School shooting hoodies with bullet holes land fashion company in hot water

School shooting hoodies with bullet holes land fashion company in hot water - ABC News

School shooting hoodies with bullet holes land fashion company in hot water - ABC News
Fashion Nova’s 2019 Halloween Costumes Are Inspired by Celebrity Looks - WWD
Gorgeous Photos Prove That Trash Is The Next Fashion Frontier - BuzzFeed News
Column: Fast fashion is hurting the planet, and you can stop it - Los Angeles Times

School shooting hoodies with bullet holes land fashion company in hot water - ABC News

Posted: 18 Sep 2019 02:14 AM PDT

A New York clothing company has introduced school shooting hoodies that have bullet holes in them and feature the names of four schools where nearly 100 students were shot to death, including Sandy Hook, Columbine, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Virginia Tech.

Bstroy, a self-described "neo-native" post-apocalypse streetwear brand, according to Paper Magazine, has been slammed with comments -- of both support and disgust -- after showcasing their Spring 2020 menswear collection called "Samsara" in a series of posts on Instagram.

"Under what scenario could somebody think this was a good idea? This has me so upset. If any of my followers no [sic] anybody involved with this clothing line, please ask them to stop it immediately," tweeted Fred Guttenberg whose daughter Jaime was killed in 2018 by Nikolas Cruz in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting.

Under what scenario could somebody think this was a good idea? This has me so upset. If any of my followers no anybody involved with this clothing line, please ask them to stop it immediately.https://t.co/VzAlog0TCt

A memorial page for Vicki Soto, one of the teachers killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting responded directly to the Instagram post of the Sandy Hook hoodie saying "As a Sandy Hook family, what you are doing here is absolutely disgusting, hurtful, wrong and disrespectful. You'll never know what our family went through after Vicki died protecting her students. Our pain is not to be used for your fashion."

"This is disgusting," actress Alyssa Milano simply tweeted.

This is disgusting. https://t.co/9MOMizLqWe

One of the company's founders, Brick Owens, responded to the critics by releasing a statement on Instagram.

"Sometimes life can be painfully ironic," the statement read. Like the irony of dying violently in a place you consider to be a safe, controlled environment, like school. We are reminded all the time of life's fragility, shortness, and unpredictability yet we are also reminded of its infinite potential. It is this push and pull that creates the circular motion that is the cycle of life. Nirvana is the goal we hope to reach through meditation and healthy practices that counter our destructive habits. Samsara is the cycle we must transcend to reach Nirvana."

While the vast majority of responses to the clothing line were negative, there were some who thought the company was doing their best to bring awareness to the issue of gun violence in America.

"I hope all the people in the comments that are upset, are upset enough to talk to their elected officials about serious gun control measures," said Instagram user @magnetic_poles.

"This SHOULD enrage people. This SHOULD spark conversation. This is what art and fashion are all about. The problem here isn't the hoodies, it's the fact that we have enough school shootings to make an entire fashion collection of them. Seeing these hoodies & reactions shows how much pain there still is and how, as a country, we still have done NOTHING to stop these senseless (and all too frequent) shooting," @jillvaccaro said on Instagram.

"We are making violent statements," the other founder of Bstroy, Dieter "Du" Grams told The New York Times in a profile that was published last week. "That's for you to know who we are, so we can have a voice in the market. But eventually that voice will say things that everyone can wear."

Bstory has not immediately responded to ABC News' request for comment Wednesday morning.

Owens reportedly told NBC News, however, that Bstroy "wanted to make a comment on gun violence and the type of gun violence that needs preventative attention and what its origins are, while also empowering the survivors of tragedy through storytelling in the clothes."

Whether or not this polarizing strategy is successful for Bstroy, however, is yet to be seen.

Wrote @girlnamedgreen on Instagram: "As a victim of Columbine, I am appalled. This is disgusting. You can draw awareness another way but don't you dare make money off of our tragedy."

