Foreword to “The Trusted Clothes Collection: Volume V”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/21
This will be the final set of volumes in the Trusted Clothes collection, as I found more extant materials. I missed a bunch. So, several years later, I did what I could to recover the lost interviews or articles and compiled them into the hilariously and overly self-involved archival work of the “Jacobsen Bank” — so-called. The word “bank” instead of “archive” is simply because “bank” is three letters shorter and does much the same job.
This amounts to the final articles of Trusted Clothes by me, which began as a side project in the ethical and sustainable fashion industry. My foci are varied, as with the recent addition to the horse industry. An interesting project focused on gaining some basic and intermediate skills in the rapidly shrinking equine industry in British Columbia while using the connections made with people, some basic knowledge, and work experience on a horse farm to bolster some of the claims and questions asked in the interviews.
Trusted Clothes was a remote job on the Western side of Canada for a family on the East side of Canada with running a website and business to bring exposure to small and medium business fashion people involved in ethical and sustainable fashion. Insofar as I know, the business no longer functions as one; it is defunct. By the looks of it, the business has not been running for several years. I came at the right time. I enjoyed the job interview with Shannon. I remember the question, “Where are you from?” I was asked with a peculiar curiosity.
I appreciated the opportunity to grow in a completely disparate journalistic, editorial, and writing area. It was interesting to have a steep learning curve in this field and then to convey this in the interviews with ethical and sustainable fashionistas and some fashionistas. As with most of these businesses, or most of these types of business enterprises, the majority of the people involved in them are women and somewhere between young adult to early middle-aged for the most part.
Highly involved work, difficult to achieve any success. However, they worked their butts off to come out with a product earning the title of ethical and sustainable. This could be the fashion industry’s future in terms of design, harvesting, production, sales, use, and discard: a cycle into an environmentally sustainable product with minimal harm produced — something like an ethical and sustainable assembly and recycling chain.
At some point, the consumption patterns and the recycling processes will need to adapt to several billion people on the planet and the desires of everyone to attain — what is called — a Western standard of living. If those dreams of a Western standard of living sustain themselves, then things like ethical and sustainable fashion — simple as the clothes we wear — will need to be taken seriously. The only problem is scaling up.
Even though the global population growth has slowed tremendously and continues to do so, the consumption rate continues to climb in gross terms. The best part of a fashion-based change in consumption is more fun than transitioning to more powerful energy forms, e.g., nuclear or thermal. It can be done with aesthetics, which, to me, is fabulous — much more fun. Indeed, more energy consumption isn’t inherently bad, but efficiency and harm reduction are better.
January 21, 2024
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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