SAN FRANCISCO: In a San Francisco workshop, Ally Beran’s team of fashion designers is sprawled out over buttons and spools of thread, hoping to slow global warming by stitching new outfits from second-hand, thrift store finds.

Designers of so-called sustainable fashion — made of recycled materials and homegrown fibers — are not only dominating New York catwalks and urban boutique racks this winter; many also are giving US farmers new markets for their crops.

This year, both American Apparel and yoga-gear retailer prAna will start selling shirts spun with cotton grown in California’s Central Valley and sewn just a few hours away, in Southern California, to avoid burning fossil fuels in transporting the materials.

Farmers in the United States grow a small portion of the organic cotton used by the apparel industry, which still sources most of its fibers overseas in countries like Turkey, where labour and production costs are much cheaper.

As more companies seek to build a greener supply chain, American farmers are hoping that will translate into more demand for domestic crops.

The Sustainable Cotton Project, a non-profit based in California, has helped almost two dozen cotton farmers penetrate the fashion industry by promoting California-grown BASIC cotton, a crop that is not quite organic but is farmed using techniques that reduce pesticide usage by as much as 73 per cent.

prAna recently snapped up hundreds of pounds of BASIC acala cotton for its ‘Homegrown T-Shirt’, and American Apparel has committed to buying nearly half a million pounds, said Lynda Grose, a sustainable fashion design professor at California College of the Arts who helped broker the deals.

Coral Rose, who led Wal-Mart’s first purchase of organic yoga clothes in 2004 when she was a women’s apparel buyer at Sams Club, said once companies start switching to natural fibers, it is only a matter of time before they start thinking about other sustainable design practices. Wal-Mart is now the biggest seller of organic cotton products worldwide.

“It’s a total mind-set shift at the design level,” said Rose, now a consultant. “It holds the designer accountable for their designs and their impacts.”

Still, analysts caution that until earth-friendly clothes come down in price, only a small group of consumers will think about their carbon footprint before they reach for their wallets.

“We’ve gotten more people aware or interested in ecological fashion, but most of the world’s still looking for cheaper, better, faster,” said Marshal Cohen, a fashion industry analyst at the NPD Group.

“The message will resonate, but it’s going to take more time.”—AP