Here you are.
- Adapt Apparel website up
and under fierce construction.
We have shirts for sale. Go there to find out how to call us and buy buy buy.
- Seattle Urban Farm Company
This month, I’ll be volunteering with the Seattle Urban Farm Company, learning about permaculture and the local food movement.
I mentioned them once before in a post for Worldchanging. Come check them out at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show (Feb 20- 24th at Seattle Convention Center). Look for the t-shirts I printed, (bearing this logo designed by owner Colin McCrate and friends) soon!
In honor of all this, here’s “Farmer in the City,” from Scott Walker’s amazing Tilt (1995).
- Bird Girl Bird
My latest designs for Adapt Apparel, the clothing etc. business Molly, her brother and I have begun out of the basement.
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The first printing was on a hemp tote bag:
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Here’s a song to dance to: “Disco 2000″ from Pulp’s ca 1995 “Different Class” (c/o Dj Anderz for my birthday party a couple weeks ago).
- Clothes the Loop
4.5 percent of waste sent to municipal landfills - 4 million tons according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - is textiles ::source
The New York Times magazine has a few slides on handmade recycled clothes.
The recycled T-shirts that are at the core of the Rogues Gallery (of Portland, ME) men’s-wear line are sorted, processed, printed and reworked in a warehouse in Portland, Me., by a crew whose backgrounds have little to do with fashion.
“I’m as proud of this system as I am of the designs,” says Natalie Chanin, the woman behind Alabama Chanin, a line of richly embroidered recycled shirts and dresses that are cut, painted and sewn by hand in rural Florence, Ala. Her stitchers, some of whom quilted alongside her grandmothers, are part of a cottage-industry style of manufacturing in which people work out of their homes.
While difficult to do at a large scale, as far as I can tell, recycling old clothes into new styles can help close the loop on what is typically a wasteful industry. It slows the pull on virgin resources (and crops like cotton are very land and water intensive to grow) and we don’t have to forgo new fashions. We can keep our cake, and eat it again.
According to one source, “over 70% of the world’s population use second-hand clothes.” Indeed, to recycle clothes has become synonymous with donating them to a charity, which will rarely re-manufacture them. If we Americans start recycle our clothing at a larger scale, where will the rest of the world get theirs? Some would argue that this opens up opportunities for local producers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to sell the clothes they’re making for American and European markets locally.
Today I post for you “Indestructible Life!” by Olympia, WA’s Old Time Relijun. Enjoy!
- La Lune de Miel on Chine
I’ve been posting sparsely while home in Boulder for the holidays. Once the reorganizing, prioritizing, and atoning is done, Carrotrope.com will be a better reflection of my interests. If you care about the music in language, fashion and design, you should read this blog.
To keep things tidy and whole for myself, I’ve imported some of my poetry from an old, unseen site. I’d love to get some diplomatic but honest feedback (ok, I yearn for it). Go to Poems for poems written by me. Poetry includes my poems, musings on poetry and language, and poems I love of others. Expect songs by me and myfriends, as I pull myself together.
Otherwise, I’ll continue to post on fabric, fashion, and design as Molly, her brother and I (a.k.a. Adapt Apparel) ramp up sales. Designs that go on shirts and skirts and posters will all make appearances here.
I’ll continue to post on economics, business, branding, and “responsible capitalism” as I continue to work for Interra and attend BGI.
I’ll continue to share songs that I find meaningful (like today’s, a catchy-as-hell recent creation by my friend Sam Cooper, called “La Lune de Miel on Chine”).
- “Vanity + Sanity”: Tracking the Locally-Grown Clothing Movement
A couple days ago, I asked the question, “In what ways could we ‘grow clothing locally’?… What does a ‘100-mile closet’ look like?”
Sarah Rich at Worldchanging was asking the same question a year ago:
All of this ranting has led me to the question: What would a “100-mile wardrobe” look like? Most likely the fashion analogue wouldn’t actually be confined to a 100-mile radius, but how small a circle could we draw and still get the goods that make us feel good? It might not be a circle, since an apple is wonderful due to proximity and freshness while a sweater is wonderful due to the vision and inspiration of the designer. But even if the equivalent system is a more globally-distributed one, how can it decrease impact in a more whole-systems sense?
This echos some good feedback I got from Graham over at Transpacifica on my first 100milecloset post:
Now that doesn’t mean it’s ideal or ecological for us to ship in all our clothes from thousands of miles a way, but just like a 100-mile food radius, this works better in bountiful agricultural zones—say, California.
If we were to imagine widespread adoption of the locally-grown clothing concept, there would need to be some changes in the global economy. For one thing, subsidies and/or consumer choice would have to make it cost-effective to pay locals to work in textile factories. Textile industries that are key to the employment of large numbers of people in a variety of Asian countries would need to be replaced by other business.
