A Designer Ethos..
Jun 27th, 2008 by Em
With just days to go before the big day, I probably shouldn’t even be taking a few minutes to write on here, but I know that if I don’t, it will be a whirlwind and a new surname away before I get around to it!
One thing that this ethical wedding journey has taught me is that the more you learn, the more you care. For a few years now, I have been concerned with ‘sweat shop’ clothing and exploitation. It hadn’t wildly influenced my buying decisions, although I had started to make some of my own clothes at home, and wear more second-hand, or recycled clothing.
I started to understand that a quality garment could not make it to Australia and sell for less than AUD$5 unless the process was flawed in some way.
At the beginning of our ethical wedding adventure, I started doing some research on various fabrics. In an ideal world, I would love to find an ethical fabric which was entirely eco-friendly, but as I learned more, I discovered that every fabric has its pros and cons.
I’ll go into these in greater detail when I’ve more time (!), but NO new fabric can ever have truly good ethical credentials. No matter how pesticide free the growth, the processing involves between a bare minimum and a vast plethora of toxic chemicals. Such is life. The trick, I guess, is in somehow finding your way through to a fabric that best suits your needs, and balancing it up against its ethical credentials.
I won’t bore you with the tedious hours of fighting between organic cotton, hemp, tencel and bamboo, but the winner for me was bamboo. I love the fabric: it is delightfully soft and really does rival silk for its sheer luxuriousness. Naturally pest resistant, it usually requires no pesticide. It does however require a fairly hefty chemical treatment to process that hard wood-like grass into said soft fabric.
In an ideal world, this would be better researched, and at the absolute LEAST, guaranteed that the chemical process is a ‘closed loop’ process which recycles the chemicals and doesn’t release them. Maybe the real world isn’t so far away, as bamboo processing IS currently being researched, with a closed loop system already developed.
Aside from a real passion for alternative fabrics, I have a passion for telling others about them, and I figured our wedding day would give me a good chance to let some of our friends discover bamboo for themselves. Prior to seeing bamboo fabric for the first time, I didn’t even know it existed. I want to be able to show them the material too, and let them feel how incredibly soft it is.
I don’t think people can be pushed towards sustainable living by force. I could harp on about the poor little silkworms for hours and leave them tutting about ‘the hippie’, but if I can let them fall in love with bamboo for themselves.. well, maybe that’s half the battle already won.
I know that our wedding is about us. It will be: I think Lachie and I have been secretly delighted by how close we’ve stayed through all the pre-wedding madness. As every day goes by, I’m more and more excited to think we’re soon to be married.
So a wedding isn’t the right time for making an ethical, eco-statement. But isn’t a wedding a time to show your family and friends who you are, what you believe in together, and what your union really means? It’s in that spirit that I want people to be able to experience a more ethical wedding, and in that spirit that I intend to make sure those little ethical touches are EVERYWHERE!
Well I guess this will be it until I’m a Mrs! We’re from a close community back in Brisbane, so over the next few days, our house is going to fill to bursting point with guests.
It’s a 2 bedroom house with a good size lounge room, and at the last count, I’m expecting it to house ten people on Saturday night.. eek!
The trial run with the cake (fairtrade chocolate, homemade) takes place on Friday night, and we make the real thing on Sunday.
My outfit is half made, and I just ordered my shoes from Adili! It sounds pretty haphazard and crazy, but we wouldn’t do it any other way. How exciting!
