I don’t always know ahead of time what a post will be about, but I did this time, so I started by trying to assign the relevant categories (listed up there under the post title). To my surprise, I have no categories for either “fashion” nor “environment”.
The two can probably only be called passing interests for me — in this post-An Inconvenient Truth world, everyone’s concerned about the environment, and I have to admit that recycling is a “when I think of it” thing rather than a way of life. And although I have a subscription to Lucky and I buy many more fashion magazines off the stand every month, well, most of my shoes are from Target.
A huge chunk of my non-shoe wardrobe, however, comes from Gap. I’d probably buy shoes there, too, but they don’t make them in my size. I buy Gap because there’s on one every corner (although no longer the corner of Haight and Ashbury), and because their clothes are reasonably priced and pretty much guaranteed never to go out of style. I never gave a thought to their “greenness”.
But apparently they’re greener than you might think. According to this article in The Motley Fool, Gap Inc. has been testing 100% organic cotton, hemp blends, and domestic violence outreach. I didn’t know either, but that’s kind of the whole point of the article — Gap has apparently neglected to capitalize on its conscience.
The only Gap mention of this stuff I can find is a tiny link at the bottom of their website, down there with the boring shit like “Privacy Policy” and “Investors”. The link says “Social Responsiblity“, but I’m too tired to read what follows. If it’s interesting, let me know. I’m still more interested in the clothes.
Not that this detracts from the “greenness” of clothes from the Gap, but I should warn your readers that shopping there pretty much went out with the 1990s. According to this recent article in Slate that chronicles the decline, the Gap — “one of the megabrands that shaped retailing and consumer culture in the 1990s” — in the 2000s has “gone horribly wrong” and has moved “on the wrong side of the fine line separating cheap (as in low price) from cheap (as in low quality).” Here is the link to the complete article: http://www.slate.com/id/2137742/.
If I can save one person from the Gap, then my work is done.