The green culture has penetrated and expanded across all the well-known fashion brands. Incorporating green while designing a clothing line is not as intimidating as it was perceived to be a few years ago. In fact, attaching a green tag to a brand has become easier over the years. It can be as simple as using a sustainable fabric like organic cotton, replacing artificial dyes by organic equivalents, or as extensive as providing ethical employment to offshore factory workers. There isn’t a central certification body that evaluates the greening of fashion industry. As a result, any label with any degree of eco-friendliness can color itself, well green. “Going Green” has become a generic phenomenon in the world of fashion, where using recycled paper price tags are on the same eco-platform as environment friendly production process. How should the hard-core green fashion designers differentiate themselves from the minimalistic eco-friendly designers? And also compete with the reasonably priced non-eco-clothing lines? The key lies in marketing and how you promote your brand as “green”. But the rise of “going green” spirit has also resulted in greenwashing, a term used to describe the attempts of the companies to glorify their low-key green campaigns through advertising and marketing, whereas in reality not implementing the business practices that will actually minimize the impact on environment. According to many environmentalists, marketers often employ tactics that paint products greener than they actually are. Having said that, wouldn’t be interesting to know the degree to which your favorite fashion brand induces eco-friendly measures in the production of their garments?
Ultimately, going green in fashion is not just about marketing; it is about tapping those business processes that are harmful to the environment and reforming them to be environmentally friendly. As consumers, we should feel responsible towards accepting green fashion too. The starting point can be experimenting with vintage fashion which involves recycling of vintage clothing to saves the environment from the alarming number of landfills which get dumped with tons of textiles. This eco-friendly characteristic of vintage fashion contributes in greening of the environment. Vintage fashion designers have certainly capitalized on this trait of vintage fashion to promote their vintage clothing online.
