The Other Sustainability

摘要

You're excused if when you walked around textiles market last month and kept hearing the words sustainability, compliance, performance, eco-friendly and certification you thought you had entered a parallel universe. For the first time in two textiles generations, the industry finally has something else to talk about - and sell on - beside thread counts, grams per inch and all the other nonsense that has consumed the business for so very long. Now, just don't blow it. It was rather remarkable this market cycle to see the industry so focused on all of these modern issues, things that were pretty much laughed at over the past 20 years. After all, it only seemed like yesterday that these same people were obsessed with four-digit thread count numbers that defied mathematical formulas, gram weights that pretty much nobody this side of the Atlantic understood and archaic terms that meant nothing...and even less to consumers. Now the talk is about sustaining sources of raw materials, working conditions at manufacturing facilities, compliance with and certification by third parties and product attributes that might actually relate to the way people want their textiles products to perform. But here's the thing: it has to be a lot more than just talk. The industry proved at the spring New York Home Fashions Market that it could create products that address the needs of a changing demographic customer base. Now it has to prove it can get that story out.