Fashion Nova’s 2019 Halloween Costumes Are Inspired by Celebrity Looks - WWD

Posted: 17 Sep 2019 01:48 PM PDT

Isn't imitation the sincerest form of flattery?

Fashion Nova would say so. The fast-fashion online retailer, which has become known for re-creating the celebrity fashion looks of Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, among others, is releasing a line of 2019 Halloween costumes that are inspired by some iconic celebrity fashion looks.

The retailer has released a number of Halloween costumes mimicking multiple celebrity looks, including Jennifer Lopez's iconic plunging Versace gown from the 2000 Grammy Awards for $69.99, Cardi B's black-and-white checkered suit from her "Invasion of Privacy" album cover for $69.99 and Madonna's Jean Paul Gaultier conical corset from her Blond Ambition tour from the Nineties for $59.99.

Fashion Nova Recreates Iconic Celebrity Looks for Halloween

Madonna's Jean Paul Gaultier look from her Blonde Ambition tour and Fashion Nova's Halloween costume. REX/Shutterstock and Fashion Nova

Fashion Nova is also offering costumes inspired by styles worn by Lil' Kim, Selena, Aaliyah and Jenner.

The online retailer has partnered with celebrities in the past. Most recently, the brands teamed with Cardi B for a collection. Conversely, Fashion Nova has also been called out by celebrities who have accused the company of knocking off one-of-a-kind designer looks they have recently worn. Kardashian, for one, spoke out against Fashion Nova in February for re-creating the bondage-inspired vintage Thierry Mugler dress she wore to the Hollywood Beauty Awards. It wasn't the first time Kardashian accused fast-fashion retailers of knocking off looks she's worn — and even those designed by her husband Kanye West under his Yeezy label.

While there was no further action taken by either party in February, Kardashian did experience a win against fast-fashion retailer, Misguided. In July, she was awarded $2.7 million in a lawsuit over the retailer misusing her name and images in its offerings and advertising.

Kim Kardashian in vintage Thierry Mugler and Fashion Nova's "Winning Beauty Cut Out Gown." REX/Shutterstock and Fashion Nova

The Fashion Nova 2019 Halloween costumes are available on the retailer's web site.

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Gorgeous Photos Prove That Trash Is The Next Fashion Frontier - BuzzFeed News

Posted: 17 Sep 2019 10:21 AM PDT

Caitlin Ochs and Greg Haerling for BuzzFeed News

Designer Zero Waste Daniel, and DSNY employees April Harris, Victor Alvelo, Steven Kuai, and Megan Harvey wearing pieces from the ZWDSNY fall 2020 collection.

At the ZWD fashion show, the only reserved seats were in the front row for NYC Sanitation employees, who at one point received cheers from the guests in attendance.

Most collaborations for New York Fashion Week involve influencers and A-listers. Long lines, red carpets, and a certain amount of exclusivity are signatures of runway shows. In an alternative take that prioritizes sustainability over celebrity, Brooklyn-based designer Daniel Silverstein of Zero Waste Daniel collaborated with the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY) for his fall 2020 collection.

"I wanted to work with DSNY. The whole idea of the collection is to position the Department of Sanitation not as garbage men and women, but as heroes of our zero-waste fight," said Silverstein in a recent interview at his shop in Brooklyn.

Repurposing former DSNY uniforms and other textile goods sitting in department storage —such as tablecloths, tents, aprons, and even parts from sanitation trucks — he created a 16-piece ZWDSNY collection that generated virtually no waste.

"You can go your entire life without needing a firefighter or a police officer," said DSNY executive director Robin Brooks, "but you need a sanitation worker at least a couple times a week."

Caitlin Ochs And Greg Haerling / Caitlin Ochs and Greg Haerling for Buzzfeed News

Zero Waste Daniel chalks a line for a coat pattern at his shop in Brooklyn.

