It’s Earth Month and we wanted to celebrate trailblazing fashion label Kowtow which has achieved the goal of its Fairtrade Organic garments being 100 per cent plastic-free!
Up until recently Kowtow garments were 99 per cent there, aside from the trims – thread used to sew garments and elastic on cuffs (to keep them from going baggy).
They’ve replaced the elastic with a natural latex rubber elastic, which had to be especially created for Kowtow and tested and trialled over the past 12 months.
Kowtow is also now using cotton thread for sewing together garments.
Did you know that designers can currently label a garment 100 per cent cotton, excluding the trims?! That isn’t acceptable to Kowtow who believe in being completely transparent.
It’s meant Kowtow has had to return to pre-plastic revolution techniques. “What the sewers have to do is stitch slower as cotton breaks quicker in the machines,” Kowtow founder Gosia Patek explains.
Kowtow has also released an open-source handbook for plastic-free clothing, containing 17 years of R&D component sourcing information – from buttons to elastic, thread to fabric – with the intent to help speed up positive change in the fashion industry.
Gosia says she “wants to be a solutions provider in the industry, not just creating more stuff”. We applaud that!
