Clothing with a Cause

Clothing with a Cause

Cambodian brand tonlé is disrupting the idea of fast fashion with ethically made clothing

by Cristina Deptula

Clothing company tonlé goes beyond recycling fabric and builds sustainability into its entire way of operating. As founder Rachel Faller explains, “tonlé means ‘river’ in Khmer. Rivers are central to life in Cambodia and also represent the circular and regenerative nature of our business.”

Tonlé offers several elegant, flowing collections of wraps, skirts, dresses, jumpsuits, and accessories including hand-sewn facemasks. They offer a line of clothes in versatile tans, greens, and blacks for those who wish to buy and own fewer items of clothing to be more sustainable, and a new, more colorful and hip, nature-inspired “Plant Queen” line intended to accommodate gender-fluid people.

Tonlé has pioneered ways to reduce waste, including a program where customers can swap with each other clothing that is still high-quality but which they no longer wear. They also buy fabrics that would otherwise go to waste for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the cloth. Faller points out the many different ways perfectly good fabric ends up becoming scrap, are picked up by remnant dealers, and sold to businesses such as tonlé.

Usually, fabric goes to waste because of the separation of design and production. In traditional fashion houses, brands design, sell, and market clothes; factories produce them. At the end of the day, this separation causes large amounts of perfectly good fabric to go to waste, simply because if a fabric is produced specifically for a brand and for whatever reason a brand cancels, changes, or otherwise alters an order, the factory can’t turn around and use it for anything else. Similarly, if garments fail quality control checks, you may end up with garments that are half made, and go to landfill or incineration. Or, if a fabric is slightly the wrong color, it may be perfectly good quality, but not according to spec for that order.

They also encourage customers to consider clothing purchases as longterm investments, seeking out quality and durability rather than expecting to toss and replace their wardrobes with every change of season.

Since the majority of a garment’s carbon footprint occurs at the customer use stage, the most important question we should all ask ourselves when buying new clothes, is, ‘will I love this and use it for a long time?

Tonlé seeks to buck the ‘fast fashion’ trend, asserting that the whole concept of fashion itself is problematic and leads to ecological waste. Read more at https://issuu.com/rareluxuryliving/docs/raremagazinesustainablepages/240