GreenJeans: The Evolution of Eco-Friendly Fashion

As you walk east on New York’s 6th Street, dodging ripped trash bags and discarded stacks of books, Gomi NYC’s neon-green awning beckons, bright and defiant. A modest placard sits out front, inviting you to pause and browse. Inside, the tiny room—painted a rich, dark red—is packed with stacks of clothes festooned with little hand-written cards. “Try it, touch it!” they say. Or, in the case of a mound of organic cotton-pashmina-blend shirts, “So soft for you.” The notes feel loving and maternal—like the tender missives tucked into lunchboxes by doting grandmothers—and the shop’s well-coiffed staff is no less endearin.

With racks of dresses, glass cabinets packed with jewelry and leather handbags, and tables piled high with jeans and sweaters, Gomi NYC is the kind of expertly curated neighborhood boutique New York’s fashion elite—young, stylish women with thick bangs, Wayfarers and knee boots—swarm for cutting-edge, special-occasion pieces and simple, well-crafted basics. And while you’d never presume it from a casual browse, Gomi NYC is also stocked exclusively with sustainable, eco-friendly clothing.
   
Over the last half-decade, the practice of “going green”—reducing waste, avoiding or cutting back on non-renewable resources—has become fairly commonplace. Fifty-three percent of those surveyed in the Nature Conservancy's Harris Poll on green living have "taken steps to green their lives," like driving less, reducing utility use and replacing incandescent light bulbs for fluorescent ones. But the clothes we tug off of hangers and pull over our bodies every day are—in many cases—as damaging to the earth as plastic bags and gas-gulping vehicles. Maybe it’s the longstanding stereotype about the aesthetics of eco-friendly clothes (the phrase still conjures images of yoga instructors and meditation leaders, bedecked in dashikis and medallions), or maybe it’s a dearth of easy options, but fashion is one of the last facets of American life to go mainstream green.
   
Instead, Americans are continuing to embrace disposable fashion, buying bushels of clothes at low-cost, high-trend mass retailers like H&M and Forever 21, and then stuffing the pieces into trashcans when they shrink, unravel or fall apart. Even worse than the glut of wasted clothing is the way in which these garments are made: Most of the synthetic fabrics—acrylic, polyester, rayon, acetate, triacetate, nylon and others—employed in mass-market clothing are aggressively treated with toxic chemicals (many carcinogenic) during and after manufacturing, and both the process and the compounds can have ruinous environmental effects. Consider, too, the proliferation of sweatshop and child labor overseas and, suddenly, the way we dress has never felt so political—or so vital.
   
But a new generation of designers and retailers are trying to change the way Americans think about clothes by reinventing the notion of eco-friendly fashion: Gone are the ill-fitting hemp dresses and Birkenstocks of yesteryear, replaced by bias-cut dresses, high-heeled leather boots, and impeccably sewn skinny jeans.
   
In October 2008, Bravo’s Project Runway named Leanne Marshall—a 28-year-old Portland, Ore.-based designer—its fifth victor. Marshall’s stunning final collection, which showed at New York’s annual Fashion Week in Bryant Park, was constructed, in part, using eco-friendly textiles like bamboo and organic cotton, which Marshall detailed during her final judging session. It was one of the most-discussed (and highest profile) moments for eco-friendly fashion to date: Although small designers had been experimenting with sustainable materials for years, most major design houses had long eschewed the notion. Marshall had an enviable platform, and spoke loudly on behalf of the eco-minded.
   
“You know, it’s kind of shocking how a lot of the high-end designers totally dismiss or scoff at the thought of using sustainable textiles,” Marshall says. “There are certainly some that do choose to use them—it’s a smart decision for the planet and for business, because there are increasingly more and more consumers who do care about the environment, and choose accordingly. They want to buy products from people who give a damn and are doing whatever they can in a positive direction. But, of course, there is also a mass of consumers that don’t care as long as they are paying a cheap price and saving themselves a dollar or two.”
   
Marshall admits that, for a designer, going eco-friendly can be taxing and, occasionally, impossible. Although eco-friendly materials aren’t necessarily more expensive, they do limit a designer’s choices. “Color suffers,” Marshall confesses. “It’s really hard to find good colors and patterns in sustainable textiles. Most are a natural off-white, or muddy, muted ‘earthy’ hues. Every once in a while, you can find a nice, bright bamboo jersey. It’s also very hard to find really high-end luxurious fabrics that are sustainable—they don’t really exist,” she continues.

“There aren’t, to my knowledge, any organic silk organzas, or high quality organic duchess satin or chiffon. You can’t really make a floaty, ethereal couture gown out of bamboo jersey. There are a lot of limitations, but when I need to use the silk chiffon I’ll find a way to line the garment in a sustainable fabric,” she says. “If I could be anything else than a clothing designer, it would be a textile developer, and I would create all those sustainable textiles that don’t exist yet.”
   
