The Green Carpet Challenge, founded by Livia Firth, exists to showcase to the world that ethical fashion can be in vogue and red carpet worthy.
American Vogue editor Anna Wintour, actress and ethical fashion campaigner Livia Firth and Natalie Massenet, chairman of the British Fashion Council, hosted the unveiling of the first ethically produced outfits by five of the UK’s most prestigious fashion houses.
Burberry, Victoria Beckham, Christopher Kane, Erdem and Roland Mouret have all designed “green” dresses, the production of which meets the social and environmental benchmarks devised by the Green Carpet Challenge as a kitemark of ethical fashion. The clothes will go on sale on Net-a-Porter, the online retailer founded by Massenet, with 20% of each sale being donated to the Global Fund’s campaign against Aids, tuberculosis and malaria.
This first Green Carpet Challenge collection aims to break down barriers, both real and imagined, between mainstream and ethical fashion. Christopher Kane, who attended the launch after staging his own successful catwalk collection the same day, said he hoped the collection would show ethical fashion could be “glamorous and achievable“. The collection takes the principles of Livia Firth’s Green Carpet Challenge – a campaign to change perceptions of “green” fashion by showing that ethical frocks can hold their own in the glamour stakes – and extends it to ready-to-wear, so that ordinary shoppers can apply the Green Carpet principles to everyday life. By embedding ethical clothes in the supply stream of mainstream fashion, Firth hopes the collection can bring about “systemic change”. And by enlisting A-list designers to the cause, the Green Carpet Collection is also designed to banish the hair-shirt connotations that continue to linger around ethical fashion.
Via The Guardian
Images via Vogue
