Buy better, keep forever.
When I design a piece of clothing I try to keep this fundamental approach in mind, focusing my attention on high quality fabrics and simple lines it’s impossible to get sick of.
My biggest achievement would be to see you in 10 years wearing what you are buying today.
If you are reading this you already know, and you also know that fully aware and transparent production is our primary mission, we don’t mean to say sustainability is something good but we mean that it’s the only way we operate.
The traceability and the quality of the fabrics, a made to order purchasing policy, processing of a piece entirely under the same roof and models that don’t require great fabric waste, are for us the pillars of sustainable production.
All of this is even more important now, because from the 19th to the 25th of April there will be the “fashion revolution week”, born to commemorate the greatest disgrace in the textile sector: the collapse of Rana Plaza. The collapse of Rana Plaza has been a structural failure that happened on the 24th of April 2013 that led to the death of 1129 people and caused 2,515 to be wounded.
The building was not made to bear the weight and the vibration of textile machinery, since it was only supposed to accommodate shops and offices. The moment in which some cracks were noticed on the building, the shops and the bank on the lower floors were closed and evacuated, while the warning was ignored by the owners of the textile factories. The workers were actually ordered to come back the day after, the day in which the building crumbled, collapsing in the morning during peak hour.
You can inform yourself widely online regarding this tragedy and I recommend you to watch the documentary called “the true cost”.
Clothing prices have decreased drastically in the last twenty years. Until the 1990s it was common to spend 100 euros for a pair of jeans, 90 euros for a Gap sweatshirt or to invest in an elegant and high quality piece of clothing.
When companies like Zara, H&M and Forever21 have got into the market in grand style, the moderate but fairly accepted prices have collapsed. The scale was titled around the early 2000s when for the average consumer it became more important to get the best price instead of investing in quality. Important names started to wear cheap and mass-produced clothes, (Michelle
Obama appeared in Zara and J.Crew) and in 2000 the New York Times stated that it was “chic to pay less.”
The current prices of the giants of fast fashion are dizzyingly low, I took this picture a few months ago where it was advertised outerwear for10 euro and shits for 5 euro.
Mass market brands have lowered the prices in an attempt to keep up, now you can enter Gap, Benetton or J Crew and find prices not too different from Zara or H&M. While the rest of our consumption goods like electronics and beauty products have constantly increased, the clothing’s prices have been severely depressed.
All of this has drastically changed society’s way of thinking about clothing, and not just among those who have grown up with fast fashion. We have been conditioned to believe that independently from inflation and from costs of clothes in other areas, clothing is becoming more and more cheap. That’s how the value of clothing perceived as a financial and emotional investment is constantly in decline. This has created the perfect setting for the twisted view of disposable clothing. Increasingly, the phenomenon of leaving the mall with 20 pieces in your hand that combined don’t exceed the cost of a good dinner at a restaurant is spreading.
It’s all very simple:
· Economic fabric produced in unhealthy and dangerous conditions
· The use of harmful, toxic and polluting synthetic fibres
· Badly managed chemical waste and disregard of the rules.
· Widespread exploitation of labor (allow me to say, not just abroad)
· Indescribable working conditions, indescribable salaries, child labour and a general disregard for human life.
This is how there are jeans that cost 10 euros and tanks tops that cost 2 euros. Nobody has invented a cheap way to make clothing, someone has discovered how to squeeze stones and we decided to look the other way.
Now, you probably already know all of this and it’s probably the reason why you are here; because you don’t want to be take part of all of this and you want to try to be a better consumer, so I apologize if I’ve been redundant but sometimes it is important to remind you and myself that everything has a cost, even if we aren’t the ones directly paying it.
I increasingly want to work to be a transparent company, so if you have any questions regarding our production line I ask you to send them to this email info@alloacasale.com and I’ll be happy to help you understand our costs.
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