What does "sustainability" mean?

June 26, 2010

Frida Giannini Gucci’s creative director describes “sustainability” to be “Quality items that stand the test of time--it is this concept of sustainability, symbolized by the timeless handbag that you wear again and again, that you can pass on, that I am always thinking about when I design.”

Oscar de la Renta says that “sustainable fashion implies a commitment to the traditional techniques, and not just the art, of making clothes. I work today in the same way that I first learnt in the ateliers of Balenciaga and Lanvin 50 years ago.”

Anya Hindmarch, designer, brand founder and initiator of the “I am not a plastic bag” initiative: “I would define the ideal as locally sourced materials that don’t pollute in their creation or demise (preferably recycled) and with limited transportation to achieve the completed product.”

Designer and Brand founder Dries van Noten: “Most of what we may currently refer to as sustainable fashion is a contradiction in terms. It refers to how the fabric used for a new garment has been produced...Yet, I believe, we need to consider this issue from a more macro and profound perspective. Though a cotton may be unbleached, we need to consider how it arrives to the manufacturer or to us the wearer. What was the ‘carbon imprint’ of its delivery, for example?”

Four Reasons Interest in Sustainability will Fuel a Local Yoked-Benefice:

Materials: These are questions that will increase with great emphasis on local production. What is the product made of? What is its origin? Did the making of the material harm the environment? What is the carbon footprint of getting the product to market?

Form: Buying locally produced goods means a more locally addressed demand for functionality and beauty. The consumer is more aware he is in control of what shape an object takes and will emphasize that the object will agree with the environment it will be situated in.

Craft: Presently an important question is “Who made what I am wearing?” “Were they paid a fair wage?” These questions are only the beginning of the path to intimacy with craft and the craftsman. In the mechanical era the demand was only that the product do what it claims to do. A switch turns on a light bulb. It does not govern anything else about the light. In the technological era the demand is that the light bulb, for instance, not just produce light, but also how much light, when and for how long, etc. Consequently, the need to know and witness the making of goods increases manifoldly. Therefore, maker will have to be more local.

Purpose: What happens when technology fails to answer the needs we have demanded of it? Oil spills, pollution, global warming spell out environmental apocalypticism and represent a loss of purpose in an immanent secular society. As a result the appetite for local control of technology will grow exponentially. Windmills and solar panels gain popularity in the popular imagination because their origin and purpose are easily and locally encompassed.

The Goods of Conscience

The Goods of Conscience as a line of apparel is a play on words. “Goods” in the rag trade refers to cloth before it is made into clothing. The term “the Goods of Conscience” refers, in Catholic social teaching, to the four principal “goods” or rewards of conscience that come with the knowledge of the moral soundness of a choice a consumer makes in a purchase. The four “goods of conscience” are these:

Individuality: Is the hand or identity of the person who made the good evident in the object? This is easier to see with a hand-made product, but even with a technological good the clarity of design is often a testimony of its integrity.

Common Good: Does the production of the product serve the common good? Were toxic dyes used that harm the environment? What are the political and economic conditions that surround purchase of a good. Blood diamonds in recent years has received due attention for how consumer power can fuel injustice.

Susidiarity: Did all the parties involved in production receive a fair wage? Many times this is interpreted as preventing exploitation in a third world country and rightly so. But the other side of the spectrum is equally true: those that labor to bring a product to market are due their just rewards.

Preferential Option for the Poor: The victims of systemic and chronic poverty need intercession. This intercession should be involved in the very structure of the consumer purchase.