simplify – the {r}evolution apparel blog

Wearing Local for One Year: A Slow Fashion Interview {Part II}

Yesterday, we had the chance to interview Rebecca Burgess, the face of The Fibershed Project. She has committed to wearing clothes made only from materials sourced within a 150-mile radius of her home in California, and as her year of wearing local wraps up, we asked her a few questions about sustainable design and personal challenges.

{r} You are also an educator and textile artist. As designers wanting to make the best decisions for people and planet, what advice would you give us about entering the industry, compromise, and sustainability?

I highly recommend the mantra, ‘make do with what appears to be little.’

Start from the inside out. What do you really want to create in this world? What do you ideally want to offer as a service or good to your fellow human? What is the systemic impact of your product?

When I reflect on the word ‘ideal’– it reminds me how this project began… it was an ideal scenario… and the question existed… but can the ideal work?

Your ideal becomes your goal, and you move towards it. You take leaps, and risks, and sometimes you work with self-imposed limitation to get there. Ideal doesn’t land in your lap, you make it happen.

Now that I am closer than ever to my ideal scenario, I’m better informed about how I would want this to be scaled to become available to others in my community. Keeping with the ideals, the clothing would be a product of a human-scale, and deeply ecologically thoughtful processes.

The current caliber of ‘sustainable’ textile production is summed up by the owner of one particularly famous environmentally friendly clothing company (that I’ll remain nameless), who says, ‘The cost of manufacturing is inherently going to damage the earth, that’s why all business needs to have a pay-back plan to the planet.’

What that person is saying and accepting as truth is that we as humans are going to continue to have a material culture that does damage. The problem with that scenario is that we live on a finite planet, and damaging manufacturers cannot continue to expand on a finite planet. This clothing company is not inherently sustainable, nor is it doing anything to create a vibrant and thriving planet; ultimately all the money put towards conservation, and protection of the environment is at best, (in a historical snapshot), neutralizing the effects of an ever- growing manufacturing process that will eventually exceed all attempts at neutralizing.

I think the next wave of textile production will be looking at how to manufacture regeneratively. How to make the process a living, ecological model. Can you eliminate the concept of waste? If you can close your loops, and balance your carbon, then your system is as harmonious as the process of breathing. And, it will last the generations, and not simply be a blip on the screen towards ecological collapse.

Planting the dye plants, harvested later for dyeing fabrics

Leather in Fibershed: DIY

Local sheep used to make socks and legwarmers, among other things

Part of the dyeing process

{r} And the question everyone wants to know: When the year ends, what’s next for you and Fibershed?

The next wave for Fibershed is to expand out of my wardrobe, and begin to look closely at how we can create a bioregional supply chain that does no harm. We are celebrating the Fibershed as a whole, and bringing attention to our plans for the first ever, solar-powered, farm-based cotton and wool mill. We’re throwing a party on May 1st, and you’re all invited!

We are inviting people from everywhere — because we see a Fibershed as a replicable module. This isn’t just about our bioregion, its about the potential that exists in all regions!

As the personal challenge ends, I forsee Fibershed having a for-profit and non-profit wing. The for-profit wing will be a host of bio-regional fiber growers and processors working together to create the best possible garments. The non-profit wing will be working on R&D (research and development), and grant-writing to secure the funds to help develop innovative manufacturing systems — everything from rotational grazing regimes, so that farmers can get help to improve their soils, and sequester carbon, to developing closed-loop water systems in our fermentation indigo dye house.

It is all completely exciting, and the best part is, it’s already happening!

A huge thanks to Rebecca for sharing her expertise with us. Her story makes us re-think the boundaries of a seemingly-oxymoron, “sustainable fashion.” We encourage everyone to check out Fibershed and spread the word!

How to Edit Your Life and Stop Wasting Time

I’m the type of person who likes things simple.

I don’t own a car. I only have one monthly bill in my name. I use debit instead of credit.

But as we enter 2011, things are getting more complicated. After we registered as an LLC, I realized, “Ugh, we have to start keeping track of things now. This is for real.”

We have a lot going on. Researching production. Updating the blog. Photography. Managing money and paperwork for taxes. Product design. Social Media.

Life just became a lot less simple.

So, being part of the millennial generation and all, I started Googling “lifehacking.”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, I’ll save you a trip to Wikipedia:

“The term ‘life hack’ refers to productivity tricks that programmers devise and employ to cut through information overload and organize their data… Today, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack.”

So basically, life hacking means getting control of your life — finding more efficient ways to do things, gaining focus and direction, and creating shortcuts for virtually everything.

Soon after I began my research, I noticed a paradox:

Looking on the web for life hacks and ways to be productive is the most unproductive way to spend your time.

So I’m going to simplify it for you. What every single site from 43Folders to Tim Ferriss says is this:

Identify what’s most important to you.
Eliminate everything else.

Basically, edit your life. Automate what you can. Outsource what you need to. Choose to do the things that are important to you and that you do best. Don’t do the other things.

It’s that simple. {r}

7 Things We're Remembering This Thanksgiving

Let’s be clear — we aren’t Zen Habits. We take the long way around. We get unnecessarily stressed. We forget to simplify.

But we’re trying to change that.

This past month has been, well, insane. All of our down-time has been spent working: brainstorming, marketing, writing, researching, learning and designing. All at once. At a frantic, unsustainable pace.

We have been falling asleep in front of our computer screens, forgetting words in the English language, and basically burning ourselves out, day after day.

Our adventure might have sounded a bit like a vacation, but trust me, we have been trying to accomplish the nearly impossible: a truly organic, ethical clothing line.

At breakfast every day, our Guatemalan home-stay dad, Jose, would ask, “Are you girls going to conquer the world today?”

And we would enthusiastically reply, “Yep.” And every day, that’s what we would try to do.

We’ve been told that starting a business can take control of you. You want something so badly, that you start running towards success full-force. You work constantly. You stress. You can’t get away from it. You start to go a little loco.

Well, that’s not the lifestyle we want. We started all of this to change our lives for the better; to gain a greater world perspective, to learn things, and to enjoy a new experience. It’s time to take a pause before we start to really go loco.

So today, we’ve made a list of things to remember when life gets hectic:

We run the business; the business doesn’t run us.

Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Most things aren’t as pertinent as we think they are.

Whether we reach our launch goal next week, or in 6 months, it will come.

Our relationships, health, and happiness come first.

A number of events had to occur in both of our lives for us to embark on this adventure. Be grateful.

We are more fortunate than we can comprehend.

You can find us brainstorming about our production process, at a leisurely pace, probably in a hammock, in San Juan del Sur. The journey is a beautiful thing. {r}

7 Things We’re Remembering This Thanksgiving