Sunday, August 22, 2010

The vision

What would a sustainable textile industry look like? How would we shop? The sustainable textile rules are similar to sustainable food rules and I envision a similar system for textiles as is emerging for food.

Local farmers in your area grow fibers organically, without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. At your local farmer's market, you browse the soft, fluffy piles of wool and cotton, or smooth, lustrous linen or silk, or alpaca or angora rabbit or cashmere or whatever other fibers grow in your area. You select the best fiber for your current needs and take it home or to your local processor to spin or felt, weave or knit, sew or shape. The farmers might also sell ready-spun and -dyed yarn as well as finished fabric or garments. Many people also grow fibers in their gardens, along with their vegetables, or keep a few sheep or rabbits or alpaca in their yards along with the chickens.

Later, you stop in at your local fabric shop and check out the latest wool suitings, cotton shirtings, bedsheet percales, and gorgeous pattern-woven silk dress fabrics. All these textiles are made by regional textile mills or local craftspeople. They buy fiber from the same local sustainable farms and create all kinds of cloth. From fiber to fabric, all steps take place in one production center or complex, including cleaning the fibers, spinning, weaving or knitting, dyeing or printing, and finishing. The workers live in your town or area and make a living wage. The dyeing and finishing are done without any toxic and polluting chemicals. You take your fabric home or to a local seamstress to sew into simple clothes, bedsheets, curtains, or whatever else you need.

For more complicated or nicer garments, you take your fabric to your local tailor or dressmaker's shop to have your clothes made. You collaborate with the dressmaker on your garment design and in choosing your trimming and notions. She contributes expertise in fabric drapery and cut, suggestions on styles she has seen work before, and information on current fashion trends or historic styles as appropriate. You contribute your preferences on the style, cut, colors and fabrics that work for you. You might bring in pictures of clothes you've seen to be copied, with whatever adjustments you want, or your favorite old dress to be recreated in fresh fabric. All of your clothes fit you perfectly, are exactly the right length, height, and width in every place. The colors are always flattering to your complexion, the cuts always flattering to your figure, the style always exactly what you feel most comfortable and lovely wearing. What a dream!

Your local furnishing shop offers all the custom upholstery, drapery, and household linens that are too complicated for you to make at home. You buy your fabric at the fabric store or browse the furnisher's selection, and she applies it to your furniture, makes your curtains or rugs or bedskirts or quilts, as well as your sheets and towels and kitchen towels if you prefer not to hem these at home. Your home is filled with colors and fabrics you love, and you can always get new pieces to fill out your collection. Your pattern is never discontinued.

Also, the milliners! Bring back the hat.

All of these beautiful, natural fibers, fabrics, clothes and soft furnishings are more expensive than the old industrial, synthetic, polluting, sweatshop-produced textiles, because they are produced sustainably by people living near us. Therefore most of us cannot afford the large amounts of clothing and household textiles people were accustomed to in the dirty times. However, the quality is so much better, and everything is custom-made exactly as we prefer, so the fewer items we do have are so much more satisfying than the piles of never-quite-exactly-right things we used to make do with. Plus, we have gained extra space in our homes by turning those gargantuan walk-in closets in late-twentieth-century houses into nurseries, offices, storage rooms, craft rooms, and other uses.

You carefully care for, store, and mend your expensive clothes and linens to make them last as long as possible. You launder your clothes and linens at home in your machine or by hand, and dry on the line in the sunshine or in the machine. You resew buttons and hems, mend holes, let out or take in seams based on your changing shape, remove stains, and store your freshly cleaned clothes in cedar and lavender to prevent pests. For specialty items or the time-pressed, professional cleaners offer hand washing, sustainable dry-cleaning, and mending. When the clothes and furnishings are beyond repair, you or the dressmaker or furnisher salvage the remaining usable fabric for a child's garment, a smaller chair or window curtain, or a bag or other smaller item. As the smaller items wear out, eventually the fabric becomes cleaning rags.

Or, instead of wearing your clothes and furnishings out or reusing the fabric, you sell them at the consignment shop, where you can also browse for pre-worn clothes and furnishings you might like.

Finally when only useless scraps are left, you sell them to the regional textile mills to be recycled into shoddy fabric, insulation, paper, or some other product. Or, you simply throw the scraps on the compost heap to biodegrade along with the rest of the organic material that feeds your garden.

No comments:

Post a Comment