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The trailblazing and ethical fashion brand recently partnered with One Tribe, sustainability already in Foxology’s DNA. The team has a holistic approach to design from farm to factory, making sure you look chic while you’re saving the planet! From organic fair trade cotton to keeping our oceans clean by using natural fibres, Foxology offers the fashion world a sustainable hat-trick.
The average person wears a garment only 7 times before it is discarded into a landfill. We buy 400% more clothing than 7 years ago, and the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is wasted every single second. That’s around 60 garbage trucks since you started reading this article!
It’s not a coincidence that brands are able to farm out garments so cheaply, using exploitative labour practices and draining the planet of its resources, the price tag reflects the quality in the majority of fast fashion. Sustainable brands promoting slow fashion are instrumental in providing long-lasting alternatives to unsustainable quick buys and the movement follows an increasingly vocal consumer demand that brands start thinking more ethically about what they produce.
Focusing on buying fewer clothes, less often, and with higher quality, also ensures that the chain of production is accounted for, with a bulk of slow fashion brands like Foxology choosing to manufacture locally, drastically driving down the ecological impact of overseas shipping.
Foxology is a true farm to factory brand, founder Dawn Foxall states:
“My version of sustainability is a lived experience”, since growing up on a Shropshire farm, the love for organic and ethically made pieces wove its way into her brand, creating pieces that not only look and feel incredible but focus on having little to no impact on the climate.”
While wool is a sustainable and biodegradable option for designers, synthetic materials, (mind-blowingly) rank higher in sustainability due to the greenhouse gasses, harmful pesticides, and dying processes used to create a wool garment. However, brands like Foxology are long game thinkers. Wool has an average lifetime of 50% longer, and due to their special seam free technology, a whole lot less yarn is wasted in their garments.
Being ethical actors, Foxology also adopted a ‘non mulesing’ standpoint which meant that their Merino sheep were spared a painful process which was meant to stop flystrike (flies laying eggs on animals). Mulesing is often performed at the same time as tail docking, castration, and ear tagging, all when a lamb is around 6-10 weeks old.
Sheep rank like wooly dogs on the intelligence scale, and Foxology and One Tribe know that we only want clothes from happy sheep.
Degraded soil is an enormous problem within the woolen farming industry, and even your cashmere sweater isn’t innocent. 90% of Mongolia’s surface is facing desertification due to the breeding of cashmere goats, and 30% of Patagonia due to sheep grazing.
To put that into perspective of how this desertification impacts the globe, it is estimated to result in a food decrease of 30% in the next 20-50 years if nothing changes. Logging in the Amazon making way for cheap farmland is a vast problem. It is sending shockwaves across our natural world, from dark jungles now decimated, to the delicate balance of life the mangroves cultivate by South America’s coastal rainforest.
It’s hard to imagine what the soil does for us besides grow stuff, but it also plays a part in our air quality. Soil is needed to absorb CO2, and if we continue reckless production of unnecessary garments, we risk the very security of our food and atmosphere. Organic is the way to go for your wardrobe as well as your fridge. Biodegradable, well made garments not only mean less harmful chemicals interfering with your skin, but less impact on the environment.
As a multi-faceted brand Foxology are also focusing on finding the very best in Fairtrade materials. Cotton is one of the most water intensive, land eroding crops. It’s pesticide driven when farmed irresponsibly, contributing to the loss of soil biodiversity, and using precious water resources from drought ridden countries. However, founder Dawn Foxall, having travelled to Egypt several times, found a way to combat this when looking for the perfect source for her products.
The Queen of Egyptian cottons is found in Sekem, producing extra long fibres and produces extremely high grade products, an ethical jackpot if you’re looking for plants that are well looked after, avoiding the harmful chemical processes all together. The land rather than being atrophied by constant over farming, is biodynamically worked, which means that not only is your garment looked after from the second the seed gets planted, the environment its grown in gets respected too.
Around 2 billion people are currently living in a water-stressed area, making it all the more staggering that the fashion industry gobbles up 79 billion cubic meters of water per year.
Protecting bodies of water like the Amazon’s mangroves, heavily polluted from industrial waste, have a lot more to do with climate change than one might initially think. The “Blue Forests” are responsible for storing twice as much carbon as their more inland counterparts, and are consistently razed, destroying some of the earth’s most important biodiversity and releasing enormous amounts of carbon stored in waterlogged soils, which has in some cases been there for centuries, and gone in an instant.
That’s why it’s so important that we work with brands like Foxology to save the rainforest, using ethical cotton production from trusted fair trade sources and making wool garments that last infinitely longer than synthetic materials, keeping industry waste out of the seas, and logging away from South America.
Phew! With all that planet saving you’ll be desperate to take a look at their site, check out how many trees they’ve saved while you’re there!
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One Tribe is a Climate Action Platform enabling businesses and their customers to make a positive environmental impact.