Last year, DSNY estimates it collected 3.1 million tons of garbage from the city. With more than 2,000 collection trucks, the department is responsible for maintaining 6,500 miles of city streets and is actively seeking collaborations with artists, designers, and activists to expand awareness of its goal to send zero waste to landfills.

"When I met with Robin Brooks, she told me about some of the challenges that the sanitation workers face, like having F-bombs dropped on them and being constantly honked at and harassed," said Silverstein.

His zero-waste approach is rare in the fashion industry, which has fallen under increasing scrutiny for the waste it generates. According to the UN, every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is sent to a landfill or burned, and if nothing changes, by 2050 the fashion industry will use a quarter of the world's carbon budget.

Caitlin Ochs and Greg Haerling for BuzzFeed News

Designer Zero Waste Daniel fits a New York Department of Sanitation employee with hero shorts from his fall 2020 collection.

"My point of origin for design is always, show me what you've got. Let's start with what we have already," said Silverstein. "I would describe my approach as a bit backward — starting with the end goal of zero waste and letting the waste materials inform my design, rather than starting with a traditional point of 'conceptual' or 'art' inspiration."

The collection's signature jacket, which will retail for $1,600, utilizes a bright orange E-Z Up tent from a previous sanitation department event, and a selection of long-sleeved shirts came from tablecloths. A pair of sunglasses integrates upcycled mixed materials from keychains and parts of sanitation trucks.

To source material for the accessories in the ZWDSNY collection, Silverstein partnered with Sure We Can, a recycling center based in Brooklyn. Special Projects Coordinator Ryan Castalia hand-cut and pressed various types of plastic into sheets that could be cut and sewn into items such as tote bags, fanny packs, and wallets. According to Castalia, each 15x18-inch plastic sheet is made from roughly 12 square feet of plastic.

Caitlin Ochs and Greg Haerling for BuzzFeed News

Special Projects Coordinator Ryan Castalia discusses patterns for processed plastic with designer Zero Waste Daniel at Sure We Can, a recycling facility in Brooklyn.

Within design, sustainability and scalability are not always compatible. But by basing the collection on existing DSNY dead stock, the number of pieces made is contingent on existing material, and Silverstein believes he is working with a scalable business model.

"We priced the collection according to how limited and how complicated each piece [is]," said Silverstein, when asked if he believes his designs can scale up for wholesale. "Our coat, for example, can only be made in a limited quantity of six units because there are only a couple of tents to work with … but we can scale as big as we want to, depending on the material we have … with some of the T-shirts for example, we have thousands of items to work with."

To see more, the accompanying gallery show for ZWDSNY is accessible via the Ace Hotel lobby and will be up until Oct. 4.

Caitlin Ochs and Greg Haerling for BuzzFeed News

The only leftover material from the fall 2020 ZWDSNY collection includes part of a t-shirt, patches, thread scraps, and a hat.

Caitlin Ochs and Greg Haerling for BuzzFeed News

Designer Zero Waste Daniel works on a component for a repurposed sanitation hat at his shop in Brooklyn.

Caitlin Ochs and Greg Haerling for BuzzFeed News

Designer Zero Waste Daniel wearing a t-shirt from his ZWDSNY collection.

Caitlin Ochs And Greg Haerling / Caitlin Ochs and Greg Haerling for Buzzfeed News

April Harris, Deputy Chief at New York Department of Sanitation with 20 years of service, wearing a long sleeved shirt and a city street fanny pack made from recycled plastic.

Caitlin Ochs and Greg Haerling for BuzzFeed News

Victor Alvelo, District Superintendent at New York Department of Sanitation with 15 years of service, wearing a black car t-shirt and empire state of mind cap, featured in the DSNY 2020 fall collection.

Caitlin Ochs and Greg Haerling for BuzzFeed News

Megan Harvey, a sanitation worker at New York Department of Sanitation with a year of service, wearing a repurposed apron, visor, and shirt featuring a print of plastic bottles and other garbage.

