An Inspirational Letter from a Hemp Fashion Design Company

I’m Herbert Victoria, an apparel designer from San Francisco. I have a current collection using hemp as the lead textile in each ensemble. Why I chose Hemp was because it’s completely natural.

The irony of being an apparel designer is that I’m very environmentally conscious, yet I know apparel is a very wasteful and harmful industry.

The amount of textiles made, clothing produced, dyes used takes a huge effect on our environment and energy. In addition, being a very unpredictable and fast industry where everyone doesn’t buy everything, sometimes designers are left with a lot of useless clothing. I wanted to avoid that going into production.

Because of the state of our environment today, I took great deal in researching sustainability and I find that many apparel companies, at least in more developed countries, are making the move in creating sustainable fashion and I knew I wanted to take part.

Because I’m emerging I’m not producing at large volume nor at a high demand, however, there were many environmentally safe directives I took starting off.

One example was bathtub hand dying. Though it still took large amounts of water, it drastically cut the cost of energy not running a huge hot water, washing machine.

Another example was limiting my collection where there are only a certain amount of clothing available instead of making it for reorder. Thus, hopefully as the brand grows I can keep these efforts and not lose the integrity moving into larger production.