Paneros Journal

You hear us talk a lot about deadstock fabrics in our garments - but what does this industry jargon 'buzzword' really mean? 

Our Small Talk Series focuses on the amazing men and women who wear Paneros, and are helping to create a more sustainable future for fashion.

Continuing our series featuring who made your clothes, here's another story we think is important to share. Keeping traditional handcrafted skills alive is very important to us at Paneros. We're so excited to feature one of our amazing and talented guys, Ardana. 

Natural iron oxides, commonly known as "earth" colors, are found all over the earth in muted shades of ref, orange, yellow and green. It comes as no surprise that these colors have been on artists' palettes for more than 40,000 years.

Tips and Best Practices for Greener Garment Care

Keeping traditional handcrafted skills alive is very important to us at Paneros. We're so excited to feature one of our amazing and talented woman beaders, Sara. 

We think it's important to feature exactly who made the clothes you wear, so we all remember that everything we touch has a story and a beginning. Our first member of our manufacturing team is Gede, the owner and patternmaker of a small garment workshop in Bali.

By now, we all know the immense problems with fully synthetic fibers made from oil, and the microplastics they release. But, even man-made cellulose fibers are not all the same. Indeed, they are usually made with pulp from trees, a renewable resource, and they are a safely washable and very versatile fabric that is an affordable substitute for other materials. But they are not all equally responsible. 

You might have heard that there are a lot of global initiatives underway to make the fashion industry more 'circular'. But what does that even mean? Right now, the fashion industry is ‘linear’ – meaning, new materials go into creating new fibers and fabrics, and after use the garments are discarded after only a short period of time and wind up in either a landfill or incinerated.

Fabrics used in fashion have come a long way since the caveman days. Can you imagine everyone sill walking around in loincloths... no thank you!  Today, clothes are made up of dozens of materials, each of which come with unique advantages and disadvantages.   As a consumer, you deserve to understand of the 3 most important groups.

Large scale manufacturing of textiles results in around 12% waste on the clothing creation alone (i.e. leftover materials wasted that are destined for landfills). Only 15% of all original materials are recycled by the end of their useful life, and less than 1% of new clothing materials are created from recycled garments. This means that roughly every second, one truckload of discarded clothing is either lanfilled or incinerated. 

Here is the dirty secret - the fashion industry is believed to be the 2nd largest polluter (right after the oil industry). We all know that creating anything takes resources, but consider the durability and staying power of the piece you are looking at – how often you will you wear it (like that spandex sequin top you wore to your holiday party 2 years ago) and for how many seasons - before you make that impulse buy.