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Cardiff's online shoppers are worst offenders for binning unworn clothes
Lucy Siegel, Guardian Environment blog
The nation's wardrobe is famously bursting at the seams and spewing into landfill. And I'm sorry sisters, there is no avoiding this is a women thing. We are dragging fashion into disrepute. According to statistics from a survey by Global Cool, which describes itself as a climate change charity, over half of all the clothes, shoes and accessories bought by British women last year have never been worn, wasting £11.1bn in the process.
(28 January 2009)
Come on ladies! "Frugal is the new black!" KS.



Colourful adventures through textiles - Part I
Susan Fell-McLean, Euroa-Gazette
This garden, set in the hillsides of a castle in Lauris, has been created to study and to revive the ancient art of natural dying. It propogates and harvests hundreds of plants from all around the world for their colour properties.

...Vegetable, animal and mineral all colouring for cloth, for the buildings of Europe and the world, and, of course, the artist’s canvas. That was until the discovery of aniline colours in coal tar (1856) and the growth of the chemically-constructed synthetic dyes that colour our world of today. (A look for “aniline” in the dictionary reveals that it is an “oily, poisonous liquid amine obtained from nitrobenzene and used to make dyes and plastics and medicines”!) In one generation the ‘know-how’ of hundreds of years was under threat and in some countries has been lost forever.

Thanks to a few dedicated institutions, courses and studies such as our International Shibori Symposium, this ‘know-how’ and fascination with the magic of the colours of nature is returning. (In September 2008 I attended the WEFT - World Eco Fibres and Textiles - forum in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, the aim of which is to conserve and encourage the use of natural, sustainable material in the creation of arts and crafts, and to promote knowledge on the use of natural fibres and dye. That was where the Nga ceremony at Rumah Garie fitted into my study of natural dyes.) The challenges are not specific to Europe.
(3 February 2009)

Is the time right for Slow Fashion?
Tim Holt, Christian Science Monitor
The Slow Fashion/Slow Clothing movement is a patchwork of the old and the new. It borrows heavily from Slow Food ideas of knowing more about what you buy, finding out who produced it, and using that knowledge to buy quality and to make socially and environmentally responsible choices.

You'll find Slow Fashion on the gritty north side of Burlington, Vt., where men and women working on rented sewing machines make customized garments out of discarded clothes and fabrics. And in the fashion design studios of San Francisco, where "green" is the buzzword and high fashion is spun from recycled and organic materials. It also comes to the US from Bolivian villages high in the Andes mountains, where women knit sweaters made from the coats of free-range alpaca herds.
(10 February 2009)