Fashion without Victims
Fashion designer Natalia Allen is working to make the textile industry a fairer, greener business. As this cannot be done alone, she is currently seeking out powerful partners in the sector. And with her resolve to make the world a better place, the New Yorker is racking up success after success
Natalia Allen actually wanted to
become a doctor. Helping sick
people get better as quickly as
possible seemed like a career that
made sense to her. After high school,
the young woman took her excellent
grades in the natural sciences with her
to New York to study medicine. And then,
while sitting in one of her introductory courses,
she thought: "Am I the only person here questioning things?"
That was nine years ago. Now the 28-year-old is sitting in the new conference center in Tianjin, northeastern China, wearing a discreet blazer made of organic cotton and recycled synthetics that she designed herself. The founder of designfuturists has brought her vision of a sustainable textile industry to life for members of the World Economic Forum at several workshops. She has explained to them that up to 8,000 different chemicals can be found in our clothing these days. That people in the US throw away about 220 pounds (100 kilograms) of clothing every year rather than recycling it. That we need to break away from a supply-driven industry that dictates 10 or more new collections every year, so that consumers relearn a responsible approach to clothing. Her presentation in Tianjin raised many questions. Many people in the audience wore expensive brands, but it seemed they had not heard of the terms "ethical fashion" or "clean clothes" before. And those listeners were all the more surprised when they learned that this young woman helps many designers - including Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and Quiksilver - to make clothing into a sustainable product.
"I naturally work with both sides of my brain, to combine creativity and reason," Allen says. And that seemed like a difficult thing to do back in those introductory medical courses. The motto there was: We don't cure cancer, we just treat it. And we do it exactly this way or that way or the other. Allen knows that dealing with severely ill patients leaves little room for experimentation. But at the same time she quickly realized: "I will never be able to reach my full potential in an environment with precisely defined solutions. I have a far too critical mind for that." As mentioned previously, aside from her talent for logical thinking and reason, Allen's left-side brain was also more active than average. In high school she excelled whether in the chemistry lab or as a painter and graphic artist. "Classical technique," she says today.
Armed with her portfolio, she was immediately accepted into the renowned Parsons The New School for Design in New York. Along with technique came the theory: "Great design is in part a decision-making process based on well researched information," recapitulates Allen. At the end of this process you should have something new. Curiosity - the hunger for something new - initially led the young woman of Hispanic and Caribbean heritage into the high-tech clothing field. While still in design school she worked with synthetic fibers that conduct electricity, which allow sportswear to be equipped with technical features such as pulse monitors. High-tech and textiles, that sounded like the future. With her degree in hand she founded design futurists as a consulting firm
Her first design: A T-shirt that glows
One of her first designs was a shirt for joggers that glows the whole night long like the luminescent dots on the face of a clock: safety without LEDs and batteries. And the design didn't just provide a long-term solution for running safely at night; it looked cool, too. Several labels bought licenses. One major sporting-goods manufacturer quickly took note of the innovative young New Yorker with technical expertise. Allen was asked to help develop an antimicrobial fabric to reduce sweat odors in sportswear. The consultant looked at the project more closely and realized the client wanted to use a toxic metal. Environmental poisons would be released on a large scale during production. The product could also be dangerous for users under certain circumstances.
"That's when it suddenly clicked. I went to the client and said: `Absolutely not.' I then published my findings and presented alternative solutions." But the manufacturer had already invested too much in advance development and would not change course. Allen withdrew from her consulting contract and asked herself a simple question: Doesn't the world need other things more urgently than high-tech clothing?
Less than 1 percent from organic farming
Allen has the ability to combine complexity and clarity. She reports with impressive precision on who comes in contact with which toxic substances for each production step, from growing the cotton to wearing the clothing against bare skin, and what impact this has on people and the environment. The amount of relevant data in her head seems endless, and she chooses what will make the greatest impact on each specific audience. For US audiences she likes to say: "The United States is the world's biggest exporter of cotton, but less than 1 percent of the raw material comes from organic farming."
In her speeches she paints drastic pictures of the conditions in sweatshops, of young workers who have lost all their teeth and children robbed of their childhood. After this chain of reasoning come simple truths: "When you pay $5 for a T-shirt, the true cost is paid for by everybody else." Empathy is a good foundation for a value-based economy, while complex problems need well-structured answers. Allen illustrates the point with a graphic. At the top are consumers who first need to become aware of the problem. The organic food trend has reached the mainstream in Western consumer societies. But few shoppers think about the pesticides and herbicides used in cotton fields or working conditions in textile factories when they browse through the boutiques in New York or Paris.
Allen also wants to use her consulting firm to spark ideas in the fashion industry, particularly in New York. She initiated a program together with the Pratt Institute that educates fashion students about alternative production processes. Best practices play a crucial role in textile recycling. Technological progress has opened up many new development opportunities for keeping shirts and pants in a cycle where scarcely any resources are lost. When the first generation of students from these sustainability seminars enters the industry, they will take their knowledge with them.
And then there's that huge wheel that the diminutive Allen would like to turn. In a nutshell, the textile industry ticks along like this, in her opinion: Global competition enables an increasing number of manufacturers to produce an increasing number of goods in shorter periods of time. They unload it into the market at all costs, creating disposable markets that should not exist.
Sustainable consumers site
An idea was born at the Young Global Leaders event in Tianjin that breaks with this "growth without limits" logic. Under Allen's leadership, the YGLs want to launch a website where consumers decide together upfront which clothing pieces should be produced. Buyers put down a deposit, and then the product goes into production, adhering to the highest standards of sustainability. The advantages of this business model are obvious. It rules out overproduction. Customers will identify with the product more closely and use it longer. Marketing and sales costs -usually the lion's share of total costs in the fashion industry- are reduced toa minimum, which in turn enables the company to offer a green, fair product at a competitive price.
After a test run with designs from designfuturists, the platform will be open to all fashion designers who share Allen's vision of a better textile world. What's beautiful is that the vision is solid and specific. The innovator makes it tangible and clear: "Designers should set the goal for themselves that their clothing pieces should be passed down to the next generation rather than landing in the garbage after two months. That's when they really achieve sustainability."
