Making a Sustainable Wardrobe Simple For All
Ethical Fashion expert Amisha Ghadiali calls on us to make 2012 ‘The Year of The Sustainable Wardrobe’ with each of us becoming conscious consumers and demanding that the fashion industry is changed. The global industry that employs one sixth of the world’s population is riddled with issues such as fast fashion, toxic chemical use, forced labour and waste. Even though our awareness is deepening about this, most of us don’t have a clue how to think about making our wardrobes sustainable.
Amisha says “When I speak to friends and colleagues there doesn’t seem to be a great feeling of responsibility about how we shop and how we dress. Many feel that it’s a girl’s fashion issue, yet we all wear clothes no matter our sex, age, or how stylish we consider ourselves.”
“The responsibility to change fashion is shared between the fashion industry, governments and us. What we buy or demand makes an enormous difference to what is made. There is a whole vocabulary building up around ethical fashion, with phrases such as Pre-Loved, Up-Cycled, Organic and Fair-trade. It’s important that we all start to understand what these mean and this is the future of fashion.”
Amisha has collaborated with Visual Communication Designer Joana Casaca Lemos to develop a poster and checklist that would makes it easy for us to think about what we buy and what we wear. As the fashion industry is now so global, they have translated their poster and wardrobe shopping checklist into a number of different languages, so that the message can be spread far and wide. The rules and checklist are free to download so as not to prevent anyone from joining in. They are designed to be realistic to the way that we shop and to give us motivation to change our ways.
“Clothes are an important part of our daily life. We have the opportunity to affect millions of people’s lives and to protect our environment by how we shop and what we wear,” says Amisha. “Rules are made to be broken, but by following these you can make a difference.”
Joana Casaca Lemos said “When Amisha proposed bringing to life her “12 Rules to Dress By” I thought it would be a good opportunity to explore how visual communication could lead us to better interact with clothing items. In the format of a poster, “The 12 Rules” were laid-out in a fun tone, aiming to be graphically engaging. It was important to have easy references to the fashion industry. For this, using universal icons such as the ‘cut here scissors’ and the washing instructions icons, are immediate clues. In order to make “The 12 Rules” practical and applicable to the everyday, they were also designed in the format of a Checklist – an easy, simple tool.
Overall, by following these “The 12 Rules” and accounting each one’s fashion consumption, it can lead to better understand the greater impact of our choices.”
