Editor’s Note
This profile spotlights Proclaim, a Los Angeles-based lingerie brand that champions sustainability and inclusivity. By crafting its pieces from recycled materials and offering multiple nude shades, the brand demonstrates how ethical production and thoughtful design can go hand-in-hand.
Los Angeles-based Proclaim makes beautiful bras, underwear, and basics from more responsible materials like recycled plastic bottles and TENCEL. Its designs come in three shades of “nude”, building inclusivity into the brand. It also ensures the people in its California factory earn a living wage, and visits suppliers regularly.
With a modern aesthetic where style meets sustainability, Katla is a loungewear brand creating timeless essentials across menswear, womenswear, and kidswear. Stemming from its ethos to minimise fashion’s impact on the environment, it follows anti-waste manufacturing principles in its limited production runs. Using innovative, lower-impact materials, it draws design inspiration from its Nordic roots offering luxurious conscious comfort.
Ace & Jig’s colourful clothing is made by Fairtrade certified partners in India using custom-made fabrics that have been designed by its team and yarn-dyed. The brand strives to reduce waste, and has take-back and philanthropic programmes.
ABLE is a US-based clothing and accessories brand that works with communities all over the world to make a meaningful impact, producing slow fashion that pays a living wage to women who have faced extraordinary circumstances. It uses lower-impact materials, and reuses water and materials to minimise waste. With thoughtful design and a level of quality that guarantees its products for life, its pieces aren’t just an investment for your wardrobe, they are an investment in women around the world.
Lâcher Prise is a US-based vegan brand that creates a range of versatile clothing, basics, and underwear. Lâcher Prise rates “Great” for the planet: it uses lower-impact materials including organic cotton, which helps limit the chemicals, water, and wastewater in its supply chain.
Anchored in timeless design, Minimalist is a curated collection of women’s ready-to-wear pieces all made in New York and designed to be recycled at their end of life. It seeks to be part of the solution to make fashion more sustainable, using certified lower-impact materials and ensuring fair wage and work conditions in the local New York City factories it supports.
Made in a Fairtrade certified factory, US brand Subset’s organic cotton underwear sets are some of the best in the responsible fashion market. Taking it a step further, the brand has also partnered with an NYC non-profit to recycle old undergarments, turning the fibres into insulation and rug pads.
HYER GOODS is an NY-based, leather goods label that curates handmade products including handbags, wallets, and accessories. By upcycling “trash” it eliminates the massive energy footprint needed to cultivate land, livestock, crops, and fertilisers, while simultaneously reducing the amount of waste being sent to landfill. Less energy and less pollution mean fewer greenhouse gases.
SEPTEMBER was created by passionate surfer and designer, Erika Seiko Togashi, who noticed the lack of timeless, elegant, and more sustainable surf and swimwear in the industry. Founded on modernist design principles, pieces are made using luxury Italian recycled fabrics in a small, female owned factory in Bali, delivering high-performing, timeless classics made fairly.
Every piece of ARTICLE22 jewellery is locally handcrafted in Laos using recycled materials from Vietnam War bombs, plane parts, military hardware, and other aluminium scraps. The brand embodies the innovation that the fashion industry needs more of—using recycled materials to produce beautiful globally marketable products, while equipping local artisans with new skill sets and providing them with a sustainable source of income.
Whimsy + Row is a US-based lifestyle brand born out of a love for quality goods and responsible practices. Since 2014, its mission has been to provide ease and elegance for the modern woman. Whimsy + Row utilises deadstock fabric, and by limiting each garment to short runs, the brand also reduces packaging waste and takes care of precious water resources.
Made locally in California, Vitamin A’s collections of swimwear and loungewear use a high proportion of lower-impact materials, including recycled nylon. The brand also uses a waterless process to print its designs with, reducing its chemical and water usage.
US-based Triarchy creates more sustainable jeans, skirts, shorts, jumpsuits, and jackets. The brand’s production system uses 85% recycled water by consistently reusing the “thick indigo laden sludge” that unmonitored factories dump into water systems.
SANTICLER is an US-based label that offers timeless collectors pieces curating modern silhouettes in womenswear. Founded by an early advocate of slow fashion and sustainability, its collections are designed and produced with intention to reduce waste, using more lower-impact materials such as GOTS-certified cotton and responsibly sourced wool.