Sustainable Shopping in the Hudson Valley

You can recycle, reduce the meat in your diet, and carpool all you want, but textile production for the fast fashion industry is still polluting the Earth at alarming rates. Shopping thoughtlessly isn’t going to cut it anymore. So what can we do in the Hudson Valley to help? The clothes on your back are a surprisingly good place to start.

That’s where Layla L’obatti began when she started Between the Sheets, her lingerie brand dedicated to sustainability in Ulster County.

“It gives me a sense of purpose,” she says. “It’s easy to feel helpless as an individual and as a consumer, and running my company sustainably gives me a sense that I’m doing something for the environment.”

BTS is a B corp certified company, which is separate from having state certification as a legitimate company. “It provides a review process that assures customers you’re not just saying you’re doing good. There’s proof,” L’obatti explains. To achieve B corp status, an ethical business must complete a questionnaire to measure the company’s efforts. “It encourages people to not just say, but do. It pushes us to look harder, to look for certain things to improve.”

L’obatti got her start in the fashion world at FIT, where she studied intimate apparel. She chose the concentration because she loved the variety of materials in which she was able to work. Today, she still loves the silks, laces, and knits of traditional lingerie, but she now knows that acquiring said fabrics sustainably takes a little extra work. “There’s a lot of research to find different suppliers for different materials,” says L’obatti. Between The Sheets gets a lot of its materials from a renewable energy Italian mill that is eco-tech certified and makes its fabric from beech trees.

“We’ve stayed away from cotton,” she declares. “We found that the water demands of cotton weren’t as sustainable long term as certain tree harvesting.” She has a point. According to World Wildlife Fund, a single cotton t-shirt or a pair of jeans uses 20,000 liters of water to produce—that’s 200 times more water than what the average person consumes in one day.

Between the Sheets has been around for a decade, but L’obatti has noticed a louder buzz for sustainably in the past three years. “Many buyers would glaze over our sustainability efforts, and were more concerned with aesthetic. But now, more and more people are buying for sustainable reasons.”

Between the Sheets isn’t the only place to find sustainable garments in the Hudson Valley. The Kaight boutique in Beacon, which owned and operated by Kate McGregor, carries a variety of brands that prioritize waste reduction, organic fabrics, and safe dyes.

“The production aspect is really important to me,” says McGregor. “There’s a lot of information that’s come out about how poorly treated garment workers are, especially outside the country.” That “Made in U.S.A.” stamp of approval means that transportation pollution and shipping costs were carefully considered, and ideally kept to a minimum.

McGregor started to become a more conscious consumer in 2005, when she arrived at a crossroads in her design career. “I wanted to have more of a connection to the things I was buying and working hard for it; not just buying things for the sake of buying.” Thus her launch of the Kaight Shop value system, a program that respects humankind and the environment.

This value system is reflected in the products the Beacon boutique carries. The Kaight Shop takes part in Trade Not Aid, a globalization effort that stocks products made by artisans from developing countries to encourage their financial independence. It also carries Swedish Stocking, a company that creates its pantyhose from pre and post consumer nylon waste. Shoppers are encouraged to donate their lightly used stockings for the company to reuse, which is an easy way to keep a non-biodegradable product out of landfills. “It’s important to look at the source,” McGregor says. “More designers are thinking about this, and thinking about ways they can produce things more sustainably. There’s a lot of incredible technology that’s helping recycle.” It’s up to sustainable fashion pioneers like McGregor and L’obatti to sniff out the new technology for consumers to try. After all, L’obatti says it best: “There’s a sense of purpose behind just pretty things.”