I recently attended Playtime, a kid’s and baby’s fashion trade show for small buyers in NYC. It was full of overwhelming cuteness, mostly from Europe. I know very little about how the children’s fashion world functions in comparison to the adult fashion world, but one thing was clear, they are primarily concerned with appealing to parents. The most popular way to do that is to promote the natural, organic, healthy, clean, fair trade, and ethically produced (choose your adjective) nature of their products. I’m going to use “organicness” to refer to all these things.
One way to do quickly convey the organicness of product line appears to be to exclude bright colors in favor of tan, beige, cream, rust, olive, and similar colors that supposedly use more healthful dyes.
There were varying degrees of organicness on display from the full GOTS certified, organic beige to the more moderately organic but super fashionable varieties. The prices were all over the place as well–just like adult fashion.
serendipity catalog
serendipity sweater
Pehr Catalog
After all that beige, I was surprised by the colorful, bright explosions of the Kidential line of affordable organic clothes. Yes, there are some chemicals necessary to make bright colors–there is no getting around it–but the founder told me they are developing more plant based dyes from a farm in Vermont. She is stepping up the organicness to meet the trend, but I have to say, I like the bright colors…
Kidential shirt dyed with blueberries
Here is a quick guide to some of the organicness labels:
Okeo-Tex: This is actually the registered trademark of the International Association for Research and Testing in the Field of Textile and Leather Ecology. Such a mouthful! They have a set of standards and do testing for safety and ecological factors based on how the material is used. For babies, covering lots of skin, hardly any skin contact, etc. It’s mostly testing for dangerous chemicals and bad dyes, but they also test for smelliness.
GOT: The Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) determines standards and authorizes inspectors and consultants to review potential manufactures for materials, chemical inputs, and production standards. This is mostly about safety. Unfortunately, small businesses and those selling directly to consumers don’t actually need certification to label products GOT.
Organic: This really only applies to cotton because obviously any synthetic fiber can’t be organic (it’s plastic). Organic usually means that the cotton is grown and produced into fabric without GMO seeds, pesticides, or harsh chemicals like bleach and formaldehyde. They also say it uses a lot less water. Read about the production of a standard cheap cotton t-shirt and it will almost hurt to buy one anytime soon. In the USA, it is required by the law that any producer wanting to label and sell a product as “organic” must meet the standards established by the Organic Food Production Act of 1990, enforced by the State organic program (SOP). That sounds good, but as you may know, the US is famously lax about chemicals and pesticides so “organic” could be a pretty wide range. Also, as founder of Kidential told me, the cloth may be organic cotton, but what about the thread. A lot of people use plastic thread as it holds together better.
All of this makes me feel a bit guilty about the plastic clothing we wear from gifts and hand-me-downs, but if I have to buy anything, I’ll think twice about how it is made.