AR in textiles

Listening to an old Veganfreak podcast with Gary Francione talking about how demand from the public leads to bad meat production made me think - does demand for wool and silk lead to the harsh farming methods used in fibre production.  I think so.  This isn't just limited to protein fibres (wool, silk) but also in cellulose (cottons, linen) as farming for cellulose is also environmentally harsh, and does not include leather or fur production as they are a whole different ball game, both as processes and in ethical terms.  However as wool and silk directly use animals they could be seen as being as morally wrong as battery farming. 

Does consumer demand lead to bad farming practice - I think the answer is yes.  Demand for cheap woollen clothing leads to practices such as mulesing and to sheep being treated as commodities rather than as living beings. 

Silk is a tougher question as it is not known for being cheap.  Silk is produced by boiling cocoons to release the fibres the silk worm has spun aound itself.  However, if the cocoon is left until the worm has morphed into a moth (which chews its way out) the fibres are damaged so the worms are boiled inside along with the cocoons.  Personally I see this production method as highy unethical, however as poorly fed and housed silk worms produce poor silk they tend to be kept in slightly higher conditions than a lot of other non-humans used to produce things for humans.


More about this when I have thought about it further.

Animal Ethics update

I have been hearing quite a lot about the meat that is being grown in labs recently.  There have been textile and food rumblings about this for a few years (growing your own leather jacket for example, BBC article about meat from 2005), however the latest thing that I read is that the science involves taking cells from the muscle of a living animal and then growing it in a solution of blood from animal foetuses - if this is an accurate explanation of the process then another ethical question arises here.  Can it be considered ethical to grow meat like this?  I don't like to pit one stance against another like this usually but here goes - is it more or less ethical to eat grown meat than to eat farmed meat?  And thus the questions comes - is it more or less ethical to wear grown leather than farmed leather?  Feasibly leather as a meat-industry by-product could become sparse if we  eat more grown meat, could this lead to demand for grown leather? 


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6936352.ece

Animal Ethics in Textiles, Fashion and Craft

Last week I went to a talk at the V&A on Fashion and ethics. When the conversation turned to leather an audience member voiced the question "How can fashion ever truly consider itself to be ethical when death is involved", to which one of the speakers answered that she was vegetarian and her company do not use leather. Unfortunately the discussion never went any further down that road but it did get me thinking.

As a committed longterm vegan, and in working with textiles a lot of questions come to me. For example; as a vegan I do not wear leather shoes. However most vegan shoes are made of a synthetic leather, which is made from a plastic. This is great in some ways - waterproof, smart looking etc, but dreadful in others - not biodegradable, not breathable, and this is asides from finding them made in a fair trade and ethical manner, as well as hopefully being durable and comfortable! So one question I often ask myself is 'leather vs pleather, which is more ethical'.

Similarly I do not work with wool, silk and other animal byproducts, I prefer not to use synthetics as I am not keen on their feel a lot of the time, but when I want the shimmer of silk or the warmth of wool I cannot always find a suitable cellulose fabric. I try not to mix material types as they are easier to reuse if they are not mixed but this is not always possible. And with a seeming prevelence of poly-cotton mixes at the moment maybe the future is mixed.

Questions about animal byproducts crop up all the time, glue, paint, brushes all have their own debates but when you then couple them with environmental ethics it becomes all the more complicated. Some find it ethically easiest to work digitally but I am a physical person, I am a maker. I am yet to marry my different ethical concerns with a suitably appropriate answer for an animal free, environmentally sound answer for most of them.