Fashion Tries on Zero Waste Design

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/fashion/15waste.html
Author: Rosenbloom, Stephanie
Source: The New York Times
Year: 2010
Number of pages: 4

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Abstract:

You wear organic T-shirts. You hang your clothes to dry. You recycle your unloved suits and dresses. But frankly, that’s just the tip of the green iceberg. Today’s truly fashion-forward have a more radical ambition: zero waste. That may sound more like an indie band than an environmental aspiration, but it’s a new focus of top fashion schools.

Zero-waste design strives to create clothing patterns that leave not so much as a scrap of fabric on the cutting room floor. This is not some wacky avant-garde exercise; it’s a way to eliminate millions of tons of garbage a year. Apparel industry professionals say that about 15 to 20 percent of the fabric used to produce clothing winds up in the nation’s landfills because it’s cheaper to dump the scraps than to recycle them.

A small but impassioned coterie of designers has spent the last few years quietly experimenting with innovative design techniques, and some of their ideas are starting to penetrate the mainstream.