Caitlin Ochs and Greg Haerling for BuzzFeed News

The Zero Waste Daniel gallery installation at the ACE Hotel in Manhattan.

Column: Fast fashion is hurting the planet, and you can stop it - Los Angeles Times

Posted: 18 Sep 2019 03:00 AM PDT

Los Angeles Fashion Week begins in October in the biggest clothing manufacturing center in the country. But what do you find when you go beneath the clothes — not the nudity but something much more revealing: how the world's wardrobes are made, and what real damage is done to the planet and to humans who create your $10 "bargain"?

Before Dana Thomas, there may not have been a job description for an "investigative fashion reporter," but she has certainly claimed it. In her new book, "Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes," she goes inside sweatshops, boardrooms, washing machines, stores, laboratories and showrooms to find out about the ravages wrought by cheap, disposable fashion, and the work of both technology and conscience to remedy it.

***

The good news for L.A. is that it's the largest apparel manufacturing center in the country. Part of the bad news is half of the people who work in it are undocumented, apparently working in sweatshops. What are the consequences and the impact here in L.A.?

Well, the consequences: You can see these sweatshops; they're sort of like in plain sight. It's a shame for L.A. because it is such an important garment industry, that so much of it is underground essentially.

Because the things are made in the USA, they get to carry a "made in the USA" label — and it begs the question of, maybe we should be IDing our clothes by how they're made, not where they're made, because obviously "where" doesn't really confer anything.

It's also a great loss for Los Angeles just simply in terms of things like revenue; because these folks are undocumented, they're paid poorly — they're paid so poorly. They're paid $1 or $2 an hour, maybe $3 an hour. They're not paid for overtime, and sometimes at the end of the month they aren't even paid what they're due.

So it would be really wise of the city to crack down on these sweatshops that are in plain view. I know Los Angeles has a lot of big problems, but considering it's the largest garment industry center in the country, you'd think that this would be a really important issue for the city.

In the last 20 or 25 years, the mania for fast fashion, for more and more clothes, has sped up. Between 2000 and 2014, you note that the number of garments doubled to a hundred billion made annually — that's 14 new garments per person per year on the planet. How have the consequences of this gone unreckoned with for so long?

Because we have so many other fish to fry, and also because we don't really know how our clothes are made, which is why I wrote the book. My inspiration for this book were two other books that I just adored. One was "Fast Food Nation" and the other was "The Omnivore's Dilemma," which were both about the food industry.

When you read those two books, you go, wow, I had no idea that the fast food industry was so dark and treated people so badly and the food was really scary.

You knew it wasn't good for you, but you didn't know it was that bad for you, on so many different levels — socially, economically, financially, health-wise, lots of different ways. The same thing with "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and industrial farming.

So I wanted to write the same thing about the fashion industry, because we all get dressed every day, and we don't understand what's behind a pair of blue jeans or how our clothes are made, where they're made. We know that it says "Made in Bangladesh," but what does that really mean? So I went to Bangladesh, and I tell you: This is how it is, and these are the survivors of the Rana Plaza factory collapse [the 2013 collapse killed 1,134 people], and here is what is a sweatshop really looks like.

There are very good people trying to change the system with slow fashion, growing indigo in Tennessee, spinning organic cotton in Manchester, England, in an old mill. There are change-makers trying to make it better.

There's some good stuff, and there's a lot of bad stuff, but mostly we were just really ill-informed about something that was a major part of our lives: What's in that dye that made the synthetic indigo that made your blue jeans blue? If you read what was in there you might go, hmmm, am I putting that up against my skin? I'm not so sure.

Part of your story begins with NAFTA, and how NAFTA was supposed to create this great free-trade zone. You began to discover, as many clothing manufacturers and designers did, that you could save money by sending jobs out of the U.S.

