A Good Book to Learn More on Vegan Fashion
Vegan Style is the first-ever guide to plant-based fashion, by an industry insider. It goes through all the vegan alternatives to conventional fabrics, and offers a way to create a capsule wardrobe, for both budget and sustainability.
A few items contain recycled polyester or elastane. If bought, launder in a microfibre filter (or just buy the 100% natural fabrics, far simpler!)
The book is a few years old, so the founder has switched from editing a fashion magazine to creating Catwalk Rebel, campaigning for better ethics in the fashion industry.
It recommends watching the film Slay, from a former fur-wearing fashionista who now campaigns for animal welfare.
Basically, anything that doesn’t involve making profit from an animal. There are always grey areas, so it’s usually easier to just avoid it all.
- No fur. This is obvious. The fur industry has horrific welfare records.
- No leather. Not a by-product of the meat industry, most is produced in the Far East, with little or no animal welfare laws. The tanning process is also polluting, and has cancer risks for workers.
- No sheepskin or shearling. Sheepskin the skin of a sheep. Shearling is the skin of a lamb. Shahtoosh (banned) is from a Tibetan antelope. Pashmina is from a Tibetan mountain goat.
- No silk. Conventional silk involves boiling silkworms. Even ‘peace or ahimsa’ silk (that lets silkworms chew their way out of cocoons) can result in them starving on release.
- No feathers or down. Vegans don’t buy jewellery or bedding with feathers (usually from factory-farmed ducks or geese). Real ‘eider downs’ are from fallen feathers (collected in Iceland) but nowhere near enough for the bedlinen industry.
- No Animal jewellery (anything from bones to feathers to pearls, vegans don’t wear it!)
