I’ve had this old pair of high-waisted shorts for years. While I love them, I don’t nearly wear them as much as I’d like because they’re rather plaincompared to the rest of my wardrobe.
My closet has a lot of frilly lacy things these days, so I figured it was time to update these shorts to make them match the rest of my clothes better.
The project:
This project was simple: I just looked through my lace stash for a trim that would be a good match to my shorts, decided on the placement, and sewedit on.
[ID: a pair of beige high-waisted shorts lying on a wooden floor.]
[ID: an end of off-white cotton lace lying on top of beige fabric.]
[ID: a pair of beige high-waisted shorts lying on a wooden floor. Off-white lace has been sewn along the pockets, the edges of the legs, and the sides near the shirred parts of the waistband.]
Conclusion:
If you’ve got clothes you love but never wear, ask yourself why. Sometimes the solution can be as simple as embellishingthe item to fit your styleagain.
All I did was add some lace to these shorts to make them feel brand new and to make them easier to combine with the rest of my wardrobe.
Projects like these are why I never throw out lace. Aesthetically speaking, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But if you like it, it makes for a veryversatile tool to update clothesandhide imperfectionswith.
At the Met Gala 2016, Emma Watson wore a dress made from recycled plastic bottles, which was a collaboration with Calvin Klein and Livia Firth’s Green Carpet Challenge.
“Being able to repurpose this waste and incorporate it into my gown for the #MetGala proves the power that creativity, technology and fashion can have by working together.”
Child Labor Free have collaborated with New Zealand artist Dick Frizzell and London based Zabou x Villanaart to design limited edition t-shirts to fundraise and establish an education and care centre for high risk children in the red light district of Kolkata.
The 100% organic cotton t-shirts are sourced from Freeset. Freeset is a fair trade business offering employment to women trapped in Kolkata’s sex trade. Proceeds from the sales of these t-shirts go on to provide support to their community and help break the cycle of child exploitation in the district.
Danielle Lara is a UK based luxury fashion and eveningwear label, designing ethical women’s wear inspired by dance, nature, love and seduction. All collections are Made in the UK using fairtrade and eco-friendly luxury fabrics such as organic peace silk and silk hemp that are traceable back to source and support artisan communities around the world.
The fall 2016 collection features romantic hand printed roses and vintage Valentino lace, combining classic styling with artistically unique detailing to create elegant, trans-seasonal clothing to wear and treasure for years to come.
Mother and daughter Lisa Bonet and Zoe Kravitz photographed by Cass Bird for Calvin Klein watches and jewelry ‘Life in the Now’ campaign, celebrating the richness and immediacy of relationships.
‘When women support each other incredible things happen’ and Sudara are helping women in India to rebuild their lives after escaping sex slavery, through their non profit clothing label for women, men and children. A powerful example of how business and consumers can be the change and empower people through ethical trade.
Los Angeles based The Giving Keys provide employment for people transitioning out of homelessness, and create handmade jewelry for women and men using repurposed keys engraved with inspiring words. Choose a word which resonates with you and then eventually pay it forward to someone else who needs it more. www.thegivingkeys.com Post link
San Francisco Ballet dancer Yuan Yuan Tan performing at the Climate Revolution themed Art of Elysium gala, Los Angeles wearing a Vivienne Westwood gown.
Winner of Best Actress in a TV Drama series, Taraji P. Henson is stunning in a white Stella McCartney dress. Mr Robot star, Carly Chaikin is gorgeous in a hand embroidered sequin dress by designer Juan Carlos Obando who works with communities in Colombia to preserve traditional artisanal techniques. Amy Schumer chose a monochrome Prabal Gurung gown and Taylor Schilling is chic and stylish in Thakoon, accessorized with Monique Pean jewelry. Post link
The ‘Child Labor Free 12 days of Christmas’ ethical gift guide is new take on christmas giving, and features brands on the Child Labor Free journey - brands who have committed to ensuring their supply chain is free of child labor. Whether they hold the CLF mark, or have just started the process, every brand is dedicated to operating ethically and sustainably. Celebrate transparency this festive season, and not only will you be giving a beautiful gift to a loved one, you will also be positively impacting on the lives of thousands of children everywhere.
