Many labels boast eco-friendly credentials, but Fashion designer Tiffany Treloar is learning it takes more than a few token gestures to do it properly, as Melinda Oliver reports.
Designer Tiffany Treloar is reluctant to wear the “eco-warrior” tag, but she is determined to tread a delicate carbon footprint for the future of her small fashion company.
The seed was planted in 2006 when Treloar and her husband, food writer Richard Cornish, endeavoured to live as “locavores” for a newspaper story, sourcing only locally produced food. It got her thinking about “fashion miles” – the often excessive transportation of fabric and garments – and this nagged at her conscience.
“Wool might be grown in Australia, then transported to Mauritius to be washed, to China to be spun, to another country to be dyed, back to New Zealand to be knitted, back into Australia to be made into clothes – then those clothes may get shipped into Europe to be sold,” she says.
Melbourne-based Treloar applied for a small business grant from AusIndustry to fund research into the environmental effect of her eponymous fashion label. She launched PROJECT 332, a program to rectify any environmental mismanagement in the business, which includes a strictly eco-friendly apparel label of the same name.
A key step was to hire former CSIRO textiles expert Dr Ian Russell to undertake research and offer advice. It quickly became evident that travelling down the green road with conviction was easier said than done.
Russell investigated Treloar’s design studio, office, textile choices, sourcing, manufacturing and delivery methods for environmental impact, advising of improvements along the way.
Throughout the process, Treloar explored issues such as the quantity of chemicals and water used to create cotton and the varied eco-credentials of much-hyped fabric bamboo.
She learned that textile workers in unregulated factories can be exposed to harmful chemicals such as caustic soda and that some banned chemicals can find their way into Australia on unchecked apparel.
Treloar was advised that lyocell (often sold under the brand name Tencel) was a good choice, as well as organic cotton and organic linen.
Renewable materials coconut and corozo – a South American nut resembling ivory – were deemed suitable choices for buttons and trimmings, but hardware such as zips remained difficult to substitute.
Fabric printing methods were considered, with digital methods trumping traditional techniques in terms of local production availability and waste minimisation.
An ongoing part of the overhaul was the collection of coat hangers from stores to re-use, as well as ensuring apparel manufacturing occurred within close radius of Treloar’s St Kilda studio.
Russell encouraged Treloar to ask suppliers and manufacturers tough questions so she understood the environmental impact of each step in the chain. She quizzed them on how factories were fueled, what chemicals were used in production, how the workers were treated and how far product was transported.
This interest was met positively by many suppliers, but she found others reluctant to be transparent. “Because of the nature of the business, changes happen all the time,” she says. “You can go to a lot of effort to make that supply chain [environmentally friendly] and overnight your business can change and that product will not sell anymore.”
Researching the impact of a garment post-sale was also key, with cold wash and drip dry fabrics proving preferable for energy reduction.
Armed with information, Treloar determined to make “best practice” decisions for her existing label Tiffany Treloar and set stringent environmental standards for the PROJECT 332 collection.
“In the next season (winter 2010) I’ve got beautiful recycled polyester and I’m mixing that back with Tencel trims, organic cotton, unbrushed fleece and regenerated wool.”
She says buyers are responding well to the new approach, but many still believe that eco-friendly automatically equals higher cost. This has proven not to be true, with the minimisation of fabric treatment, chemicals and transport often making product cheaper.
Treloar emphasises that she does not have all the answers to the fashion versus environment conundrum. Every collection presents her with new environmental hurdles to jump, but her approach for the future is to make the best decision at every step.
“[A designer fashion label] is a very different animal to someone who supplies something very specific, such as a range of organic cotton basics, as you need to source new things every season,” she says.
Treloar hopes other designers will endeavour to make a difference. “They are tricky questions because things can change overnight. We all have to start looking at it and not thinking that we are going to lose. We gain.”