A person can find themselves with very few clothing options if they want clothes produced in a planet, people and animal friendly manner.
The Vegan Shoe Lady who is a clothing designer and owner of Shop Humanitaire wrote this interesting essay about a lesser known difficulty of promoting planet, people and animal friendly clothing:
As a blunt, honest person, I WANT to tell them point-blank why their wares can’t cut it in this style-oriented, perfection-obsessed market. I’d love to sit them all down, show them pictures of our top-selling styles, and ask them to drop us a line when they’re making something in a similar vein. I would readily offer to help them develop products that I could sell all day long. I’d win, they’d win, my customers would win, and everyone would be happy, right?
If only it were that easy.
The fact of the matter is, designers (even the amateurs) are often hypersensitive creatures who do not take criticism well (and I’m allowed to say that because I’m one too).
There are a number of creative people who work less interesting “day jobs” that provide the resources for them to be creative in their spare time.
Perhaps these clothing designers could produce a mix of conventional clothing out of people, planet and animal friendly materials for the rest of us, get paid, and have a separate set of clothing for the more experimentally minded of those among us.
Just a thought from a regular guy who knows nothing about clothing.
Bravo, B.W.
Point of clarification: most of the niche designers to which I refer in that post actually don’t have day jobs – they design full time (there are ways of finding these things out, and I often do).
I am all for creative expression (my grad collection was in the Avant Garde category, for pity’s sake), but the offerings that prompted that post create far more problems than they solve, and design is supposed to be about creating solutions that work.
Hey Stitches;
I didn’t mean anything about day jobs literally.. I meant that things could work for everyone if the niche designers branched out into making a mix of normal clothing out of friendly materials to pay the bills and creative clothing for their artistic endeavors. Everybody would get something.
FWIW, I think your blog post might make a good essay in Herbivore or some publication that the niche designers might likely read.
It sounds like you know what you are talking about.