Sustainable Fashion: The Road Less Traveled

Laura and I embrace many of the “green” tenets necessary to be a Brooklynite.  We recycle avidly, we bring our reusable bags to the store and we pick up our weekly veggie and fruit allocation every Saturday morning from our local CSA (community supported agriculture). In fact, we even share our CSA with our neighbors--I mean what is more Brooklyn than that…besides bushy beards and artisanal coffee shops? In short, we take active steps to make sure we are taking care of the environment, but none of those sustainable actions translated into our clothing. It wasn’t until we started working on Kirrin Finch that we understood how much the fashion industry damages the environment and people living near it and working in it. In fact, many people don't realize the fashion industry is the second most polluting industry, second only to big oil. When we found this out, the floodgates opened, and there was no turning back.  We had to be a part of the movement to make fashion more sustainable. 

So, sustainability, that buzzword that everyone keeps throwing around. What is it actually, and what does it look like in the context of fashion brands? Well, at Kirrin Finch, we wondered too. So we investigated to find out what different clothing brands were doing to incorporate sustainability into their business models and which of those strategies would fit for Kirrin Finch. In the end, one of the things we realized was that sustainability takes on different forms depending on the unique needs of each business.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We should start from the beginning when Laura and I commenced working on our business plan and started to plan out ways to incorporate sustainable practices. Our first thoughts went directly to using recycled packaging materials, manufacturing locally and using fabrics with natural fibers so they would eventually disintegrate all by themselves. To be honest, those are all valid ideas and we plan to implement all of them…but it wasn’t until the BF+DA asked us to complete our sustainability plan that we realized how much more we could do. Zero waste fashion, buttons made out of nuts, promoting low impact care, slow fashion… all these new ideas!

Sure, they all sounded fabulous! And our first thought was sign us up for ALL of them!  But once the dust settled, we realized we couldn’t do it all–and certainly not all during our first collection. In fact, the ironic part about sustainability strategies is that many of them can’t coexist with each other. Charlie Morris, the owner/creative director of Fanmail was asked how he approaches the need to pick through the various sustainability strategies to find what works best for Fanmail. “It’s a balance, definitely, but I see the potential for greater sustainability initiatives that can come with business growth–comprehensive auditing of ourselves and our supply chain, R&D of lower-impact product, and the buying power to influence our manufacturers to partner with us in these initiatives.” You simply can’t do them both at the same time. 

At Kirrin Finch, we recently ran into a sustainability dilemma with our buttons. On one hand, we loved the idea of using buttons made out of a natural material, like corozo (a nut) or shell. However, we were concerned about depleting natural materials from the environment.  The other option was to use buttons made out of a synthetic material, like polyester.  Synthetic materials never break down, thus contributing to the build up of waste.  Paradoxically, since they don’t break down, the garments will be less likely to be discarded due to broken buttons. Neither option offered the perfect solution, which unfortunately, is sometimes the case with sustainability. 

So we spoke to several brands that we thought were good models and asked them how they implemented sustainability. We figured we'd get a better understanding of the different ways brands can be sustainable, and then we would know what would work for us.  One of the people we spoke with was Mandy Kordal, the owner/creative designer of a women’s knitwear brand called Kordal Knitwear that produces in NYC and in Peru. “We do production in Peru because Alpaca is considered a really sustainable fiber. One reason is that the Alpacas themselves naturally irrigate and keep the land extremely fertile because their feet are more like dog paws, so when they are walking it isn’t super hard on the grass.” Even though Kordal prides itself on local manufacturing, she realized that manufacturing in NYC doesn’t make sense when she is working with Alpaca. “Instead of having the Alpaca wool shipped to the US, I am working with manufacturers in Peru. It took three trips to find someone who I really clicked with, and was someone who I knew would treat their workers right. They are also a small business, so it feels good to work with them.” 

We also spoke with Tara St. James from Study NY. She told us the sustainable strategy she felt most proud of was her anti-fashion calendar. Tara developed a new calendar because she felt “The fashion calendar in it of itself is broken, and I think that the way we approach the calendar is just antiquated…and not-because its current state is relatively new.  It has just become so fast and so overwhelming that I don’t think that’s sustainable in concept, let alone in practice. At Kirrin Finch we are focused on bucking the current trends of fast fashion and embracing slow fashion like Tara’s idea of the Anti-Fashion Calendar. That means that 80% of our garments are made outside the traditional fashion calendar to increase job security for the garment manufacturers we work with. We are also defying the traditional fashion calendar by having at least 70% of our designs be able to be worn across seasons.