Looking at ways to make clothing more environmentally friendly is a valuable pursuit. Since we can pretty much guarantee no huge number of U.S. consumers is going to jump on the train right away, this effort will likely help raise awareness and serve as a model that could pressure other clothing manufacturers to reduce shipping-based emissions. All the same, if this is too successful, it could have vexing (and fascinating) global repercussions. ::link
In my googlings on “100-mile wardrobe” I came across another instance of fashion following food: “slow fashion” (paralleling the “slow food” movement):
Slow Fashion is to clothing and design what slow food is to cuisine – natural, organic, ethical, local (where possible) and one-off designs with an emphasis on quality, and of course – taste. Slow Fashion means you can look fantastic and feel 100% guilt free. ::link
Vanessa Richmond at the Tyee’s got some good stuff on local clothes:
While reading the 100-mile diet series, I got to thinking about my other material indulgences. If food typically travels between 2,500 and 4,000 miles before it ends up on our plate, clothes are even farther wanderers. Hong Kong, where many of BC’s clothes are made, is 6378 miles (10,265 km) from Vancouver, and that’s not even counting
the distance the fabric travels to get from the mill to the factory, or the distance the fibers travel from their source to the mill.
Richmond points us to Angela Murrills, who coined “Slow Clothes” in 2004 in this article:
Take the freshness issue. There’s no question that when you buy Vancouver-grown, you’re getting concepts and ideas hot off the drawing board, designed last night and stitched up this morning. The new crop of designers just emerging from the schools is not just in lockstep with what’s happening, it’s ahead. This is design still with the dew on it, and, as with those Okanagan peaches, you know where it comes from. Buying mass-produced labels means you have no way of being sure that that T-shirt or pair of jeans wasn’t made by preschoolers in a Third World country. I’m not saying that there isn’t sweatshop labour in Canada–there is–but seeking out locally produced fashion does up the odds that the person who stitched that lapel or pocket (often the designers themselves) wasn’t working for peanuts.
Lastly, it turns out that Fashion High, part of the B.C. chapter of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) just hosted a “dress local” event, and has come up with the “dress local report card”:
Participating stores have to answer positively to three of the following questions to qualify for the Dress Local Campaign.
- Is your business locally owned?
- Where is the local content manufactured (B.C., Canada, China, etc.)?
- Are at least 50% of your store’s products designed locally?
- Are at least 50% of your store’s products made in Canada?
- Are the products created from sustainable or organic fabrics?
The Stranger’s Line Out reminds us that Vancouver, Seattle and Portland (a.k.a. “the realm of the three kingdoms”) should “be experienced as one urban realm”…
…but I may have to host a “dress local” event here in Seattle (with BALLE Seattle, of course)…
- Ludovico Technique
Murketing’s Rob Walker is in the New York Times magazine today, on “Why imaginary brands can be even better than the real thing.” I was curious about what the possibly-redundant phrase “imaginary brands” referred to, and my imagination went wild with what I might encounter after clicking over to the full article…
Would it be Shepherd Fairey’s once-imaginary Giant brand? Or how about American Apparel and the “brand-free” brand, or the jaded - about - branding branding of Blackspot and Antipreneur? Or did this have to do with the MacLeod / Doctorow / Fawkes / Godin dialectic of whether branding is dead or not or is or not, kinda? No one disputes that “people who like using the word ‘Brand’ a lot are assholes,” but how could anyone refute Godin’s final say, in haiku form:
Big brands are dying.
Little brands are doing great.
Branding is a weird gig.I ventured over to the article, for something else entirely:
There is no shortage of logos in the world, no dearth of brands striving for consumer allegiance and no chance that the creation of new brands and logos will cease. In fact there’s an interesting subset of brands and logos that don’t bother with what seems like a crucial component: an actual product, service or company. Consider the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It’s part of the fictional universe depicted in the 1979 film “Alien” and its sequels; Nostromo, the spaceship freighter in the first movie, is a Weyland-Yutani vessel. The company doesn’t do much in the way of branding in, you know, reality. But as it turns out, it’s possible to buy yourself a Weyland-Yutani T-shirt, or even a Nostromo T. It also turns out many people have. ::link
Oh. Cool, t-shirts. I want one.
It’s the weekend. Let’s all just sit back and listen to Orchestra Baobab (c/o Andres).
- Logos for Adapt Apparel
Possibilities, works in progress.
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- Gas Works love from Carmacazzi
I bought a great shirt from Carmacazzi a few months ago at the Fremont Sunday Market. It seems he shares my fascination with Gas Works Park.
- Last Minute
Computer Love presents a t-shirt design contest, submissions due November 4th!
