Being fashionable never hurt anybody, right? Well, nobody besides the millions of animals the fashion industry slaughters barbarically for testing or producing garments. But increasingly brands are joining the mindfulness bandwagon with Quo India being the latest one.
It has worked out a collection in collaboration with PETA India that chooses morality over money.
Called ‘In Hand’ it brings the unscrupulous practice of animal and plant testing to the spotlight. This is done through the visually attractive custom motifs on cruelty-free fabrics.
“For example, the cut tail motif shows the unethical practice of cutting an animal’s tails for the experiments. There is an eye motif dress with enlarged eyes showing an animal’s shocked expression. There is also a half wide eye motif on our crop tops representative of human apathy.
You have the composition of the tongue, thick eyebrows and saliva on the pockets of a cropped shirt as motifs of pain,” says 28-year-old Ishita Mangal, founder of the Delhi based fashion label Quo India.
The thought of the collection came from reading about how animals in laboratories are isolated, burned, shocked, poisoned, starved, drowned, addicted to drugs, and brain-damaged.
They are then put back in the same cages after the procedure without any painkillers. “This has been done for a long with because its the cheapest form of testing products,” says Mangal, who decided to do her bit by introducing a line committed to highlighting this wrongdoing.
That’s when she approached PETA India. ten per cent of the sales from this collection will go to the organisation.
The collection is a mix of style and purpose. It has cotton lurex, block printed cotton and striped cotton interplayed with traditional textiles.
There has been no use of silk, wool or leather. “People are acknowledging our approach. They’re realising that being stylish can be achieved without being cruel.
The industry has been talking about sustainability and vegan lifestyle for long but there hasn’t been enough reinforcement, so to drive home the point, we are aggressively promoting this ideology” she says. For her, it’s a promise to give a voice to the voiceless.
Whether it’s by sharing real-life footage of animal testing with people, using social media for outreach, or reaching out through publications, every channel has one purpose: To make fashion hurt less.
Available at: D-162, Defence Colony; Quostore.in