People Tree is a fantastic place to start if you care about ethical fashion and organic cotton production.  Last year they won The Observer Award for Ethical Fashion and it’s founder and CEO, Safia Minney was quite rightly awarded an MBE for her efforts to promote fair trade organic fashion.  They have a delightful range of organic baby clothes, including the Bee Good tee pictured here.  It has matching trousers and hat, I just love anything bee related so this is what the parents of the ‘fairly-recently-born’ are likely to be unwrapping.  I also like the unisex colourway which doesn’t play to traditional gender stereotypes and it is practical if you are buying for a ‘yet-to-be-born’ baby.  To check out the Bee Tee click on the image, or view the whole organic baby clothes range here.

People Tree is an active member of many Fair Trade, social justice and environmental networks. Accreditation by these bodies, like WFTO, the Fairtrade Foundation and the Soil Association gives you the guarantee that People Tree are doing what they say they are doing when it comes to Fair Trade and the environment.  They work hard to support their producers and suppliers, where certification is not yet in place it is usually because People Tree are supporting small, family run businesses in their efforts to meet certification standards rather than abandoning them to preserve a brand.  People Tree deserves to grow bigger because you know that people all over the world are growing with them.

Regardless of economic climate I have always been quite good at ‘not shopping’.  The Man from Salford laments my ability to not shop every time he opens the fridge door.  Not being able to find any underpants, other than the ones I have relegated to cleaning-rag duty, also tends to underline my ‘not shopping’ credentials. Arguably underpant shopping is not my job, after all he is a big boy, XL in fact, and is quite capable of not doing his own shopping.

I’ve never really thought about clothes that much, the fact that I wear rigger boots for a good eight months of the year tends to put paid to any sartorial creativity I might have. Nevertheless, I thought it was time I considered what would constitute a sustainable wardrobe.  To be honest my wardrobe wouldn’t sustain a mouse’s jumble sale, but here is what I came up with:

• Clothes should be sourced from renewable raw materials.  Most synthetics with their reliance on petro-chemicals do not have a place in the sustainable wardrobe.
• Raw materials should be produced with minimal environmental impact – in other words organically produced with due consideration to best land use.
• Materials should be of a high quality and durability and not need regular replacing, thus cutting down on production and transportation.
• Production and distribution should not perpetuate cycles of poverty - poverty is an enemy to sustainability in so many ways.

 Oops! My wardrobe isn’t even tugging at the shirt tails of this bench-mark, which in short is 100% organic cotton and 100% ethical fairtrade.  Arguably I wear most of my clothes to the death, regardless of the fact they probably weren’t meant to last more than a ’season’ and certainly are not of high quality or high durability.    I actually appear to own two organic cotton t-shirts but they obviously got in there by default rather than by conscious design.  Many of my clothes are bought second hand from charity shops and I think that for most of us with limited means this is definitely one of the best options for reducing the environmental impact of our wardrobes, and is a way of supporting causes that seek to reduce inequalitly, poverty and cruelty.  

 There are some clothes that we really don’t want buy second hand and that is underwear.  I’m back to knickers and underpants, sorry folks!  It’s unlikely that I can afford to be 100% organic cotton and 100% ethical all the time and will continue to wear clothes to the death and buy second hand, but here is my opportunity to be at least 5% organic  cotton and 5% ethical.  No more cheap knickers for me since I discovered the bright, practical but also stylish range of underwear from People Tree.    They do nice stuff for the men also, I might just tell The Man to click his way over there, you never know he might accomplish his own underwear shopping!

UPDATE!!!

Cornish based outdoor wear company Seasalt now stock a range of hemp clothing for those looking for sustainable alternatives, as well as their more traditional range of organic cotton products.  See also Organic Baby Clothes for a lovely range of baby clothes from People Tree.