Red Carpet Green Dress Promotes Award-Winning Sustainable Fashion – Sourcing Journal

It has become common for celebrities attending awards ceremonies to wear a ribbon or pin to show their dedication to a cause close to their hearts – cancer research, peaceful conflict resolution, human rights movements and so on. With the world watching, many take the opportunity to show solidarity. That’s why so many will tune in when celebrities walk the red carpet for this Sunday’s Oscars.

But what if their clothing itself reflects a commitment to a good cause? That’s the mindset driving organizations like RCGD Global and its Red Carpet Green Dress initiative, which promotes environmental awareness in global fashion design and production. With the support of celebrities who walk the “red carpet” each awards season, the initiative works with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to highlight the cause of making fashion more sustainable.

Celebrities may have the platform to showcase sustainably made clothing to the world, but making sustainable clothing accessible to consumers worldwide – or the norm, the expectation – is the real goal, and one that may be closer than many even in the fashion industry believe .

Balancing the fashion world with demands for sustainable practices is an ongoing challenge with no easy answers. The World Economic Forum estimates that fashion and textiles are responsible for a tenth of global CO2 emissions, with more than 85 percent of all textiles produced ending up in landfill each year. The Harvard Business Review suggests that there have been no significant gains for sustainable fashion since 2000 and points to the increasing overproduction of shoes as just one example. It is well known that textiles are one of the most polluting and wasteful industries in the world, and actions such as the New York Fabric Act and the European Union’s Sustainable and Circular Textiles Strategy reflect the ongoing struggle to proactively move the industry towards a more responsible, accountable state.

Consider what the traditional fashion production model involves. It can take more than a year for a concept to hit the runway and getting a garment to market requires creating an inventory. Building this inventory requires stable or cost-controlled access to the necessary commodities – supply chains subject to shortages, tariffs, human or labor concerns, pandemics, acts of God, etc. You hope to break even by selling enough goods to justify that inventory.

As the fashion cycle turns, mark that stock, with unsold merchandise ultimately being written off, donated, scrapped, or even incinerated. Essentially, you’ve bet on the popularity of your creation, and losing means not only dwindling profit margins but, in many cases, a reputation for being a wasteful contributor to the problem. Overproduction is not sustainable as an environmental model, business model or PR model.

On-demand digital production technology is already solving this problem for creators, brands, and agents around the world, and this new reality is about to enter the mainstream. E-commerce has long provided the consumer with an almost limitless range of options, but a mature ecosystem of digital technologies is doing the same for designers who want to uncompromisingly realize their visions and for brands who want to capture and capitalize on social trends in the moment in which they can be perceived, producers who want to create new products and enter new markets at will, and more. Virtual reality, augmented reality and the Metaverse offer designers and consumers alike new ways to engage with each other, model concepts in real-time, and virtually try on each garment before committing to a piece. And thanks to digital, the garments are actually produced only then.

In addition to using pigment-based inks that meet several stringent environmental standards (such as GOTS, Oeko-Tek Eco Passport and Bluesign), on-demand printing systems enable designers to take their creations from concept to runway in just weeks, and do it bespoke Fabrics ready to use in minutes – perfect for trying out different materials and graphic effects. Production costs are low and constant, so fulfilling orders of 1 or 1,000 brings reliable profit margins. The speed to market, complemented by efficient workflow and visibility systems to ensure a streamlined, traceable pixel-to-packet fulfillment process, means that producing only what has been sold is a realistic business model, keeping operations ahead of the unforeseen Protect against disruptions and enable nearshoring or onshoring of operations to mitigate risk in the supply chain.

It’s one thing to discuss the mechanics of digital fashion production, but another to see what the finished product can be. Organizations like Red Carpet Green Dress are key to highlighting what bold and beautiful creations can come from a process that delivers on the promise of a digital world – with less work, less materials, less energy, less time and less space to create Reducing the carbon footprint without demanding compromises and in many cases even introducing new graphic and haptic possibilities.

We can’t wait to see the sustainably made digital creations at the Oscars. In the end, the prize could only go to sustainable fashion on demand.

Don Whaley is VP Marketing at Kornit Digital Americas, a global provider of on-demand sustainable technologies for digital fashion, apparel and textile production.