‘It might sound like we’re cut from the same cloth, but Consumer Activists of yesteryear share few similarities with our modern Ethical Consumer selves. While Consumer Activists went to great lengths to understand how products were made and sold and how corporations function, this process of knowing was not in service of choosing better products (à la the Pollan era of privatized enlightened consumption)—it was for the explicit purpose of holding corporations and government accountable. “Consumer reforms cannot be separated from corporate reforms: they are two sides of the same coin,” wrote Nader in The Consumer and Corporate Accountability, a 1973 anthology of the movement’s mid-career victories.‘
‘The most striking difference between yesterday’s consumer activist and today’s ethical consumer is the matter of responsibility. Who or what is to blame for social problems, and who has the power to solve them? Consumer Activists believed that companies selling goods and services have a responsibility to “their customers, to their workers, and to the government agencies which regulate them.” Companies have a responsibility to society. And when companies endanger us or the environment, it’s their fault, not ours as shoppers. They understood that the market must be tamed with democracy, and rules, and guardrails, or it would always exploit.
The Ethical Consumer, by contrast, somehow believes that we personally cause social problems by sending market cues that we want unethical and unsustainable products. If we follow our own beliefs to their logical conclusion, that means problems as serious as the climate crisis, racist inequality, union-busting, food deserts, and sweatshop wages are somehow the result of not shopping in the right stores. How convenient for the Fortune 500 companies that directly cause so many of these troubles.‘
But: ‘ESG bonds and loans are only a starting point. Indicative of progress within the industry, many still fail to address pressing issues surrounding labour rights and environmental issues beyond their own operations.
“Within the social space, the real material issue is actual wages, and bonds are not going to magically solve those issues,” said Bédat. “Materiality means what is happening on your scope three emissions, materiality means what wages are your workers receiving, materiality means how many people of colour are on your board. That’s the way to move away from greenwashing or green aspirations and really fundamentally address and change how companies are operating.”’
‘Bangladesh is a prime spot for a mass-recycling experiment. It is ground zero for fast-fashion manufacturing thanks to its low-wage workforce. This means that a lot of cheap, low-quality clothes pass through its borders, leading to a lot of waste. (This cheap labor often comes at a high human cost: Many Bangladeshi workers face terrible working conditions; in 2013, the Rana Plaza garment factory collapsed, killing 1,134 workers.) Factories are full of clothes that were thrown out because of a manufacturing error and bolts of fabric that were ordered but never used—plus all the scraps leftover from regular production. COVID-19 has only exacerbated this problem. The pandemic has hit the fashion industry hard and many brands have cancelled orders. According to the Global Fashion Agenda, wasted fabrics and finishes are piling up at factories. The goal of the recycling project is to capture these and other waste materials, then transform them back into new clothes.’ ‘Still, sustainability experts warn that recycling is not going to save the planet if clothing consumption continues to increase, and fast-fashion brands continue churning out billions of clothes every year. In addition to recycling, consumers need to buy less and wear each item longer. And brands need to design and market clothes so they are more durable—which is diametrically opposed to how fast-fashion brands design today.’
‘Every item for sale on a secondhand marketplace must be sorted, priced, photographed and described in a listing. Multi-brand resellers have giant warehouses where some of that work is automated. Few brands can hope to achieve the scale needed to do the same.
At Eileen Fisher, for example, all new items must have a price tag that also includes a bar code and information about the materials used, information that comes from various departments. Eileen Fisher Renew, the resale arm, has to figure out what older pieces are made of and set its own prices, said Cynthia Power, the secondhand division’s director.
“There are these [surprising] challenges, where when something feels like it should be easy actually isn’t at all,” Power said. “If you’ve built your company as a retail company, offering resale requires a different set of practices.”’
‘Pairing upcycling with a quest for uniqueness and supporting charities has, over time, become the core of Williams’ label. Except now she’s selling her pieces via some of the biggest luxury retailers in the world, collaborating with sportswear giants, and setting a standard for what partnering with charitable projects could, and arguably should, look like within the fashion space. And she’s doing a lot of that work with the help of donated and recycled textiles. “We have yarns donated from different suppliers in Italy and then we just use those materials. If one store has a different colorway to another store, it’s because we’ve run out [of one particular yarn or material]."’
‘H&M releases [two] ‘conscious collections’ a year and calls themselves sustainable… how about you make all your clothes sustainable (and properly disclose how they’re even sustainable). How about you pay your workers liveable wages and give them good working conditions.‘
