The Fibershed Project is All About ‘Slow Fashion’

Yolo Wool Mill. Photo credit: Paige Green.
Yolo Wool Mill. Photo credit: Paige Green.

In a recent article from the Bay Citizen titled “Dressing Locally, Thinking Globally,” Twilight Greenaway wrote about an interesting take on sustainable fashion spearheaded by Marin resident Rebecca Burgess called the Fibershed Project.

This project was based on her eye-opening experience of the impact of the garment industry in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. She learned that “people who worked in areas where they produced clothes for the West lived shorter lives and had many more illnesses.” She also told the Bay Citizen that the areas she visited were “the most polluted, impoverished communities…that were producing and dying garments for us.”

Burgess decided to conduct a little experience. Following the lead of the “slow food” movement, she spent one entire year wearing clothes dyed and made from sustainable agricultural products within 150 miles of her home — a.k.a. her “fibershed” (hence the title of her project) — hen she documented it all on her blog.

Now that the year is almost done, Burgess is going to leverage her experiment into something called The Fibershed Marketplace, “strives to facilitate the creation of a functioning local supply chain; one that brings balance to the production and consumption of goods, and that supports the health of all humans and the greater ecological system of which we are a part.”

What are your thoughts of this sustainable take on fashion?

Read the full article at The Bay Citizen