade, and Fairtrade are not the same. This I did know before – fair trade is a generic term which anyone can use, whereas Fairtrade is a certifying organisation – proof that it is fair trade. What I hadn’t quite grasped before, I’m ashamed to say, was the limits of Fairtrade within apparel. Basically that when a t-shirt says ‘Fairtrade certified cotton’ it is literally just the cotton growing stage that is certified Fairtrade, not in fact the cotton processing stage or t-shirt manufacture stage. Makes sense now, but it’s so easy to just assume. It just seems strange that this is the case, and worth shouting about, when much of the labour intensive part is perhaps the sewing of the garment. I suppose it links on from the fact that the Fairtrade foundation’s most successful area is food, which comes straight from the farmer to us almost. Indeed they only developed the Fairtrade cotton standard in 2004 so perhaps the standard will develop and grow in due course, but if I hadn't grasped that fact in full, no wonder other consumers are confused.

Social Labelling Conference

Last week I went to an ethical fashion conference held at Northumbria University. It was focused on social labelling which is very relevent to my MPhil thesis question, 'How to communicate the environmental and social impacts of producing a cotton t-shirt to the consumer at point of sale'. There were representatives there from FAIRTRADE, People Tree, Workers Rights Consortium and many more, but what was really interesting was to find PhD students studying such similiar topics to me! It becomes easy to think that I'm the only one doing research in my field, but that is of course not true, especially as it is such a current issue. Having said that, we were all approaching it in different ways.

I picked up on a lot of new information and will have to spend time going back through my literature review to add these details. What really struck me is the amount of work going on to help the conditions for workers globally, and the number of barriers that they face. I also realised that if I want to start my own label in the future, there is a lot of support out there to help me find an ethical way of manufacturing products. I'll update the blog as I go through my notes and the conference papers.