Sustainable pt IX – ReBurberry Edit

There was a certain grave irony in Earth Day having to be celebrated behind closed doors last week Wednesday.  The day we were supposed to be giving thanks to our planet and thinking about ensuring its preservation came during a period when the planet seemed to be giving us a very clear warning about our own future preservation.  It’s been a few years now since the fashion industry as a whole started to come up with real business solutions to these long-anticipated ecological questions in response to public awareness and pressure.  In the UK the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney made sustainability and social responsibility almost a part of the business model from the get-go.  For others, like Burberry, their ships were much bigger and therefore the inertia to turn them around much greater.  Fortunately, Burberry’s aggression and determination to be a corporate leader in this area, and be carbon neutral by 2022, more than made up for the logistical challenges it faced.

One of the newest initiatives to add to their long list is the recent launch of the ReBurberry Edit collection.  This is a new capsule collection of 26 pieces for the summer that have all been produced using the latest in sustainable material science.  Even before this, Burberry had already reached a target of having more than two-thirds of its product range meet strict environmental standards, including a minimum level for organic and/or recycled materials across the board.  All products in the Burberry range going forward that meet these criteria will now be accompanied by sustainability labelling in the garment itself, a move designed to please their increasingly discerning and demanding customers.

At the half-way point of our Responsibility Strategy to 2022, we remain dedicated to delivering tangible progress against our social and environmental targets, and our holistic, product-focused sustainability programmes are central to this. By inviting customers to learn more about the sustainable credentials of our products through our labelling programme, we are helping them to better understand our initiatives and the breadth of the ambition of our Responsibility Agenda. We strongly believe that driving positive change through all of our products at every stage of the value chain is crucial to building a more sustainable future for our whole industry. – Pam Batty, Vice President Corporate Responsibility, Burberry

But, while this is all very nice and warmly welcomed, this is still luxury fashion.  It doesn’t matter how well meaning your manufacturing process is or is going to be.  If the designs don’t make the effort worthwhile for the customer then all those plans and initiatives would be for naught.  That’s the fulcrum on which everything is always balanced when it comes to sustainable fashion.  To answer this concern with equal confidence, the ReBurberry Edit is a clean, crisp offering of coats, Parkas, capes and accessories that fortunately compromises nothing in achieving its aesthetic goals.  The tailoring is sharp as ever and the little touches – like the harness bag – adds an extra ‘pop’ for good measure.  When the sustainability quotient of a collection becomes just a welcome bonus on top of the design quotient, then you know you are already onto a good thing.

The ReBurberry Edit collection is available now.  Click here for more details.

Click here to see the last feature in our Fashion Sustainability series.

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