More esoteric choices are becoming available
shortly. The activewear company, Patagonia, is
shortly to launch clothes made form a synthetic
spider silk which promises astonishing strength
and resilience while bio-degrading in an
appropriate timescale. Recently a project has
come to light whereby leather is being grown
artificially which is based on the DNA of the late
fashion designer Alexander McQueen. How do
you feel about plant-based fabrics now?
Talking of leather, vegan shoes are easy to find. In
general, they are made from a composite of
cotton or hemp substrate with a non-porous
matrix made from flax oil. The material is
indistinguishable from leather, breathable, soft
and was developed for the yacht upholstery
industry. Leather does not play well with salt
water. As far as I can tell, most vegan shoes are
made in the same factory as each other in
Portugal. Bourgeois Boheme is a UK company
devoted to smart, creative shoes. I have a pair of
these and they are wonderful.
A final word about economics: if we had put as
much effort into finding alternatives to leather,
wool and silk as we have in attempting to
overcome their shortcomings, the industry
would be clean and green and we would all be
wearing resilient, stylish, comfortable,
plant-based clothes. The reason they are not the
norm is that we were lazy and didn’t start
looking for alternatives early enough.
I’d like to end with a word about the reactions I
get they fall into three themes: The most
annoying is “Nonsense, it’s traditional, we’ve
always done it, don’t give in to
environmentalists.”, to which I can only reply
with evidence. More commonly people know
that there are problems, but believe that we can
get around them. Curiously, the people who say
this are unlikely to come up with useful
suggestions, perhaps hoping that technological
advances in their production will save beloved
traditions. Obviously the global harm caused by
clothing production is a problem and if a vast
majority of the experts in the various fields are
to be believed it’s going to be everybody’s
problem sooner or later. We should devote our
clothing budget to solving it.
Follow Matthew on Twitter @MatthewBate
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