By Nicola Twilley.

I stumbled across a very happy surprise on Thursday afternoon: after months of "coming soon" promises, Stewart+Brown's online store opened for business on Thanksgiving Day!

For those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure, Stewart+Brown is a sustainable clothing company, founded by Karen Stewart and Howard Brown in 2002, and based just up the road, in Ventura, CA. Their green credentials are impeccable: their clothes are made of organic cotton and their accessories from factory fabric surplus, and they give one percent of all their sales to non-profit NGOs, as a voluntary earth tax. But my credit card would still be firmly wedged in my wallet, if it wasn't for the additional fact that their designs are entirely perfect. The colors are beautiful, the cut is fitted but flattering, and the details - a little dart here, or folded edge there - push the clothes right over the edge into clinical irresistibleness.

Karen was apparently converted after a trip to a California cotton farm, where she learned that one-third of a pound of carcinogenic pesticide is typically used to grow just one T-shirt's worth of conventional cotton. In fact, according to the Sustainable Cotton Project (based in California's Central Valley), "when all nineteen cotton-growing states are tallied, the crop accounts for twenty-five percent of all the pesticides used in the U.S." Persuading these conventional cotton farmers to adopt organic farming methods is an uphill struggle, for reasons that are largely economic. As a recent and fascinating article in Grist explains. cotton "needs to drop its leaves before it can be mechanically harvested. Otherwise, the green leaves can stain the cotton, and make it wet and susceptible to mildew." And while Turkish growers can go organic by hiring cheap labor to handpick the bolls, their American counterparts rely on mechanical harvesting and defoliants to remain economically competitive.

The Sustainable Cotton Project is attempting to tackle this situation by offering American farmers a compromise solution. Since 1996, its BASIC (Biological Agricultural Systems In Cotton) program has conducted research and used peer mentoring and step-by-step assistance to help growers produce "cleaner cotton" - using up to 70% less pesticide and no GM seeds. This truly admirable program is growing slowly but steadily to about 1,800 enrolled acres in 2006, mostly in California's San Joaquin Valley (out of a total of 657,000 acres of cotton sown statewide).

I'm voting with my wallet: Stewart+Brown assures me that it uses American-grown organic Pima cotton (and they manufacture their clothes in the U.S. too, although they do source their regular jersey cotton - about 25% of their total cotton supply - from Turkey).

You will also be interested to know of a new twist to the organic cotton story. Because of increased consumer demand and awareness of the benefits of organic vs conventional cotton the CORPORATE fashion brand sector is now getting into the game. I won't name names on who these profit mongers are as you will be able to figure it out on your own. Essentially what is happening is that the corporates, after dismissing the viability of organic and supressing it for years, are now tripping over each other in an effort to paint themselves green and rush to the marketplace w/their own organic products all the while trumpeting "how much they care" about the environment. This is nothing short of complete phoniness. It all sounds great but the problem is that there is a finite amount of organic fiber available and the corporates are buying up all the supply at a high price in an effort to dominate the market and put the "little guys" out of business. The results are that the small, independant companies (such as ours) are having trouble sourcing the fibers to complete our production cycles. Additionally, the early word is that the corporates "green" efforts are not working on the sales floor (meaning it is not selling) because mainstream america (hello Wal-Mart) is not ready for it. This could ultimately lead to an even bigger controversy if the Green Movement fails the profitability test for corporate America...it could send our progressive lobbying efforts against agricultural subsidies (conventional is subsidized, organic is not) back to the stoneage!

So, in otherwords, please continue to support your favorite independant organic / green designers and continue to be suspicious of the motives of any publicly traded corporate fashion house.

Posted by: Howard Brown on January 8, 2007 9:36 AM