News

We delve into the ethics surrounding fast fashion and why sustainability is the key to our future.

 

We feel you. Here are some of our tips on how to keep your spirits lifted during all this chaos.

  HELP STOP UYGHUR GENOCIDE. As you all know, enforced slave labor and poor working conditions for garment workers are issues we at Ilk + Ernie care deeply about. Some of you may or may not know about the appalling mistreatment and enforced imprisonment of Uyghur Muslims that is currently going on in China. Regardless, we felt compelled to use our platform to share a super educational article written by our dear friend Roxy Khan-Williams. Roxy works for the anti-facist organisation Hope Not Hate where she works on issues to do with islamophobia and racism towards Muslims. We are sharing her good work in...

It’s not enough to just buy second hand, independent or ethical fashion. If you’re still buying wastefully, without longevity in mind, it’s a problem.

We delved into this subject recently, because we think on some level there is still a misunderstanding when it comes to the link between global warming and fast fashion. In fact, it's worth considering whether many people understand/have bothered to understand what fast fashion actually is. That's where the above statement comes in.  Sure, it’s great to bag a bargain, we’ve been raised with that mindset, BUT it is almost impossible to avoid the facts that have been SO present in the media over the past 18 months (though it’s more like 7 years). Fast fashion is bad. If you...

Fast fashion, what's the deal? Fast fashion brings us an ever changing variety of cheap clothes, but we should probably ask ourselves: what’s the real cost behind a £2 t-shirt? Spoiler alert: it’s high. Very high. Unfortunately, fashion is one of the world’s most polluting industries. To name just a few of its problems, fast fashion’s cheap polyester materials shed plastic microfibers when washed in washing machines: these are not biodegradable and end up in the oceans (and poor fish’s bellies). Also, the toxic chemicals used in textile dying pollute galleons of clean water, 300000 tons of garments end up in...