Green is the new blegh

Bollocks on Green Is the New Black: How to Change the World with Style by Tamsin Blanchard

By Ryan Rose Weaver

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When it comes to the environment, what you wear is nearly as important as what you eat. The pesticides that soak conventional cottons are as harmful to farmers as the pesticides that seep into the ground on conventional lettuce farms. The implications of fast fashion produced overseas, which will sojourn only briefly in your closet before spending the next few millennia floundering in a landfill, are as daunting as the ones faced when eating a Big Mac wrapped in cardboard.

It's apparent from her badly edited, sloppily turned-out "guide" to eco-consumerism that fashion writers like Blanchard, who's worked the style beat for several leading London publications, still believe that "fashionistas" need to be strong-armed into caring about the environment. That any innate curiosity or concern they might have about the origins of their clothing is likely to be eclipsed by their need for omigod shoes. That they'll be able to sort through Blanchard's self-indulgent, blowsy rambling to find the useful nuggets of information that the writer does present in her guide, such as pointing out that even mainstream chains like H&M and American Apparel feature organic cotton lines, or that UK company People Tree may actually have a workable model for Fair Trade, sustainable fashion.

What fashionistas need, it seems, is for a high-ranking insider to teach them about a new concept called "vintage" and to reassure them that it's, like, totally posh to shop at "charity stores" and to buy hemp-based clothing from Marks & Spencer without becoming a "hippy-dippy." (Did we mention this book is all in Brit-speak?)

We recommend recycling your copy of Green is the New Black and turning to the paperless resource of green lifestyle websites written in a style that non-fashionistas can read without retching on naff vegan shoes.

[Available for $24.95 at your favorite bookseller. greenisthenewblack.typepad.com]