I’m signed up to a number of newsletters, follow a lot of tweeters, and collect textile related blogs that I read intermittently. On any given day, I probably get plenty of inspiration for a blog post if I actually followed through on the possibilities, but I tend only to write a new post when the subjects of more than one of them intertwine in a way that really excites me. That happened today.
Ecoterre, a site devoted to ecologically oriented clothing companies,
offered a discussion of why ecological clothing is so expensive. Just like a lot of you, I’d love to commit to wearing only ecologically and ethically made clothing, but my budget is so tight I often have to compromise or even abandon these ideas in favor of not walking around the world naked. I do this, even though I know very well that my favorite pieces in my wardrobe are the o nes I have accumulated one by one from individual makers over the years. A good number of these pieces were bought 20 years or more ago, now. They still look good. There’s absolutely no doubt at this point, given what they cost and the amount of wearings and compliments they have had, that they were some of the best bargains I have ever bought.
Yet I still have considerable resistance to buying new items like these beloved ones.
Why? It’s the resistance to that initial comparatively high price, however well justified that price may be.
Well, let’s put that aside and talk about the other story of interest.
I am sorry to say that I seem to have misplaces or forgotten to bookmark the page referenced, I think on Twitter, for this one, but you can google it for yourself using “batiks Indonesia Fridays”.
This is the idea. Indonesia’s people are encouraged to wear batiks on Fridays.
It’s a simple idea, supporting the products of a country’s own textile makers. Imagine that! Imagine if every single Friday, Americans wore something made by American textile makers. (I generally do every day. My handbag and shopping bag are both handmade, and generally one of my scarves is tied the handbag strap.) We’d all have taken advantage of some of those bargains I mentioned above, and we’d all be very well dressed on Fridays. All those skills that are disappearing offshore because the US’s textile industry can’t match the prices offered elsewhere, especially if they endeavor to pay US living wages, would be kept alive. And what a flowering of those skills there would be.
If you like this idea, feel free to spread it. If you want to act on it, allow me to suggest an investment at my ArtFire shop, PockTTorian Textiles (Note the 2 t’s):
http://www.artfire.com/users/PockttorianTextiles
I do accept commissions.
