Still Alive

Since the Rana Plaza collapse in April, more and more attention has been drawn towards the dreadful conditions under which most garment workers in the Far East, Asia and India have to work. The trick is to keep that fact high on the agenda. It's important that the notion of better working conditions for third world workers doesn't become this year's fad. High in the sky like a firework one minute, nothing but cinders a moment later.
The Offset Warehouse, probably the biggest distributor of eco- and ethical-friendly clothing, are doing their bit to raise awareness. They've launched the "Still Alive" t-shirt, which boldly puts its status as cruelty-free wear front and centre. There's a nod to Katherine Hamnett's classic protest t-shirt designs in the strong, sans serif text and simple, direct message. It also makes an uncomfortable point in a clear fashion: it'll probably be one of the few items in your wardrobe that you can be totally certain has been made in an ethical manner. The t-shirts are made in factories where the employees are treated and paid fairly, and all the profits will go towards supporting the rights of garment workers worldwide.
They're under a fiver, which I'd say is well worth the investment. Show your support for garment workers rights, and look good doing it.

The Still Alive T-Shirt at Offset Warehouse

Veleco: Smart Cyclewear

Cycling is one of the smartest ways to get around. It has next to no environmental impact, keeps you fit and can be a lot of fun. Of course, you also get issues with pedestrians plugged into iPods who walk out in front of you without looking and drivers who hate the idea of sharing the road with anything that slows them down by 30 seconds. But then, nothing's perfect.
As you can tell, I'm a cyclist. I'm passionate about it as a sport, a pastime and a lean, sustainable means of transportation. However, I'm not one of the characters in skin-tight lycra. I'd look like even more of a cock than they do. I lean towards the Dutch school of cycling apparel--that is, wearing normal clothes.
However, I can be persuaded towards more specialist cycle-wear if the motivation is right. Which is why I'm pleased to announce that I'm one of the first sponsors for Fair Corp's new range of ethical bike gear. Currently running on Kickstarter, Veleco is a collection of t-shirts, classically-styled musette bags and caps made from organic cotton in a sweatshop-free environment. They come in a ton of different designs, and, if Fair Corp's famous Ethletic shoes are anything to go by, are built to last.
The campaign is currently at £1500, with 23 days left to run. £35 gets you a t-shirt with your choice of logo, a bag and a cap... and the knowledge that you're supporting a great new venture and, in a broader sense, the cycling cause. Being Kickstarter, it's a risk-free investment in a new business venture. If they don't make the target, you don't get the goodies. So join me, because I really fancy a skull and crankshaft t-shirt. If you're a cyclist with any sense of style, you should be all over this .
Get with the peleton, readers. The road awaits.
Veleco Kickstarter

After The Rubber Hits The Road

Rubber is one of those materials that just keeps on giving. Sustainably sourced (it's a sap produced by rubber trees which can be harvested for years on end) and tough enough to be recycled in all sorts of different ways. We're big fans of Katcha Bilek's designs for belts and accessories that she sells online and at her Bristol stall, but plenty of other designers see the benefits in recycled rubber.

Sophie Postma runs Reclaim Bags, a one-woman operation that creates exciting new bags and clutches from the most humble of starting points: old inner tubes. These come to her in conditions ranging from reasonable to, erm, "scarred". Frequently rusty and filthy, the tubes undergo careful cleaning before being polished, cut and formed into Reclaim's distinctive and minimalist product line.

Up until very recently, you could have any colour as long as it's black. In the last few weeks, however, Sophie has been experimenting with PVC flaps and inserts in red and white, adding a whole new range of texture and pop to a limited edition run of clutches.

The way in which Sophie hides the Reclaim brand name in cutouts shows a playful nature that works well with the formal lines of her designs. They're fun accessories with a real sense of flair, and surprisingly affordable.

They're available online, and at the Reclaim stall at Spitalfield Market every Friday. Worth a trip if you're in the City Of London.

Reclaim Bags

One Of Your Five A Day

We're always interested in finding out about alternative yarns for fabric. From traditional fibres like nettle and hemp that are ripe for rediscovery, to recycled plastics and spaceage monofibres, we've seen and written about them all here at The Pier.