In theory, on paper, if you were an economist and you crunched the numbers and you lived in your air-conditioned conference room with the other PhDs, a free-trade zone between Mexico the United States and Canada made perfect sense, like we have in Europe.

But the wealth inequality and the income inequality between Mexico and the United States, and Mexico and Canada, was just too great to make this an even trade. And business saw the great advantages of moving everything to Mexico, and then farther down the peninsula through South America, and then across the Pacific to Asia.

What they discovered very quickly, too — which is a very key difference between NAFTA and something like the EU — is that there was no oversight. So these jobs moved offshore, the prices were cheap, and there was no oversight. There were sweatshops. There were no health inspectors. safety inspectors, and then that carried on across and around the world.

And that's when it really did spin wildly out of control, at the time that globalization was taking off.

What was striking too was how the chain of manufacture gave the designers plausible deniability. It walled off each part of production, with contractors, subcontractors, sub-subcontractors, so they could say, "I didn't know this was a sweatshop."

Or "I didn't know that it was happening there." That's what even happens in L.A.

We call it the fractured supply chain, because they contract somebody, and then those contractors subcontract and subcontract.

They do these raids in in sweatshops, and they find the labels of these companies, and then the companies say, "Well, we had no idea. We just contracted A and sent it to B, who sent it to C, and we lost track of it."

Now that's one thing if you've had your manufacturing done halfway around the world and you're doing everything by email and you never even see what's going on. But this is within the city limits of Los Angeles. If you don't have control of your supply chain and it's just around the corner, you're not running your company very well. And you should be held accountable.

Fast fashion can be environmentally damaging. You have a striking figure about water use — it takes 5,000 gallons of water to make a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Some chemicals, the byproduct of denim, are killing off streams and rivers in parts of the world.

I'd always heard that the garment industry was one of the greatest users of water. But I had no idea to this degree. Thank goodness there are innovators like a company I write about in the book called Jeanologia, out of Valencia, Spain, who have come up with a super-cool high-tech way of reducing water to process jeans — their finished jeans, as they say — and it reduces the [water] use down to one about one glass of water per pair of jeans, and that's recycled for several weeks. They're working on reducing it to zero waste of water.

This is super important for L.A., because it is the center for jeans finishing in the country and one of the largest in the world. Jeanologia [and] some competitors who've come up with similar systems are going to work with these finishing houses in L.A., wash houses, to reduce their water use, especially in a state like California, where water is so precious.

And, happily, one of the companies that has recently contracted Jeanologia is Levi. They are going to reduce their water usage around the world to one glass of water per pair of jeans. This is immense, as Levi is the largest blue jeans producer in the world. I hope it leads the industry into being a cleaner, greener business.

In the book you bring out how much waste there is, because in fashion, you never know what people are going to like, what they're going to buy. Things get made that don't get sold and get thrown away. And people buy immense amounts and get rid of those after wearing them once or twice.

The average garment today is worn seven times before it's thrown away, which is crazy. And it must mean there's a lot that are never worn. In China I recently heard the average is three times.

What's more, we throw them away in the trash. Only 1% of all garments are recycled, which also is kind of crazy. So we have to come up with ideas, new ways to extend the life of our clothes.

It could be swapping, and that's what my teenage daughter does with her friends. You can resell on consignment. And then then there's renting; we can rent our clothes instead of buying them, so when we're tired of them we don't throw them away — we just return them.

There's loads of alternatives to throwing away our clothes. You can give them to a home for battered women, women who run away with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They could use it.

There's so much waste with leather, too — 50 million animals killed every year just for shoes and handbags. You have pioneers, like designer Stella McCartney, who go leather-free and insist on leather-free. H&M, the huge retailer, has temporarily stopped buying Brazilian leather because of concerns that that industry contributes to deforestation of the Amazon. Talk about changes that designers are making to put the brakes on this waste, with leather and animals' lives, in fashion right now.

