Sustainable Fashion is a hot topic term used widely right now, and while I would love to claim to be 100% sustainable, that term is impossible to obtain, because we all use water and power to produce our clothes. However, most brands who use this term are pledging their commitment to our planet, to leave behind a minimal carbon footprint when running a garment business.
For Pyne & Smith, we are very conscious about each step we take to produce our dresses, from eco friendly packaging to where to recycle our scraps. We chose to use a natural fiber material, Linen, which uses several times less water (it’s estimated to use 5-20 times less than water, depending on the processes used.) The production of Linen is more laborious and time consuming than many other fabrics, but much kinder to our planet.
After our Linen is cut into dresses, the dresses are sent to our seamstresses in Los Angeles. (We use a local, family run, high quality production studio for our production.) We collect the Linen offcuts from the cutting process, and those scraps are either sent to crafters, or to our local textile recycling center where they shred the scraps and re-purpose them into car seat covers.
Next up in the sustainability process - we don't mass produce our garments - Pyne & Smith dresses are made in small batches (so they do sell out) so that we don’t make more dresses than we sell - none of our garments end up in landfill sites.
Tips on Sustainability as a Consumer? Look for businesses using natural fiber materials who offer transparency into their processes, ask what they do with their waste, do they use local sources or businesses in their production? Do they pay their workers a livable wage? Do they encourage recycling or mending of their garments?