But here's a real mind-boggler, and an inspired example of lateral thinking. A group of Italian students noted an increased problem with the disposal of citrus harvest waste near to their study base in Milan. Was there anything they could do with the huge amounts of pulp, rind and fibre that the food industry created?

Wait. Fibre. The waste is largely cellulose, which can be transformed into fibre, which can be used to make yarn, and then on to fabric. The students, chemistry majors at the Politechnico di Milano, spent a year on the problem.

The end result? Orange Fiber. The core fabric in designer Adriana Santanocito's Fall/Winter 2012 collection, this cloth has some surprising benefits apart from its impeccable ethical and environmental credentials.

Natural citrus oils remain in the fabric, so as you wear it the clothing releases doses of Vitamin A, C and E onto your skin. This benefit is something that nano-tech fabric researchers have been working on for years, trying to find ways of embedding micro-capsules of nutrients or moisturiser into the cloth. The students who now run Orange Fiber have beaten them to the finish line by all accounts. This is clothing that looks good and does you good.

What next? Well, Orange Fiber are one of ten startups to be featured at the 2015 Changemakers Expo in Milan, which should focus a ton of attention and money on them. Their goal is to bring new life to the Italian textile industry, and a shot of sunshine to ethical manufacture there.

I'll raise a glass of juice to that.

Saving The Rainforest With Lily Cole

You should, as the saying goes, never judge a book by the cover. Take model and actress Lily Cole. Her ethereal, almost alien looks have seen her spook up the catwalk for years. She's been cast as a sea-nymph in Doctor Who, and a mystery girl in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. She seems almost apart from this world. Otherworldly.
Her efforts on behalf of a wide range of ethical campaigns, and her role as the face of Sky Rainforest Rescue tell a different story. Now, in conjunction with them and the WWF she's launched a new range of jewellery, with an unusual main component.
Lily was inspired by a visit to wild rubber plantations in north-west Brazil, seeing huge, delicate sheets of the stuff hung out to dry. The rubber, in jewel-like colours, sparked an idea. It took a little work, though. She says:

"I looked into embroidering it, I looked into putting lace into it and creating different textures. I looked at carving it, but in the end all I had were these millimetre-thick sheets of rubber, so I ended up doing things very simply."

By which, she means pendants, ear-rings, bracelets and rings in warm, soft colours teamed with bronze inserts. They're somehow delicate, their simplicity all the more striking given the craftsmanship of the pieces.
The jewellery is designed to highlight an important issue: the erosion of wild rubber plantations in Brazil. Farmers, faced with dwindling profits in the face of plantation rubber, are cutting down hundreds of acres of virgin forest to clear space for crops and livestock. The task is to persuade these communities that wild rubber still has a place in the global marketplace, and is a viable alternative to farming. Lily wants to help save a billion trees in the Amazon rainforest. Encouraging the use of this most sustainable resource is a good way of keeping the trees where they belong: as part of the lungs of the world.
Projects like this are important to the role of green economics as a part of the general ecological movement. Empowering local communities to make the most of the resources to hand rather than forcing them into an ill-suited subsistence farming model helps them, us and the planet. Here at the Pier we applaud Lily's efforts, and note that this is no expensive vanity project. Her jewellery is thoroughly affordable, with rings starting at just a tenner. Well worth checking out. Why not get a little rubber in your life? You'll be doing us all a favour.

Lily Cole's Jewellery for the Sky Rainforest Rescue project is available at stylistpick.com.

*UPDATE* sold out with more coming soon, I'm told. If you Facebook, you can sign up to be told when new stock becomes available.

How many slaves work for you?

A tough question for a Monday morning, sure. But it's one that shouldn't be ignored. It's a hard truth that many of the raw materials and manufacturing processes on which we rely use slavery in some form or another, either as indentured workers or through debt bondage and economic migrancy gone wrong.

If you're a consumer, then at some point some products in your household have been touched by slavery. If you're a geek, like me, with a ton of gadgets in the house, or cotton clothing in the wardrobe
, or if you like prawns or bananas, or have a tin can in the food cupboard, then you are housing products of slavery. It's pointless to deny it.

