Overview
The recent three-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse and the release of the Baptist World Aid Ethical Fashion Guide (did it put you off shopping at Seed Heritage for good? Me too), as well as the fact that fashion is the second most environmentally damaging industry in the world besides oil provide good reason for a focus on how we are buying and why. Appropriate then that Well Made Clothes launched this March.
The brainchild of Catalogue magazine Editor (and Kiwi expat) Courtney Sanders, and Australian Kelly Elkin, Co-Founder and Director of ethical industry body Clean Cut, the site is a marketplace platform to buy well-designed, ethical clothes with meaning. Under their touch, sustainable clothing is so cool: immediately accessible, beautifully merchandised and complemented by mindful fashion editorial from their writers.
It's so easy to ignore the origins of our conventional clothing. The murky depths of the fashion industry are notoriously hard to plumb, with many fashion houses unwilling to release the true cost of their garments on society - in emissions, labour and unethical practices.
Well Made Clothes measures their clothing under eight values - among them locality, transparency, sustainability, fair trade, and gender equality. You can identify which values the garment sits under according to symbols; a hand for handcrafted, little boobs for gender equality, plants for sustainability and a cow for vegan. Clothes with meaning, from labels such as Penny Sage, Kowtow, Hunter and Nom*D must meet at least one of the values for inclusion on the site, as well as sign a basic fair trade practice code of conduct.
The nuances of these values are explored within meaningful content to sit alongside the products: interviews, feature articles and fashion news to give readers insight into why ethical fashion is the sustainable future. Well Made Clothes makes it easy to make informed decisions on what you're dressing your bod in. It's one of the strongest statements you can make against fast fashion, and also a clever tactic: meaningfully-created clothing lasts far longer and is much higher quality than the overstuffed racks in your gross local mall.
Well Made Clothes joins the growing interest in ethical fashion and awareness: fashion designers such as Stella McCartney, ethical fashion ventures such as The Reformation and ASOS' Green line, sites like the Business of Fashion, documentaries like The True Cost, and platforms like Clean Cut. The attention drawn to the ethics of fashion recently surely signals a change in mindset. And the ease of the site (you can literally shop at home in your organic cotton undies, fair trade chocolate block in hand) makes it a mindset you can't help but try on for size.
Photos courtesy of Well Made Clothes.