As the fashion industry mourns the death of Alexander McQueen, we at E.S. would like to salute the British designer for his contributions to the ethical movement. He inspired many young minds in the fashion world with his avant garde ideas and although his apparent suicide took him from us too soon, his legacy will live on.

Here, a retrospective of his work in the eco-realm:

• In his Fall 2009 Ready-to-Wear collection, McQueen explored the ideas of recycling, reinvention, and sustainability. “This whole situation is such a cliché,” he said in an interview last March before his Paris show. “The turnover of fashion is just so quick and so throwaway, and I think that is a big part of the problem. There is no longevity.”
• In November, McQueen gave items from his collections to the “6 Degrees of Cool” project, which encourages Brits to don warm clothes indoors to reduce their reliance on energy-sucking heat.
• McQueen nurtured the next generation of talent by offering internships to many up-and-coming fashion visionaries, including Ada Zanditon and Mark Liu.
• As one of the spearheading brands behind the Fakes Are Never in Fashion campaign, McQueen sought to end the use of child labor in the production of counterfeit designer items.
• McQueen also lent his name and talent to many charitable causes, including 21 First Century Leaders and Breast Cancer Care.

Marc Jacobs has filed a lawsuit against Ed Hardy designer Christian Audigier for ripping off one of his signature bags.

The lawsuit alleges that Mr. Audigier borrowed too heavily from a Marc Jacobs fabric handbag in the creation of the Ed Hardy Extra Large Quilted Jana Tote Bag. The filing says the Ed Hardy tote bag’s “size, shape, color or color combinations, product design, texture, and selection and arrangement of materials and accessories” are suspiciously similar to the Marc by Marc Jacobs Pretty Nylon Tote’s ”scrambled logo” design, which is pending trademark.

What do you think, E.S. readers? Are the bags too close for comfort, or creatively fair game?

(via Jezebel)

An Oregon man who set himself on fire in protest of a Portland fur boutique has died, police are saying.

Witnesses described the scene as pretty gruesome:

[A witness] said that after setting himself ablaze, the man tried to enter Nicholas Ungar Furs  at 1137 S.W. Yamhill St. He said the man also had something in his hands, but could not see what it was.

Cheema said a police officer was at the stoplight at Southwest 12th Street and Yamhill Street when the incident occurred and immediately responded.

By the time firefighters arrived, two police officers and bystanders had already put out the flames, Simmons said.

A short time later, charred materials remained on the ground around the building, including a shoe, but most were unidentifiable. Yellow police tape surrounded the scene.

The fur store has been the site of frequent animal-rights protests in the past and Cheema said the man was yelling something about the world ending and animals dying.

“People always come every day protesting,” Cheema said. “They’ve done some extreme things.”

Our condolences to his family, but this kind of violent protest has got to stop. No matter what you believe about the ethics of fur or other animal products, destroying a human life does not further the cause.

Earlier this month we reported on H&M’s Garden Collection and its lofty promises to clean up the fast-fashion retailer’s act. Unfortunately, new information may torpedo H&M’s big green hopes, if you believe genetically modified (GM) cotton shouldn’t bear an organic label.

As Ecoterre.com reports:

Roughly 30 percent of the tested samples contained genetically modified cotton, says Lothar Kruse, a director of Impetus, an independent lab in Bremerhaven, which examined the cotton fabrics in question. The contaminated cotton was traced back to India, which is responsible for more than half of the global supply of organic cotton, with an output of nearly 107,000 tons of fiber in 2009 alone, according to thee Organic Exchange.

India supplies more than half of the global supply of organic cotton.

The controversy over GM and organic cotton is far from over, but we can’t help but notice they have fairly compatible goals. Organic farming is designed to reduce farmers’ reliance on chemical pesticides and fertilizers that run off the crops and poison the habitats of native flora and fauna. Some strains of GM cotton have been developed to diminish the desirability of cotton for its main pests and to increase the crop’s heartiness in poor soil, meaning less pesticide and fertilizer are needed altogether.

So while it doesn’t excuse H&M for defrauding its ethical consumers, shouldn’t we be revisiting the GM debate to see if it’s worth berating a market leader for trying to do the right thing?

The European Union has enacted a ban on Canadian seal fur, reigniting the controversy over the ethics of seal hunting. On the one side, the seal hunt is a tradition practiced by Canada’s native population, who rely on the sales of the pelts to support their communities. But it’s also been roundly and publicly condemned by PETA and the Humane Society of the United States.

China’s fur market is booming and has no such restrictions on Canadian pelts. To find out whether Chinese consumers are interesting in buying imported seal pelts, Canada’s The Globe and Mail recently surveyed savvy fur-buying shoppers in Shanghai.

A few sample responses, first from a pro-fur perspective:

Every time I wear my real fur jacket, people ask if it’s real. A lot of people I hang out with are foreigners, and so I’ll tell them it’s fake because I don’t want to offend them. But if a Chinese person asks me, I would definitely tell them it’s real. In our culture, it’s not a big deal – we think wearing fur is really nice.

I don’t especially care what kind of animal the clothing is made of – for me, it depends on the style, design and price.

And from the other side:

I have three fur coats and one fur scarf, all made of rabbit. They’re beautiful and trendy. I doubt I will buy [seal fur], I think it might be too expensive. Hunting animals for clothing is a concern for me. I think seals should be protected.

Wal-Mart, Claire’s, and several other retailers have temporarily stopped selling costume jewelry manufactured in China while federal consumer-safety groups investigate reports that many items are contaminated with high levels of cadmium, a known carcinogen.