Because of the complicated ways in which clothes are constructed and distributed, declaring a skirt or pair of jeans “sustainable” isn’t always an easy endeavor. Gomi NYC owner Anne Bernstein, who has been dedicated to educating the public about the advantages of eco-friendly fashion since she opened the shop five years ago, believes that in order for a piece of fashion to be accurately dubbed “sustainable,” its creators have to be conscious of three things: the health of the planet, the health of the workers making the garments, and the quality of the product (for an item to be truly sustainable, it has to be built for long-term use). “Sustainability is a term that’s thrown around a lot these days,” Bernstein says. “When we first opened the store over five years ago, almost no one had ever heard the word before. In terms of sustainable fashion, how the raw materials are created is key—so with cotton, for example, the use of excessive toxic pesticides is avoided. How is the fiber woven or created? How is the factory powered? How do the materials get to the factory? During manufacturing, how is waste dealt with? When the fabrics are turned into articles of clothing, how efficient is that process? How well is the garment made?” she demands. Nodding to the preponderance of sweatshop-produced products, Bernstein is also conscious of the human workers involved. “In all stages, from raw-material production to retail, work conditions are also key,” she adds. “Humans must be treated well and fairly.”
   
But while sustainable fashion is slowly eking its way into the mainstream, plenty of people—Bernstein included—worry that if it becomes too much of a fad, a backlash will be inevitable. Instead, they’d like to see sustainable fashion become an irreversible norm. “I hope people actually think it’s important and not just a passing trend—that the shift of interest is because of necessity. I hope in the near future every designer is eco-friendly so that we don’t have to even use the term, it’s just understood,” says Erica Bradbury, a 31-year-old jewelry and clothing designer, who runs her eco-friendly company, Species by the Thousands, from her Greenpoint, Brooklyn, apartment. Bradbury’s jewelry, in particular, focuses on the use of recycled materials, which is a relatively simple way fashion can be made sustainable. “I really like old stuff, and the idea of repurposing outdated jewelry parts and fabrics seemed like a good way to reconcile putting ‘new’ things into the world without having the anxiety of adding to the problem of the overabundance of stuff in the world,” Bradbury says. “Over the last couple of years, it’s become easier to find ways to make jewelry and clothing eco-friendly without relying on using solely vintage materials. For jewelry, I can make cast pieces in precious metals that are 100-percent recycled, thanks to companies like Hoover and Strong who don't buy their metals from mining companies, but instead use scraps.”
   
Likewise, Tierra Del Forte—a 34-year-old denim designer based in the San Francisco area—senses that public perception of eco-friendly clothing is changing. “There has been a huge shift in the last few years,” she notes. “When I started, many of the buyers I would talk to about the line didn’t even know what organic cotton was. Now, people are much more informed. Most people are very aware of the climate crisis and want to take action to reduce their own impact—one easy way to do this is to buy organic whenever possible, and now that’s possible in boutiques and department stores as well as the supermarket.” Del Forte Denim is made exclusively from organic cotton, which is grown without the use of chemical pesticides or fertilizers. “Instead,” Del Forte explains, “Organic farmers use biological methods of discouraging pests and increasing yields. For example, they’ll release ladybugs around their crops instead of spraying pesticides, because ladybugs are a natural predator of the pests that harm cotton plants.”
   
Although eco-friendly fashion is still mostly the terrain of younger, smaller designers, a few larger corporations are embracing sustainable ideology and incorporating more eco-friendly materials into their lines. Edun, a denim and graphic-tee company founded in 2005 by Ali Hewson and her husband, U2’s Bono, is dedicated to introducing fair commerce to impoverished communities (what they describe as a “trade, not aid” philosophy). The company’s mission—to drive sustainable employment in developing economies by bolstering the skill sets of factory workers in places like India, Peru, Tunisia, Kenya, Uganda, Lesotho, Mauritius and Madagascar—is based on manufacturing, but Edun is beginning to incorporate more sustainable materials (at present, all of its graphic tees are made from organic cotton). Meanwhile, TOMS shoes—a Santa Monica, Calif.-based shoe company that donates a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair purchased—uses all natural textiles, avoiding petroleum-based molded pieces, metal eyelets, and buckles, and limiting toxic glues in the construction of its signature shoe, a no-frills variation on the Argentine alpargata.  
   
Eco-friendly clothing’s reputation is evolving, both as consumers learn more about the devastating environmental repercussions of traditional manufacturing processes and as designers strive to squash preconceptions about the way these clothes look. "I strive to make it something entirely modern and sophisticated and, quite frankly, something that you would never even know was sustainable,” says Marshall. “It’s just great design that people can appreciate—and oh yeah, by the way, it just happens to be sustainable, too.”