Whether you’re inside or poolside, these summer supplies will have you feeling cool and ready for anything.
Sunglasses from Modo in recycled acetate and Waiting for the Sun in bamboo. Shirts from Arthur & Henry, a London-based shirt-maker in 80s count organic cotton and linen. Organic cotton chinos from Twothirds in bone and navy. Recycled sail bag from Yesorknot and perforated vegan leather bag from Gunas. Shoes in Italian microfiber future-leather from BraveGentleMan. Vegan water-based pomade from Imperial Barber Products and organic, vegan Double-Duty Moisturizer with SPF 20 from Get Jack Black.
The Brave GentleMan x Novacas worker boot in tan and original mastermind are featured in the new Three Leaves spring lookbook. Three Leaves is a men’s retailer focused on sustainable, cool and classic fashion. Their most recent lookbook also features interview with their models Ian Cooper and Colin Sussingham. Defintely drop by the Three Leaves website for a look around!
Moncler, an expensive Italian outerwear and accessories line known for quilted down, decided to send some animals down the runway in Paris. Some of the animals featured in their AW13/14 collection were on leash, and some roamed leashless through the audience. Others were killed and in the form of coats and accessories. People in faux-fur polar bear costumes hugged the models at the end of the show, and this over-the-top spectacle seemed like all fun and frivolity in the name of fashion. But, like many people who saw the show, something seemed odd. There is a glaring disconnect that Moncler shares with other brands determined to say relevant in the luxury arena: Why we adore some animals, and do things to others that would showcase a deep hatred? Why adore dogs, yet wear the pelts of countless other animals like fox and mink who spent their entire lives on fur farms, deprived of every evolutionary desire, then anally and vaginally electrocuted, gassed, poisoned or bludgeoned to death. Why celebrate polar bears, yet subject other fur bearing animals like coyote and lynx to the languishing death of a steel jaw trap or snare, when they spend days bleeding, dehydrating, and even attempting to chew off their own paw to escape? As I spoke about with Berluti’s recent show at Paris’ Museum Museum of Natural history, this is fashion carnsim:
“…it’s rare that an opportunity to connect these dots so obviously presents itself. Fashion carnism, like traditional carnism, is a dominant, violent ideology that, according to Dr. Melanie Joy ,”…need[s] to use a set of social and psychological defense mechanisms to enable humane people to participate in inhumane practices without fully realizing what they’re doing.”
Aesthetic irrationality is when we rationalize an object strictly based on its aesthetic appearance. In this line of logic, pretty and handsome are seen as a “good” regardless of the production process. Here, a typical dead-pile at a fur farm in Russia, are the parts of the animals that did not make it onto the coats or into the show:
photo by Sergey Maximishin
In early 2011 Born Free USA and Respect for Animals conducted a landmark investigation inside the world of fur trapping. They uncovered shocking cruelty and brutality involved in the trapping of wild animals for the fur trade:
Most people do not see animals like a fox or raccoon as capable of valuing their own lives – at least not enough to outweigh desires to wear them or make money on their pelts. Don’t get me wrong, if I was living off the grid in the arctic circle eating blubber, I’d have no problem wearing fur. But I also wouldn’t have to worry about an insatiable fashion industry obfuscating my clothing and turning it into a symbol of power, or representing romantic native rationalizations of food and clothing. The truth is that most simply don’t need the fur to survive, that the most exciting innovations are happening in the realms of high-tech, sustainable synthetics, bio-printing, 3D printing, organic plant-based materials like Japan’s biodegradable poly and other bio-plastics. Fur is just bad design and it’s only a matter of time before it is phased out completely.
Upcycling has come a long way. Creating new garments using discarded materials and scraps from the garment industry that would otherwise end up in landfills seemed difficult to scale up for the mass market. Most upcycling production models needed to stay small-scale and hand-made. But then came Reet Aus, an Estonian fashion designer and Ph.D. who has developed a system for putting manufactures and designers who want their scraps in contact for large scale manufacturing. The database is called Trash To Trend. In her own line, which features some menswear, Aus provides info sheets that compare the envionrmental impacts of upcycled materials used in each garment against the impacts of using the same “virgin” material.
The Brave GentleMan store has some new, really cool, one-of-a-kind necklaces from DLC Brooklyn. I had the honor of collaborating with DLC founder, Susan Domelsmith on choosing which amulets from her collection would go on the chains, and naming the necklaces. These, and all DLC Brooklyn jewelry are made from vintage, dead stock, remnants and recycled materials. They’re $160 and won’t last very long:
