How The Fashion Industry Is Greening Its Operation

Trend or not, companies are emerging nationwide solely for consulting and producing green events. Some amenities include basic program management, air and ground transportation, and energy efficient lighting and audio-visual needs. "Needless to say, fashion shows are often pretty extravagant productions," Leslie Hoffman, executive director of Earth Pledge, a Manhattan-based group that partners with businesses in organizing events with sustainable materials, says. In January, Earth Pledge held FutureFashion to kick off New York Fashion Week, bringing in big name designers, like Mark Jacobs, Stella McCartney, and Calvin Klein to get their message to the media. But the blogosphere isn't buying it, criticizing designers for only doing this for the publicity. Yet green event organizers welcome any kind of acknowledgement that change is necessary. "They're getting a ton of press because there's only a handful [of green fashion shows]," says Susan Taber Avila, a design professor at the University of California, Davis who is hosting an exhibition on sustainable fashion in Davis on May 18. "There is criticism that designers only do one show and go back to their ways. But I think it does help somewhat."

One of the major consequences of lavish fashion shows is the carbon footprint left behind. At the Hong Kong Fashion Week, for example, the footprint for transportation and accommodation for the exhibitors and buyers to attend the four-day event was estimated at over 49,000,000 pounds of carbon, or the equivalent of over 1,200 average Americans living their lives for an entire year, Duerr says. She added that this figure doesn't include the carbon footprint of the entire production process underlying the manufacturing and fabrication of all of the clothes as well as other infrastructure necessary for the event.

"A lot of fashion shows actually use materials once," Hoffman notes, "When you think about the fact that the show itself is happening for a short period of time, it really does make sense to think about where materials are being sourced from, how they can be put to use again instead of thrown away and left behind." To offset the carbon footprint, Earth Pledge partners with farmers to sequester the carbon dioxide emissions by absorption through plants.

Loads more work is needed to keep the green fashion trend alive, Hoffman acknowledges. One of the biggest materials wasted at fashion shows is paper. While her company utilizes environmentally friendly printing techniques and recycled paper, no one is ready to go paperless quite yet. "Greening events is a pretty interesting field because [the events] are so fleeting that its obvious to people that there is a significant amount of waste involved," Hoffman says.