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 One thing a dedicated eco-fashionista is probably used to buying is clothing made of materials called "pleather," "phurr" and child-labor-free "felieece." (Feliz meaning "happiness," as if we Americans all know Spanish, and can actually play on the word!)
I get it. I’m down with it. Very clever with the "fleece." Sooo soft-n-downy sounding. Sooo earth-friendly. Marketed to people who think fleece is always made of recycled plastic bottles and therefore cool. Totally trustworthy. Uh—not.
Fleece can be cruel to kids—not those who wear it, but the child laborers who sew it! Leather really sucks for all. Fur? Ripped away from young, living skin? Come on! Really? What’s the argument? Animal and human torture is so weird and icky that it makes a person want to buy "felieece." Or Earth Shoes. No matter the style presented.
But some of us resent the styles presented. Some of us don’t use clothing as birth control or sartorial Mace.
Some of us like sex and don’t want to repel it as a result of our outerwear and innerwear choices.
Some of us are also in our forties, fifties and beyond, and we want to look good without sporting teen tree-elves, nymph or gauzy, high-breasted, Phurry-sex enticers that are vegan, but look good only on, well, very young vegans. It just doesn’t work on us. Similarly, gauze t’s, hemp bras, organic-cotton fairy teddies, etc. We older women need good-looking clothes, shoes and cosmetics in harmony.
We don’t need to refight the Battle of the Bulge. It was fought once and it was horrible then. It’s not so great now, either.
I get that child slaves in El Salvador and Nigeria don’t have much fun while they’re working long hours to make cozy, child-labor-intensive "fleece." And animals all around the globe aren’t having too much fun when they’re garroted and clubbed for their skins and furs! Nice! Not! But let’s call what we’ve got as an alternative what it is.
Gross! Let’s call it ugly. Let’s call it punishment. For not being mainstream or 1960s holdouts.
Leather. Fur. Fleece. Factory clothing. It all may be cheap, easy and cut well to accentuate our bodies, but it’s all a serious "ouchie." Just foul. Yet in going against cruelty, do we all have to look so ugly and sanctimonious while doing the right thing?
(Sidebar—Mia Farrow looked great in that short, eco-haircut, but how many would? And how many—over 45—look greatin crocs? Or Earth Shoes? Or gauze tanks? About how many of us over-35s look great in present-day vegan fashion?)
Jeez! (Jees? Jesus? Jesus of My Suffering, Bleeding Heart?) Can we just have some proper matching vowels and consonants to explain the truth without cute-ifying and disrespecting our principles? Some proper verbiage so as not to minimize and make funny, and make "alternative" the damage?
Or can we at least have an attractive, eco-friendly bra that doesn’t look like great-great-great Israel Kidwell III’s threadbare pre-Civil War drawers? With no support?
Can it be black and lacy or pink and lacy—not a weird blanched grey, or weird blanched vanilla Israel Kidwell color?
And does it have to be so huge?!
Updated 4/9/11; originally posted 3/31/09.
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