Continuing the U.K. theme this month, fiftyRX3 presents Katharine Hamnett as the featured designer. Katharine has been designing since the 70's and was using contemporary heavyweights Ellen von Unwerth, Juergen Teller and Terry Richardson to shoot ad campaigns long before others. So, it is no surprise her fashion designs have pushed the envelope in other areas as well. In 1983 she launched her protest t-shirt lines for which she has become famous, donating a portion of the proceeds to charity.

Her website states that in 1989 she:

Initiates research into impact of clothing and textile industry on the environment, which reveals an untenable situation. Conventional cotton agriculture is responsible for 10,000 deaths per annum from accidental pesticide poisoning (now 20,000) 1,000,000 p.a. long-term acute pesticide poisonings, desertification, and long-term contamination of the aquifer, millions of people working in conditions worse than slavery. Decides to try to change the industry from within.

In 1990,"Katharine Hamnett gives a speech on the dangers of conventional cotton cultivation in New York. Environmental cotton 2000 is launched in association with the Pesticide Action Network, a research and education programme concerned with pesticides used in cotton growing. Money is raised to help cotton farmers by a percentage of wholesale price of garments being donated to Pesticide Action Network." Throughout the 90's Katharine continued to weave social and political messages into her work and onto her clothing.

























In the introduction to her "Clean Up or Die Campaign" she states:

The fashion industry as a whole is too lazy, too ignorant and too disinterested in fair trade and the environmental issues surrounding its sourcing of raw materials and manufacturing. It makes too much money from the low cost of outsourced cheap labour to be interested in making a change. Only pressure from the consumer in the form of boycott of unacceptable materials and manufacturing processes can make it change.

OXFAM invited Katharine to Mali in 2003. There she visited with cotton farmers and governmental officials. In this year, four years after her initial attempts to promote the benefits of organic cotton, she decided to cancel her current licensing agreement and go into production of a new line, Katharine E Hamnett. E stands for ethics and the environment. The eagerly anticipated line is to launch in the spring of 2007.

A model wearing a hemp jacket by Katharine Hamnett stands in a field of hemp.