This month we were absolutely thrilled to be featured in Tatler's 'Positive Luxury' article, showcasing 5 of the best sustainable, luxury brands. They highlighted our 'Slow Fashion' design ethos which we are very proud of, as it enables us to create beautifully crafted garments from wonderful high quality materials.
At Suzannah London, sustainability has long been in our hearts and minds, right from the initial design process through to choosing how each garment should be produced.
We are also very aware that there is always more to learn and so we decided to use this period of lockdown to educate ourselves on how we as a business can improve. We have completed the 'Fashion and Sustainability' online course, run by the London College of Fashion in partnership with the global luxury group Kering. The course highlighted many key issues within every level of the fashion industry, and we have been encouraged to continue pushing ourselves, and our suppliers, to use more sustainable practices within each level of production.
One of our biggest take aways from the course, was learning of the harm cashmere production has had to the environment over the past few decades. We discovered that each goat can only be shorn once a year and it takes roughly 4-6 goats to produce enough fleece for a single sweater. In recent years the huge increase in global demand has forced producers to rapidly increase the size of their herds in an effort to keep up. Not only is this unsustainable for the grasslands which the goats depend on, but it is also having a detrimental effect on the quality of much of the cashmere being produced around the world. In order to make a positive change to the industry we have decided to only buy recycled cashmere from now on, and we will make sure to use every scrap of our current stock to ensure that nothing goes to waste.
At Suzannah London we believe transparency is the key to running a modern, responsible business and as such we have created a new sustainability page, outlining our current practices as well as our future aims. We would love you to read it and learn what goes into making our garments and how we are making great steps forward as a responsible and positive luxury fashion brand.