A comprehensive program that helps fashion brands, designers and suppliers continuously improve how clothes are made. The Fashion Positive Initiative applies the Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Product Standard to transform the way apparel and accessories are made.

On November 13th, 2014, Fashion Positive kicked off with its official launch partners Stella McCartney, G-Star Raw, Loomstate, Bionic Yarn and the manufacturer Saitex alongside a host of supporters including  Amber Valletta, Julie Gilhart, Wendy and Eric Schmidt and Scott Mackinlay Hahn.

Fashion is one of the most polluting industries in the world. The production of textiles in China alone releases three billion tons of soot into the air each year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. There is growing demand among consumers, investors and other fashion stakeholders for sustainable products. Fashion Positive gives designers, fashion brands and suppliers a platform to transcend industry challenges such as materials sourcing, modernizing manufacturing equipment, ensuring safe and healthy working conditions and leveraging collaboration to create highly desirable and sellable apparel that is beautiful inside and out.

The program will help fashion businesses look at  5 categories of sustainability: material health, material reuse, renewable energy, water stewardship and social fairness. Through these fashion partnerships Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute is creating a generation of fashion building blocks-and the preferred suppliers of those materials-in order to bring the fashion industry into the future.

Industry leaders (as mentioned above) are joining Fashion Positive’s cooperative of leadership brands to innovate materials and optimise manufacturing to meet the Cradle to Cradle Certified™ GOLD-level standard beginning in 2016.

Certified materials will then be added to Fashion Positive’s Materials Library, indexing natural and synthetic materials to help other industry stakeholders source high-quality materials and to make them widely available. These leadership brands and designers will utilise the Fashion Positive Innovation Fund to identify and invest in key suppliers who will create these new materials for use by the entire fashion industry. Fashion Positive partners have also agreed to benchmark the social and environmental impact of materials and products before and after they have been certified. Additional partners joining Fashion Positive include Under The Canopy/Portico, the new sustainable fashion brands of Michael Stars, both launching in 2015.

We are excited to partner with these industry leaders who are on the cutting edge of fashion design and manufacturing.

Together, we are expanding a vision within the industry that is abundant rather than resource-constrained.

We are creating beautiful, must-have clothes made in such a way that everything and everyone along the supply chain has been optimized for a better future.”

Said Lewis Perkins

Senior Vice President of the Cradle to Cradle

Products Innovation Institute and Fashion Positive Lead.

(Past interview on CLASSecohub here)