Stella McCartney’s take on leather.

Listen to Stella McCartney explaining why she dropped leather and animal skins from her collections. Leather is a material which is not only cruel towards animals but environmentally devastating as well. Not to mention the health hazard it causes to people involved in the tanning process (or living near tanneries) given the high amount of toxic chemicals used to arrest the decomposing process animal skins have to undergo before being commercialized.  As amply demonstrated by studies around the world (Italy, Sweden and India to mention a few) leather is NOT AN ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY PRODUCT despite the vegetable tanning process some companies tries to pass as such.

In Italy for instance, the area around Vicenza famous for its long tradition of tanneries registers one of the highest incidence of cancer due to heavy chemical pollution caused by chromium and other hazardous chemicals used in the tanning process. Here the land has been vastly polluted and its ecosystem destroyed by the sludge local tanning factories reverse into the environment, as shown in this pdf sposored by the Europena Geoscience Union in 2006 and carried out by Venice and Florence Universities.

The good news is that you can make a difference for animals, the environment and the unlucky people living or working near tanneries deciding to buy leather-free goods. Next time you are out shopping ask yourself the question: “Isit ethical? And what are the consequences of my purchase for animal welfare, the environment and the people involved in the production of this item?”.

Filed under: leather, Peta, chemical pollution, environmental pollution, hazardous chemicals, PETA, Stella McCartney

Australian fashion industry in search of a new more comprehensive ethical marquee

Here is the original article and here is my rant:

Australia’s textile, clothing and footwear industry is working on an ethical marquee to distinguish fashion products. Products that are made without resorting to sweatshops labour, polluting chemicals and that should take into account animal welfare. We all know the length certain companies will go to market themselves as “ethical champions” along the line of “organic-eco-bio-fair trade-ethically produced products”: buy me, buy me buy me I am good for you and the environment! People simply will buy such branded items and will feel better thinking they have helped children in Africa, the environment and have also contributed to improve working condition in some obscure country of South America. It’s a fact people are resort to shopping for instant gratification as a way to fight stress in modern life. And it’s a fact that environmental and animal exploitation issues are growing concerns among consumers. Put the two together and you find the most attractive marketing device ever, the one that suits both sides of the economic world: the producer and the consumer. One spends without feeling guilty, the other gains and both feel happy. Far from saying that the whole bio and organic market is a marketing device to attract consumers, we also need to acknowledge that in many circumstances it has become simply a strategy to promote products that ultimately have little to do with this philosophy: what’s the consequence of my “bio mango” organically grown in Brasil, transported unripe all the way to Belgium? Still people will buy tasteless organic mangoes grown in far distance lands without thinking of the real environmental impact. People either buy or think, they are mostly unable to do both at the same time, so someone is cunningly reducing the gap between thought and wallet presenting products of the “I care” fashion.

The real issues for Australia’s textile, clothing and footwear industry is animal rights or more appropriately animal welfare in this case. When it come to include animals rights in the ethical standards there is a tendency to neglect some of the moral and ethical implications and not to remain faithful to what real ethics should be about. The big question is: “Shall we include animal welfare issue into this new Australian branding proposal or shall we leave it out?” This issue is currently causing a big problem in the Australian working group as it engaged in defining the boundaries of what is ethical and what is not. Can ethics move beyond superficial marketing strategy into real ethical concerns toward animals rights to have a life devoid of torture and suffering? We will see what Australia, the first nation to tackle such issue will have to say.

The biggest problems are caused by two materials that have always been extra popular at catwalk shows around the world: leather and wool, “the” fashion materials par excellence. Can we really consider them ethical or do we have to forget about the reality of their production and see economic interests as the driving force for our ethical concern? If you ask me you should by now have a pretty good guess at what my answer is. When it comes to the “real world” though, the world out there, so much entangles in animal exploitation the answer is much less straight and simple than mine. These two products still make fashion (unfortunately!) and are directly linked to huge economic interests not only in Australia but the world over.

Is leather simply a by-product of meat consumption, a “given” in our carnist culture or it is incompatible with ethical concerns that deal with animal suffering and exploitation? As for wool, can it really be labelled an ethical product when muesing is still so widely adopted in Australia? For the unaware muesing consists in surgically removing strips of skin bearing wool from the sheep’s buttocks to reduce the incidence of flystrike (myiasis) on Merino sheep in regions where flystrike is common. And how do we go about the fact that so much work is centred around animal exploitation? Which concerns are “more ethically urgent”: animal or social? These issues are still open for debate and I doubt they will be dealt with in a manner in which ethics will conceived in a format free from economical interests.

I am very curious to see how the promotion of this new marquee will proceed because it will reveal an interesting aspect of human nature: the capacity to filter down ethical concerns when too many economical interests are at stake.

Filed under: Australia, Australian ethical fashion marquee, leather, wool