Fashion engages with the 'real' world

Fashion flash mob? As in walking around a supermarket wearing clothes? Hilarious. Talk about dislocated from reality.

I'm all for aesthetics and escape, but at the end of the day, clothes need to be practical on some level. Getting gawped at like this in the supermarket wouldn't be a selling point for me...

Beautifully shot though.

Baroness Lola Young takes ethical fashion debate to House of Lords

I’ve finally got around to reading the transcript of the House of Lords debate on ethical and sustainable fashion which happened earlier this month. 

Image from www.demandingconversations.org.uk

I particularly enjoyed the way Baroness Lola Young put aside any doubts that fashion was relevant to parliamentary business by doling out some hefty stats on Government procurement - £691 million spent on wearing apparel alone. Add in other textile-related expenditure, and the total Government spend is £1.186 billion a year. 

For anyone else as tardy as me who hasn’t yet read it, here’s a link to the full transcript, or read a digested account from Made-By here.

Happy International Women’s Day!

Image from www.rt.com

Remember the Triangle Shirtwaist fire

Today marks the 100^th International Women’s Day. The first ever International Women’s Day happened in Europe less than a week before the horrific fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York on 25 March 1911. 146 young female garment workers died by burning or jumping to their deaths.

That fire ignited the fight for social justice, and became a focus for future International Women’s Day events.

Alas, incidents like this are still commonplace in places like Bangladesh where women knock together our cheap threads. In fact, the Clean Clothes Campaign points us to 9 similar incidentsin Bangladesh since the start of the millennium, causing a total of 273 deaths.
 

Image from www.guardian.co.uk

So let’s celebrate 100 Years of championing women’s rights and get behind the organisations who campaign for change and for justice. 100 years on it’s unacceptable that these ‘accidents’ still occur.

www.laborrights.org

www.cleanclothes.org

Be inspired

Read the history of International Women’s Day around the world here.

And check out the Guardian’s Top 100 Women (some more inspiring than others, it has to be said, but still a soul-rousing read).

Google maps shows denim pollution in China

See for yourself the pollution caused by jeans production. This satellite image from Google Maps shows chemical dyes washing downriver from textile mills in the denim capital of the world, Xintang, China.

Click to see it on Google Maps.