Is your beauty shelf heaving with products, some unopened, others opened, not empty but unused? Are you a victim of the promise of eternal youth and flawless skin that comes in expensively packaged pots and jars? Yip, well most of us are. Whether they provide…
As the academic year draws to a close, fashion design students have been busy finalising their end-of-year collections. For her fourth-year project, Erin Hooper not only considered the environment but also the collapse of the Cape Town clothing and textile industry. When developing her final thesis for…
‘What’s the Stitch?’ is a new monthly column by Emma Jones-Phillipson about dressing sustainably in our modern age. She’ll pair critical insights into the environmental and social impacts of the fashion industry with useful guides to conscious buying, wearing, and mending clothes. Don’t fret about…
You know how the promise of summer feels: days are a little longer, the temperature slowly gets warmer, once every few days we have a teasingly perfect day followed by a colder one…It’s not long now before we can spend summer days on a beach…
https://youtu.be/vlkVfXIBPaU At a star-studded fashion event in Milan on Sunday night, the latest sustainable trends and innovation in fashion were on show at their luxurious best. Gowns, dresses and suits made from handwoven palm straw, recycled polyester, organic silk, upcycled denim... were gloriously worn…
The 2018 winner of the best film in the fashion category of Bokeh Fashion Film Awards is Picha Marangi. This two-minute long film starts with seconds of smoky, depressing landfill imagery, but quickly segues into a film that leaves you feeling like you’ve been listening…
With a passion for the natural environment and a fascination with the secret language we all speak through our clothes, Hanri Taljaard is currently knee-deep in a PhD study, focusing on “voluntary simplistic” clothing consumption practices in South Africa. Nadia Krige asked Hanri a few questions:…
On the first day of New York Fashion Week, slow fashion had its moment in Hong Kong. Last Thursday 11 emerging sustainable designers from around the world showed their collections at the Grand Final of the Redress Design Award 2018, the world’s largest sustainable fashion…
On the small mezzanine level of a house in Johannesburg, the Wrapt team is busily working at knitting machines. It’s been a few months since they joined Hannelie Bekker’s new knitwear label but already Oupa Nhovela, Anna Setloboko and Felicity Mhlanga have created multiple designs…
Rowena Bird is picking up trash when we meet. Her hair is soft pink, her lips painted a brighter pink and she’s wearing Parly Adidas sneakers made from recycled ocean plastic. On her recent visit to South Africa, she’s cleaning up Milnerton beach, across the…
When Dirty Fashion was released in June last year, most of us woke up to the horrific production processes of viscose. The Changing Markets Foundation which researched and compiled the report has since established a roadmap to better production processes and last month it released,…
We all love the feel of viscose. It’s soft and luxurious to the touch. So, it shouldn’t surprise you much that after it was first commercially produced in 1905 it was often called “artificial silk”. The silkiness is obvious. But artificial? Maybe this comes as…
Shoes aren't an easy product to make sustainably. Most mainstream mass shoe manufacturing involves toxic glues and plastics and unsustainably-sourced rubber and leather. A few companies have succeeded in making a shoe that is credibly sustainable and looks cool too. I noticed some exciting social…
In the Kullu Manali Valley valley lies Bhutti, a small hard-to-access village on the foothills of the Himalayas in Northern India. It’s here you’ll find one of the world’s last hand-weaving societies in the world. And it is here that Cape Town-based designer Ben Nivison's…
In this extract from How to Give up Plastic: Save the world one plastic bottle at a time, author Will McCallum gives us the lowdown on plastic and our clothes. You'll be surprised by what he has to say. It comes as a surprise to…