Carte Blanche Ethical Fashion: Get In on the Ground Floor with This Smart New Label
New ethical fashion label Carte Blanche addresses all of what is problematic about fast fashion and today’s (unfortunate) way of making clothes. Carte Blanche’s first collection is low-waste, made fairly, made in the USA, high quality (so it will last), non-trendy (so you will want to wear the designs for years), and even, for all that, affordable.
Designer and entrepreneur Monica Noh explains, “After years of experience working in the industry, I grew frustrated with the inefficiencies and waste generated by the traditional retail model. Carte Blanche is about creating something new for today’s consumer — less waste, better quality, and producing only what you love.”
Noh’s Kickstarter for Carte Blanche is already funded, but you can still get in on the action.
How exactly is Carte Blanche different? Noh says:
Crafted with love in NYC – We work with the same fabric vendors and factories as your favorite luxury brands and keep our production here in NYC to ensure that our dresses are of the highest quality.
Crowd-sourcing – Fashion companies spend a fortune each season trying to forecast trends. >Carte Blanche is the first women’s fashion brand that uses crowd-sourcing to allow users to vote on which styles will be manufactured.
No more middlemen – We sell our dresses at their true cost, not 4-8x, which is what you’d pay at a traditional retailer.
I’ve been in contact with Monica over the last weeks, and got this great note from her, which proves this designer-entrepreneur is always thinking ahead (and holistically): “I just read Vanessa Friedman’s keynote at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit and was really inspired by the new term she coined – “sustainable wardrobe”, to replace the oxymoron of “sustainable fashion”. That’s absolutely my state of mind from when I sit down to sketch a collection to fitting each style for production: does this item comprise that 20% of your wardrobe that you always want to wear: season in, season out?”
Starre Vartan
Starre Vartan is founder and editor-in-chief of Eco-Chick.com and the author of the Eco-Chick Guide to Life. She's also a freelance science and environment writer who has published in National Geographic, CNN, Scientific American, Mental Floss, Pacific Standard, the NRDC, and many more. She lives on an island in Puget Sound with her partner and black cat. She was a geologist in her first career, and still picks up rocks wherever she goes.
