A Common Thread – Among Conscious Designers

Olivia Wong (left) and Camille Mori co-founded Conscious Designers Hawaii

Olivia Wong (left) and Camille Mori co-founded Conscious Designers Hawaii

On a trip to Cambodia several years ago, Olivia Wong came across a thriving community of social businesses – like the restaurant that hired kids off the street, or the company that taught young girls how to weave and sell silk fabrics.

It wasn’t something that Wong had sought out – she had come to Cambodia on vacation from a stint teaching English in Japan – but she had found her calling. Soon after that, she enrolled in a master’s program at University of Hawaii at Manoa to study business. She knew she wanted her future to be in these types of businesses – but she just wasn’t sure exactly how.

So it must have been a certain degree of kismet when she met Camille Mori at a fashion production workshop in 2014.

“When I got to talking to her, and I realized that she does a lot of up-cycling and recycling of clothing, I was really happy to find somebody that has the same interests,” Wong recalls.

Mori, meanwhile, recently had gone through something of a professional coming-of-age, as well. After earning a master’s degree in religion, Mori was on track to become a professor. But she realized that her more creative pursuits were where her passion really was.

While studying abroad in Japan, Mori had taken to buying old kimono and repurposing them into something new. Back in Hawaii, she took that concept and created Tsubaki Him, in which she creates up-cycled, modernized products from thrift-store items. One popular line, for example, entails bleaching Japanese-inspired wave patterns onto used denim shorts.

“Through that process, I started to learn more about sustainability and realized that there are not a whole lot of people out here who do (sustainable designing), and there are not a lot of resources to learn more about it or to develop a sustainable brand,” says Mori.

In November, Mori and Wong teamed up to launch Conscious Designers Hawaii (CDHi), which works to empower designers to be able to operate in a socially and environmentally responsible way. Whether it is an upcycled clothing store or a designer working with and promoting sustainable fashion, they ultimately have the same aim – encouraging more people to consider eco-friendly fashion through awareness. At the same time, it also aims to create an open dialogue about negative practices in the fashion industry and show people that eco-fashion can be stylish, too.

In order to address the lack of resources for sustainable brands, CDHi acts as a platform to connect designers with the necessary resources.

“Hawaii’s physical location makes it difficult to get many of the resources that are more readily available in the Mainland,” Wong explains. “Most resources are either hard to obtain or very expensive to obtain, since most need to be shipped to Hawaii.

“If you’re a designer and you’re looking for more sustainable fabrics, you can come to us for advice,” she adds.

CDHi has hosted a few pop-up shops in order to give budding companies a place to display and sell their goods. The organization also has worked with designers that incorporate eco-friendly or socially responsible practices into their businesses. Partnerships so far have included Indigo Sage, Love at Dawn, Odina Surf, Love Me Knots, Aaron Miko and Organik. With these groups, CDHi put on a fashion show for its launch party in November. This event also served as a fundraiser for Dress A Girl Around the World, a nonprofit that provides new dresses to girls in need in 80 countries.

In selecting designers to partner with, CDHi leaves the question of what constitutes as sustainable fashion decidedly open-ended. It’s careful not to cultivate too narrow of a definition of what it means to be a conscious designer – rather, CDHi welcomes a range of practices that include producing locally, utilizing organic fabric, or working with factories that foster safe, healthy work environments.

Although most consumers probably would want to support ideals like this, they may not want to sacrifice style to do it. Through events such as pop-up shops and fashion shows, CDHi wants to update preconceived notions that people may have about this type of fashion.

Once, at a networking event, Mori asked someone what sort of connotations came to mind when they heard the term “eco-fashion.”

Their response? “Garbage bags.”

Altering those perceptions is a key part to creating any real market change – and CDHi wants to demonstrate that eco-friendly fashion can still be fashion forward.

A primary reason that this is an issue that both Mori and Wong are passionate about is because they’re aware of the social and environmental perils associated with fashion.

“So much waste goes into the fashion industry, and people just don’t talk about it,” Mori says. “And once I started learning about it, I wanted to tell other people.”

Such waste, they explain, starts from the manufacturing process – which often yields wasted materials and causes pollution – and goes all the way down to the consumer purchase, as the buyer might wear the clothing for only a couple of months before discarding it.

According to a report in Environmental Health Perspectives, a journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, manufacturing polyester, a commonly used fabric, releases harmful emissions into the air and water near factories. Meanwhile, factory workers in developing countries are paid as little as a few cents an hour. And once clothing finally reaches a consumer, only 21 percent of items they buy each year will remain in the home. That means the vast majority of annual clothing sales are ending up in landfills.

“Most people are not directly affected by the pollution and waste produced by fashion manufacturing,” Wong says. “Most manufacturing is done outside of countries like the U.S. … and so the effects are so remote from our realities that it’s easy not be conscious of the waste.”

In the coming year, CDHi plans to host a number of educational events and workshops to raise awareness about these issues in the community. After all, in many ways, the power to make socially and environmentally conscious fashion more mainstream lies largely with the consumer.

“If more people are just aware about sustainable fashion, then it would give them that choice to go to a store and buy a sustainable piece of clothing,” Mori says.

“We’d like to see more designers want to be socially conscious and eco-friendly,” Wong adds. “But we also want that demand to grow on the consumer’s end – because if there isn’t that demand, it doesn’t matter how many designers are out there.”

For more information on Conscious Designers Hawaii, find it on Facebook at facebook.com/ConsciousDesigners or email consciousdesignershi@gmail. com.