Bee & Alpaca: The Launch of Sustainable Style
Bee & Alpaca’s sustainable style is a foil to fast fashion’s fixation on short product life and continual cycles of replacement to feed its bottom line. The new brand concentrates instead on creating timeless pieces that won’t go out of style in six months time. “The fashion industry leaves behind a lot of waste fabric, and it gets labelled as deadstock. Sometimes there are minor consistency issues – which in many cases are purely technical, are invisible to customer, or which a new design can take into account. Other times the fabric did not meet purchasing or manufacturing order criteria, such as the exact gram per square metre density or colour tone requested by the buyers.” Public awareness of environmental issues is now at the level where it is prepared to accept the imperceptible differences in colour or texture that a fashion house could not stomach. Fast fashion, in turn, is responsible for producing extraordinary levels of waste at a time when indiscriminate dumping, landfill and incineration are the cause of so many problems the world over. “The fashion industry has hundreds of sustainability problems, from water waste to landfill to workers’ rights, and no single brand can tackle them all,” says Deniz. “By transforming so-called deadstock materials into upcycled clothing, we can solve a few of these problems whilst balancing all the other aspects.”