admin Driven by a passion to protect the planet,
Phoebe English hasn’t bought a centimetre of fabric or a single plastic button
for her collection at London Fashion Week.
The fashion industry is one of the most polluting, accounting for up to 10
percent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to World Bank estimates.
“Fast fashion”, where clothes are bought for a few dollars and then
discarded after a few wears, leads to a high volume of waste, which often ends
up in illegal landfills in the Global South.
It’s an issue that preoccupies English, a 37-year-old designer who
graduated from London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins arts college in
2010.
“We are producing too much too quickly, in quite an unnecessary way, and we
need to really think about it,” she told AFP.
“Is that something that can actually continue with the planetary boundaries
that we have?”
Like millions of people, she admits to a degree of “eco-anxiety” that at
first glance is difficult to reconcile with her profession.
But it has prompted her to take radical action: a blouse made from bed
linen salvaged from a luxury hotel is an item typical of her collection.
She found the fabric for a crepe blouse in a wedding dress store.
“We spend the year collecting textile waste, so that might be in the form
of off-cuts from other businesses,” she explained.
Several wedding dress manufacturers send her scraps of fabric “that usually
just go in the rubbish”.
The non-uniform and often small nature of the off-cuts makes the work
transforming them into garments to wear “quite technical and complicated”, she
added.
Given the self-imposed constraints focusing on slow and sustainable
clothes, she only presents one collection per year at fashion week, which
starts on Friday, while most designers present at least two.
“We can’t do it at the same speed that potentially other companies can,”
she added.
Afterlife
“What we’re aiming for is to work in less damaging ways,” she said.
“We don’t use plastic components in our clothes. Our buttons are corozo nut
or milk casein, both natural materials, and we use organic cotton sewing
thread where possible.”
English thinks about the afterlife of the garment so that it is easy to sew
and repair once worn and is biodegradable, should it end up being disposed of
in a natural environment.
The collection is monochrome and refined: the clothes are either black or
white with no prints or embroidery.
“We work with the shape and the form and the cutting and the draping,
rather than necessarily the decoration,” she explained.
Many pieces are also gender neutral.
Everything is done with a small team in her east London studio, or
outsourced elsewhere in England.
It is a “very niche company”, she said.
English has sold her creations in Japan, the United States and several
locations in Europe and has built a loyal clientèle, who order items directly
from her on the internet.
Among her clients are many artists and people curious about her approach.
While most fashion brands now say they are acting to protect the
environment, many are accused of “greenwashing”.
“There’s quite a lot of misinformation,” said English, calling for “clear
legislation to help mitigate some of the damaging practices”.
The British Fashion Council, which organises fashion week, has just
announced a joint programme with the British textile industry to clean up the
sector.
They will attempt to reduce waste and overproduction of clothing and work
to support the UK’s net-zero strategy and wider climate targets.(AFP)
