We seem to live in an age where the stock answer to the question "when do you want that?" is usually "yesterday."

 Despite the modern urge to produce everything as fast as possible, there is a grassroots movement afoot that bucks the trend.

 Tammachat Natural Textiles of Mahone Bay, owned and operated by Alleson Kase and Ellen Agger, is doing just that - promoting fair-trade products through an ideology that has been dubbed "slow fashion."

 Ms Kase says the initiative is similar to the slow food movement, promoting organically and naturally grown and harvested produce, that has taken hold in many areas of North America, including Lunenburg County.

 "It's like organic foods coming out of China and being sold at Wal-Mart. That's not really what we meant by organic food. So then there was this sort of rise in slow food, real food and local food," she explains.

 She says the same applies to fabric products sold in big box stores in which the fibre may have been organically grown, "but the whole production was still within an industrial model.

 "And that's not really what people had in mind when they said, 'Oh, I want to have natural fibres,'" she says.

 The partners recently returned from a four-month trip to Thailand, during which one of their aims was to seek out exactly where organic cotton comes from in that country.

 "And we found it's being grown on a very small scale along the Mekong [River]," Ms Kase says. "It's slow fashion, because there are no industrial processes. It's not just organic, it's handworked."

 During their visit, they spent two weeks with representatives of the Pattanarak Foundation, a non-governmental agency that works with disadvantaged people along the rural borders of Thailand to help them establish alternative development programs.

 A talk and slide show of their visit entitled "Women Weave: Organic Cotton Along the Mekong" will be presented at a fair-trade show and sale being held at the Lunenburg fire hall May 23 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

advertisement

 For more information visit http://www.tammachat.com.

posted on 05/19/09