So I am grateful when designers demonstrate awareness of ethical and environmental matters. Gudrun Sjoden offers "Swedish design with a green soul." Eileen Fisher's site showcases a collection of progressive corporate practices, encompassing employee health and happiness, environmental responsibility, and efforts to empower women in developing countries.
Why then did I snort with derision at a certain item in Eileen Fisher's latest flyer? The model is wearing a jacket of boiled wool and made-in-the-USA organic cotton jeans, and her hands are warmed by fingerless "glovelettes." The glovelettes are "encrusted with crystals...[and] knit with yak herded by nomads."
Yak indeed. And not, God forbid, feed-lot yak, or yak herded by people who go back to their village every night, but yak herded by nomads. Remember the three wise men crossing the desert on camels with their cargo of gifts? It used to be you had to be the Son of God to rate such exotic goods, but now all you have to do is point and click.
I mean, really. It's just a pair of gloves.
And yet, I know that nomadism as a way of life is disappearing from the planet, and soon highways and suburbs and slums will obliterate the high pastures where the nomads wandered with their herds. So maybe buying gloves knit from nomad-herded yak is not just silly, but an act of kindness to the nomad and his yaks and the grasslands with their earthworms and their bees.
Can it be that shopping these days has become a spiritual act? I think it has, and that's o.k. In this cold and soulless world, we have to take our spirituality wherever we can get it.
I think shopping always has been a spiritual act, in that how we spend our money is a reflection of our values. But it isn’t straightforward. Is paying $300 for a pair of organic cotton jeans manufactured by union-scale workers an act of caring for the environment and human welfare, or is it an act of wasteful elitism by the moneyed class? Or both? If buying based on principle becomes something only the wealthy can afford, how principled is it? It gets COMPLICATED.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, the idea of crystal trimmed yak wool gloveletts knitted by nomads is funny.
It is all good and well when you can afford to buy with your conscious and love the earth and the people who produce the goods that are honestly and kindly made, but what if you hardly have any money to get by each month? What are your choices then? You have to do without or buy cheap mass produced gloves.
ReplyDeleteWhaledancer and Irene, you've both put your finger on the difficult question of how economic factors influence our ability to make good choices in the marketplace. Nowhere is this more disturbing than in the supermarket, where the poor are reduced to buying mass-produced, highly processed foods of little nutritional value.
ReplyDeleteI like your central point. If we can afford to, perhaps we should be more responsible about who and what we purchase (goods and services)?
ReplyDeleteBut really, glovelettes? I've never seen the point. My fingers would get cold.
I always associated fingerless gloves with starving artists trying to keep their hands warm while painting in their garrets--not exactly the Eileen Fisher kind.
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