Japanese designer adds recycling and polyester to luxury

Tag : lining polyester

TOKYO — Basking in the runway spotlight at a Tokyo fashionshow Monday was a cape of lowly polyester sewn with chinchillabilled as an "ecological fur."
The cape, a bolero and other items by Japanese designer Chie Imaiare made with real chinchilla and mink from fur farms, but theirfabric parts and lining are made of recycled polyester from TeijinLtd., a Japanese plastic and pharmaceutical maker.
"We have not compromised quality," Imai said. "Andtying ecology with fur is such a fascinating concept."
Imai is the latest fur designer to use synthetic materials with fur— despite complaints from animal rights activists that theterm "ecological" is a ploy to distract people from themistreatment and cruelty of animals in the fur industry.
Imai said the composite material — ranging in price from$12,000 for a mink bolero to $83,000 for the chinchilla cape— allows her clientele, who include the Japanese royal familyand celebrities such as Sarah Jessica Parker to feel green, evenwhen they're buying fur.
"They want to take part in being ecological, but it's hard forthem to find a way to do it," Imai said at a Tokyo hotel,showing her 2008-2009 collection debuting her ecological fur.
Fur is ecological because it can be worn for generations and"returns to the earth" as organic material and causes nopollution, Imai argues.
"We aren't destroying anything. Aren't you going to eat meat?Wear belts or shoes?" she said.
Mass-producing T-shirts from recycled polyester cuts carbon dioxideemissions by 77 percent and energy consumption by 84 percent,compared with making them from scratch. Teijin produces some 7,000tons a year of recycled polyester from used polyester clothing,said company spokesman Yoshihito Usami. Most of it is used for workclothes and uniforms.
"Recycling, rooted in the idea of avoiding waste, doesn't linkeasily with the idea of luxury fur," said Usami. "This issomething we are carrying out as a trial."
Old clothing is first broken down into bits as tiny as rice andprocessed with chemicals and heat to take out the coloring,buttons, zippers and other foreign objects to produce dimethylterephthalate, or DMT, he said. That is then made into thread thatis spun into fabric.
Luxury fur has drawn protests for years as causing animalssuffering.
"The idea of 'ecological fur' is absurd," KristinLeppert, director of the Fur Campaign at the Humane Society of theUnited States, said in an e-mail from Washington, D.C. "Theindustry has been trying to 'greenwash' their product for years todistract from the cruelty and killing that continues to bedocumented."
Ashley Fruno, senior campaigner for PETA Asia-Pacific, believes furfor clothing is unnecessary.
"Fur can't be environmentally friendly because you can't beconcerned about the environment without caring about our fellowinhabitants: the animals," Fruno said.
Hiroe Tomura, a 35-year-old Tokyo restaurant manager, who tried ona cream-color $18,000 sable stole at the show Monday, said sheprobably wouldn't buy "ecological fur."
"But I am definitely interested in ecology," she said.