ENVIRONMENT

Ethical fashion is a cutting edge industry where designers put the environment and respect for mankind top of their agenda.

For its 6th edition the Ethical Fashion show brought together 100 designers from all around the world.

From India  Kakoli Banerjee brings designs from rural Rajasthan. Feeling that fashion should be about more than just money...this designer quit her job in the city and set up a trust that  brings together women who have been outcaste from society, woman who were brave enough to speak out but then suffered the consequences.  Based on an organic farm the women grow organic cotton and use vegetables to make their dyes. With little electricity available the designs are hand stitched.

British designer Ada Zanditon sewed her first styled stitches as an intern with the Alexander McQueen house of fashion...Today she credits them for teaching her everything she knows...but it's not flicking through their new collections that this artist gets inspiration, rather it's to scientific books she turns. “This is the key dress to my collection which is called the colony. The colony is inspired by the book 'A world without bees' which discusses colony collapse disorder so I wanted to create a collection that was inspired by the way bees think and create their colonies," she notes

Ada also hopes that her designs will bring the message about the precocity of the world's bees to fashionista's who might not read books about the environment.

Meanwhile in Mali organic cotton is saving the agricultural industry there as small growers everywhere are trying to come to grips with the rise of mechanized super farms in Texas, Brazil and China.  There, the scale of production is larger and less costly, notably thanks to the genetically modified crops. By two thousand and ten, such crops will count for half of world wide cotton production.

In the south of Mali, organic cotton is rejuvenating an agricultural industry that was almost dead.  The number of large global clothing distributors demanding organic cotton is on the rise.  Out of a global harvest of 25 million tons of cotton in 2008, 145,000 tons were organic.