According to the Associated Press (AP):

Lab tests were conducted for the AP on 103 pieces of low-price children’s jewelry such as charm bracelets and pendants purchased around the country. Virtually all were imported from China.

Twelve items had cadmium levels of at least 10 percent by weight. One piece had a startling 91 percent, and others contained more than 80 percent. The government has no restrictions on cadmium in jewelry.

Children can be exposed by sucking or biting such jewelry. But without direct exposure, most people do not experience its worst effects: cancer, kidneys that leak vital protein and bones that spontaneously snap.

The worrisome results came in tests of bracelet charms sold at Walmart stores, at the jewelry chain Claire’s and at a Dollar N More store. High amounts of cadmium also were detected in “The Princess and The Frog” movie-themed pendants.

The use of cadmium is favored by Chinese factories because it is cheap and pliable. It is commonly found in rechargeable batteries and circuitry, but it is also poisonous and can affect brain development in young children. Dangerous stuff.

An Oil of Olay print advertisement featuring 60-year-old supermodel Twiggy has been yanked in the U.K. for misleading the public.

The Advertising Standards Authority concluded it was photoshopped so heavily, the results were far beyond what any topical anti-aging product could promise.

The ASA explained in a press release:

“[W]e considered that the post-production re-touching of this ad, specifically in the eye area, could give consumers a misleading impression of the effect the product could achieve.

“We considered that the combination of references to ‘younger looking eyes’, including the claim ‘reduces the look of wrinkles and dark circles for brighter, younger looking eyes’, and post-production re-touching of Twiggy’s image around the eye area, was likely to mislead.”

Procter and Gamble, which owns Oil of Olay, admitted only to “minor retouching” of the photo for the ad.

This newest retouching scandal goes right to the heart of the question we’ve asked before: Are we so aware of such clearly altered images that they no longer bother us anymore? Or does the constant exposure to airbrushed images have a cumulative effect on shaping unrealistic ideas of beauty, particularly in older women? Share your thoughts below!

(via Salon)

Lots of people have tipped us off about this study in the journal Psychological Science, regarding an experiment that showed people who buy environmentally-friendly goods tend to offset that do-gooding with bad social behavior.

SmartMoney.com summarizes the research:

While mere exposure to green products may “prime” us to think about social consciousness and perhaps improve our behavior, if we actually buy a green product, we appear to take it as license to act like jerks.

At least, that’s what researchers Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto found in the lab. In an experiment, they had student subjects look at products in one of two online stores: a “conventional” store (with few green products) and a “green” store (with lots of green products). Some of the students were asked to purchase goods in these stores; others were just asked to rate the products.

Things got interesting when these students were subsequently given $6 for an economic task and asked to share it with an unknown partner. The students who had purchased products in the green store, it turned out, were far less generous with the $6 than students who had merely been exposed to the green products.

A subsequent experiment pushed things even further. Students were again asked to shop in a green or a conventional store. They were then put through an experiment where they had the opportunity to earn extra money by cheating — even to steal money from an envelope left in the room. Consistent with the previous experiment, participants who had purchased from the green store were significantly more likely to cheat and to steal than participants who purchased from the conventional store.

Seem counter-intuitive to all us green shoppers? We think so, too. It’s almost like the shopping version of religious indulgences.

The N.Y. Post just ran this article about Zaarath and Christopher Prokop, a married couple who live in New York’s smallest condo. At only 175 square feet, the “microstudio” lacks even a closet:

It has two small windows with views of upper Manhattan; hardwood floors; a tiny kitchen with a mini-fridge and hotplate; and a closet-sized bathroom with a shower, sink and toilet. …

Once in their running attire, the two change the cat litter box (stored under the sink) and start their small Rumba vacuum — which operates automatically while they’re out, picking up cat hair.

They then jog to their jobs in Midtown, picking up along the way their work clothes, which are “strategically stashed at various dry cleaners.”

Just in case the cleaners are closed, both have emergency clothes at their offices.

“I have a closet at my office,” Zaarath said. “You don’t want to be standing outside a closed cleaners at 8:45 in your workout pants thinking, ‘Greeeeeat’ . . . It’s a great strategy. You always have fresh things to wear.”

While living in such a small place likely means next-to-nothing energy bills, we have to take issue with their decision to dry clean their clothes every single day. The carbon footprint of dry-cleaning waste likely more than makes up for any eco-savings they rack up on heating and cooling.

Nearly half of consumers who knowingly purchase counterfeit goods go on to buy the real thing within two years, says a fascinating new marketing study from MIT.

MIT researcher Renee Richardson Gosline found that luxury retailers have reason to be optimistic in the face of $250 billion in lost sales due to counterfeiting every year:

[F]ake luxury purses have a place on the social ladder. Many purchasers of knock-off bags move on to buy real ones within a few years, Gosline found in a separate study of 100 consumers.

“The counterfeit actually served as a placebo for brand attachment,” she said. “People were becoming increasingly attached to the real brand even though they never possessed it at all.”

Forty-six percent of the counterfeit-bag owners bought the authentic products within two and a half years, she said.

Gosline also found that sartorial context played the largest role in how consumers determine whether a bag is fake or real. In other words: If you’re carrying a Louis Vuitton Speedy on a well-dressed arm, people on the street are more likely to judge that your bag is real than if you are wearing sweatpants and sneakers.

Interesting stuff!