It's important to know more about the role slavery still plays in the world, which is why I spent an eye-opening five minutes on Slavery Footprint. It takes you through the contents of your life, from clothes to food to technology, the car you drive, the bicycle you pedal so proudly to the station in the morning. Got kids? Well, they need feeding and clothing, and I bet they have a cupboard full of toys.

The friendly graphical interface takes you through everything, allowing you to finetune the results, before dropping a bomb on your head. Me? I like to think I lead a good life, with a low global impact. I took the survey, answering honestly.

53 slaves work for me.

Once the awful truth has dawned, you're given the chance to find out more, and maybe do something about it. But we should not be complacent. Slavery is still a major force in the global workplace, and our blithe ignorance of that fact doesn't make it any less real or shocking. I urge you to give Slavery Footprint a go, and find out just what your comfortable life is built on.

Slavery Footprint

There's Enough Food For Everyone If...

Back in January I wrote about the IF campaign. Like the Make Poverty History initiative that gave Gerry the Voice the big idea to make Pier32 all ethical all the time, IF uses people power to send a simple message to the people in power.

The simple fact is that world hunger is a logistical problem. There's plenty of food for everyone, if we take a few steps to change the way we source, harvest and distribute it--and if governments around the world do their bit to be open, transparent and fair about how it's happening.

The focus of the campaign is the G8 summit, held in London in June, with a huge event, The Big IF, in Hyde Park on June 8th. With just over a week to go, now's the time to show your support for a simple and powerful message. Together, we can make sure that world leaders hear us.

How do you show your support? Well, you could join names like Erin O'Connor, Rita Ora, Dermot O'Leary and Loki himself, Tom Hiddleston, and wear the ethical accessory of the summer: the IF wristband. Available at Oxfam, Save The Children and online at http://enoughfoodif.org/shop, they're made from 100% recycled materials and are customisable with special pins. Or you could simply sign up to the campaign at the IF website, and join over 80,000 people in letting the world know there's enough food for everyone, if...

Tell it like it is, David Beckham.

Name And Shame The Holdouts to the BFSA

My last post talked about how it's a bad idea to boycott or force companies out of Bangladesh, at a time when their money is most needed. However, this doesn't mean that we can't apply a little consumer power in the right places to make sure our favourite brands are doing right by their responsibilities. Knowledge is strength, and it's good to know who's upfront, and who's backtracking.

Many UK-familiar High Street names like Primark and Tesco have already signed the Bangladesh Fire Safety Agreement, a comprehensive workplace safety measure which, if properly implemented, could change the face of fashion manufacturing in the Far East and Asia.

In the States, it's a different matter. Only two major retailers, Abercrombie & Fitch (which shows the other side of the douchebaggery I highlighted last week) and PvH, home of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, have signed the accord. There are a lot of big name holdouts that could still torpedo the BFSA before it gets out of the dock.

So who are the companies that are trying to wriggle out of signing? The biggest names on the list (published this week by Ecouterre) are Gap and Walmart, who run the Asda brand in the UK. Gap, in particular, are striking a low blow by claiming that they're happy to sign with just one minor change to the agreement. That change being the removal of the clause making it legally binding. Which, let's be honest, removes the point of the whole thing.

It's interesting to note some obscure names on the list with some heavy High Street punch. VF Corp, for example, probably doesn't mean much to you. But they own high-profile outdoor brands like Timberland and The North Face. And they're still using factories that have the potential to collapse in the same way that the Rana Plaza did. Inspectors from Walmart and Inditex (owners of Zara) have found cracks in the walls of a factory near Dhaka, which caused it to fail safety audits. VF Corp see no problems with continuing to use this factory, saying only in a statement that it was" in daily contact with the facility and VF's leadership is closely monitoring the status in this facility and others in our Bangladesh supply chain."

It's important to keep track of what the big High Street and retail park brands are doing out in places like Bangladesh. They're counting on their Western customer base forgetting about the Rana Plaza, and about the promises of help and support. Let's show brands like Gap and faceless conglomerates like VF Corp that we can't forget, and that change in the death-trap factories that they run across Asia and the Far East is long over-due.