Absolutely. The leader in this, or the godmother, the fairy godmother in a way, is Stella McCartney. And she is a woman of conviction, in part because she was raised in a household where her father [Paul McCartney] was probably the most famous hippie in the world. This was her upbringing: no leather, no fur, super-vegetarian.

She has been godmothering a really cool company out of Brooklyn, and now New Jersey, called Modern Meadow. And they create what's called bio-fabric material that is essentially leather grown in a lab. They code the DNA. They can grow it to shape, which is very interesting for things like the automobile industry, where they grow it into the shape of the car seat. You just slip it on like a book cover.

It's clean, clean, clean and less damaging to the environment.

3-D printing seems to hold so much promise. If you like a dress, you can order the instructions, download that into your 3-D printer and make it at home.

That's what it is, at least in theory. We'll see if that's how it comes out. It still feels a bit George Jetson-y, right? But then if you told somebody 30 years ago that we would be walking around with iPads, iPhones, and you had everything in your whole life in this little thing, a little bit bigger than a credit card, they would say, are you crazy? So maybe this isn't too outlandish either.

The one thing that you advise, and the easiest to remedy some of this, is for people simply to buy less.

Buy less! We used to buy less. Sales of clothes have quintupled or more in the last 20 to 30 years. If you walk into an old house — L.A. has these fabulous Craftsman houses from the '20s — and you look at the closets, they're small! And now we take the second bedroom of the house and we turn it into a walk-in closet, because we have so many clothes that we don't know what to do with them all.

Clothes have never been cheaper than they are today. I discovered while working on the book that Hattie Carnegie, a wonderful New York retailer in the 1920s and '30s, had a mid-range, middle-market line called Spectator Sport that sold for the same price, about $19.99, that clothes sell for today. It was known then as a "secretary special."

Eighty years ago! And I'm not talking about the same price adjusted for inflation — the same price! How much has the price of gasoline gone up since then? How much has the price of a home gone up since then? And yet we're paying the same amount for clothes. That kind of puts things in perspective.

We seem to overdo everything about our clothes, including washing them.

One of the things we can change that's very simple, and will have an enormous impact, is that we just wash our clothes less. The man who told me this works for Procter & Gamble.

They want us to wash our clothes. That's their business. He said, wash your clothes less for several reasons. Wash them on the short cycle, not the long cycle, because you're saving energy and you're giving longer life to the garments. Wash in cold water instead of hot. You're saving energy not heating up the water, and they will still get clean.

When you wash your clothes less, and wash on the shorter cold cycle, you're releasing less microfibers into the water system because the heat warms up the fabric and releases them.

It's weirdly like [the household advice column] "Hints From Heloise" but on a global level, and I urge everyone to do it.

Do you think people really care about the misery of sweatshops, the impact on the environment and all of the consequences of fast fashion, disposable fashion, when they go shopping?

I do — when they know about it. When you don't know about it, you don't care. But when you do find out, then you look at the clothes a bit differently.

A generation or two ago, before NAFTA, we knew people who made our clothes, and we knew how to make clothes. We had home ec classes. We knew how to sew.

That all disappeared in the last 30 years, and therefore we don't invest any sort of value or emotion into our clothes like we used to. We don't understand what it takes to sew a button on a jacket, and therefore we don't care. We've been very cavalier and casual with our clothes simply because we don't know.

And that's why I wrote this book, to inform consumers. People, this is what's on your back! This is what you're putting on in the morning. This is what goes into it, and we should really have a long think about it.

Did writing this book change the way you shop and dress?

Absolutely. I've always kept things a long time. But I also started renting for special occasions. I had this event at the Cannes film festival and I rented the gown for it. When I speak at conferences, I rent a new suit so I look really snappy. I come home, I send it back, and I'm not cluttering up my house with stuff I don't need because I don't wear it very often.

I've changed a lot of the way I look at my wardrobe and how I'm living and dressing every day, and I hope that readers will too.