Naomi Jorge shoots Autumn 2016 New Zealand Fashion

Naomi Jorge shoots Autumn 2016 New Zealand fashion with an ethical slant, from labels Kowtow, Woodward and Nyne from the store Harper Inc, with jewellery by Stephanie Grace, and flowers by The Flower Crate.

Thoughts on Ethical Fashion by Louise Hutt from her blog at saycheeselouise.com

I love fashion, I really do. I love dressing up in ridiculous, interesting, and expressive clothes; but something I love to do should not come at the expensive of other’s lives, whether that is through building collapses, or continuing the cycle of poverty. The fashion industry is also harmful in other ways; discriminating racially, through the models they employ as well as cultural appropriation of “trends”, discriminating size and body-wise, again via models they employ, but also in limiting the sizes and styles available. It can be easy to feel hopeless; the negatives hugely outweigh the positives in a lot of ways, but the fashion industry can also be very difficult to remove yourself from. Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada has some excellent points about fashion apathy, so whether you love fashion or not, these are still things in which you take part. Even though it’s not always fun for me to love fashion, I’d rather be educated and acknowledge the problems, than pretend they don’t exist and can’t be solved.

What I’ve come to realise from (almost) six months of sourcing my clothes ethically, is that it’s not just the way we make clothes that needs to be changed, but our entire relationship with fashion, because buying ethically isn’t affordable on the scale of consumption you’re used to with fast fashion, and op shopping also has its limitations. I’ve often looked at capsule wardrobes and scoffed- “not for me”, and maybe I wouldn’t put together a 15 piece, entirely black wardrobe, but I could definitely apply a lot of the principles to my own. I’ve been slowly refining my style over the past couple of years (if you’d believe it), and having a core wardrobe of pieces which are ethically made, in durable, sustainable materials is something I’m working towards (whether they are bought first hand or from places like Recycle Boutique or SaveMart), then using op shopping to pick up trend pieces I want to experiment with (the amount of last season’s Glassons I find floating around is astounding) as well as any vintage or one-off finds.

I’ve been using Pinterest as a way of visually keeping track of my wardrobe -and therefore anything I want to add to it needs to be able to fit onto one of my boards. I’ve also come to terms with the fact it’s okay to appreciate a design, a material, a pattern, and not buy it. Pinterest also serves as an excellent method of ensuring that what I actually go out and buy are also items which I will wear (30 times or more), as I can still “keep” the things (on a board) that wouldn’t be able to practically wear in real life. Bec McMaster, who is helping bring the fashion app Good On You to New Zealand, provided me with some further food for thought – we need to consider the life of our clothes once we’re finished with them; can they be recycled, re-purposed or de-constructed? This has further refined my process of purchasing clothing from just “is it ethically made?” to:

How ethically is it made?

How sustainably is it made?

Would I wear it more than 30 times?

What can I do with it after I’m finished with it?

While that might seem much more time consuming, as someone who also has sewn their own clothes, I know exactly how much time, knowledge, and energy goes into making a garment. Taking the time to consider the garment shows respect to not only the design, but also the people who made it.

In terms of investing in key wardrobe pieces, I particularly love New Zealand makers and to mark my (almost) six month anniversary of buying better, I teamed up with a friend of mine, Näomi from Naomi Jorge, to explore some New Zealand pieces which made it through my process checklist. The incredibly kind Courtney from Harper Inc let us borrow the pieces for the day, from Kowtow, Woodward, and Hamilton locals, Nyne. Stephanie Grace provided us with jewellery, and The Flower Crate gave us flowers to complete the looks.

I’d been interested in Kowtow for a while, but as their models and I are a bit different (ahem) in height and weight, I was reluctant to put them on my wishlist without trying them on. That said, their Walk In The Park jacket AND Conclusion pants are both top of my list now; their fabric quality was absolutely beautiful, and I really enjoyed the cut of both the jacket and the pants (the arms were exactly the right length! That never happens! And the pants weren’t too long! A short girl dream!) I’ve also had a super big crush on Stephanie Grace jewellery for a while now, and while she kindly let me keep the two bar piece, she’s definitely going to be my go-to for jewellery in the future. Having said goodbye to my previous fast fashion staples, it’s nice to find some new makers I can trust, and start to enjoy fashion again.