Boycotts Are Bad For Bangladesh

Multinational companies faced with the inevitable blowback from their involvement in the Rana Plaza disaster could be forgiven for considering retreat to be the safest course of action.
Getting out of Bangladesh makes all kinds of sense. Let's face it. The old saw of "all publicity is good publicity" simply doesn't apply here. If your labels have been found in the rubble, then you need to act quickly to avert the inevitable damage to your carefully-considered brand.
The smart option would seem to be to jump ship and move on. Disney have already announced that their clothes and toys will no longer be sourced from factories in Dhaka. The EU are thinking about punitive trade measures to force Bangladesh on line with international heath and safety standards. In that sort of toxic environment, and with your own customers boycotting you, wouldn't you think the best option would be to pack up shop and leave?
But leaving Bangladesh is the worst thing that the multinationals could do now. Their business is the lynchpin of the country's economy, bringing in billions that Bangladesh can ill afford to lose.
When you consider that 3.6 million Bangladeshi workers are employed in the garment industry, 80% of which are women who are the sole source of income for their families, the notion of Mango, Primark and the like leaving the country becomes a double blow. Workers have been maltreated for decades as the multinationals quietly allowed worker abuse and poor workplace safety to become the norm. When the companies were found out, all of a sudden they're packing up to leave leave, taking the money, the one reason that anyone would put up with a 12-hour working day in a sweltering factory, away with them. A lousy job is still a job, and if that's all you can get, then having it evaporate on you is a weight on top of the burden you already carry. The notion of leaving suddenly looks petulant, cowardly and cruel.
Like it or not, the garment industry in Bangladesh is helping to pull this desperately poor country out of the mire of extreme poverty. It's becoming increasingly urbanised, as rural workers move to the cities in search of a better life. Many, sick of scratching out an existance from the soil, dream of a life as a garment worker. It just goes to show how little we know about life in Bangladesh, and how our calls for boycott, made with the best of intentions, can have potentially disasterous consequences.
So what can we do? Well, we need to tell our High Street shops to make sure that their workers are safely and fairly treated, wherever they are in the world. Insist that they join the growing rollcall of signatories to the Bangladesh Fire Safety Agreement. And make sure we know that they're going to be around to help clean up the mess they helped create. If that means an extra 5p on a t-shirt, then so be it. It's about time we all realised just what the true cost of fast fashion is, and how little it takes to make a real difference to lives which are more closely tied to ours than we might have thought.

Fitch The Homeless

In the UK we are perhaps fortunate that Abercrombie & Fitch are a little-known brand. They have a certain noteriety as that shop that employs models to stand outside its flagship Mayfair store and lure in the unwary. Their diffusion Hollister brand is becoming more of a feature in our shopping malls--the stores are dark and loud, perhaps to make it more difficult to see their inflated price tags and kick up a fuss.
In the States, however, A&F are everywhere, and not for the right reasons. They have a highly skewed perception of the market at which they aim: in short, they have a "no fatties" rule. I'm not kidding. They only stock jeans to a 34" waist, a policy explicitly implimented and defended by CEO Mike Jeffries.
Now things are blowing up even further, as a comment by an un-mamed store manager has emerged. He is on record as saying:

“Any clothing that has any type of blemish, including things such as a stitch missing or a frayed fabric, gets sent back to the company for immediate disposal. Abercrombie & Fitch doesn’t want to create the image that just anybody, poor people, can wear their clothing. Only people of a certain stature are able to purchase and wear the company name.”

Hoo boy. Now, there's nothing wrong with quality control, or wishing to attract a certain level of customer. But A&F seem to enjoy rubbing people up the wrong way. It's as if they've seen the growing trend of conscious, socially-responsible clothes stores and thought, "Nope, that's not the image we want to portray at all. We want to be callous douchebags."
This blatantly uncaring attitude is primed to backfire, and the guy to do it is film-maker Greg Karber. He scours goodwill and charity stores for A&F branded clothing (say what you like about the PR, but the clothes are well-made) and gives them to the homeless in East LA, home (if that's the right word) to one of the largest transient populations in the US. His goal? To make Abercrombie & Fitch "the world's number one brand of homeless apparel."
He urges us to dig out any A&F clothing, donate them to shelters, and share the result on social media using the hashtag #FitchTheHomeless.
Personally, I wouldn't be seen dead in a A&F or Hollister, but I applaud this delightful piece of direct action. Check out the video before to find out more.