Art's District Duo // New DL Shop Styles

We've been so busy adding items to the Dazey Lady Shop lately, a section of our site dedicated to selling goods made by fellow female entrepreneurs! Today's post includes more gorgeous goods you can shop and style along with Dazey tees. We have been focusing on sustainable fashion for this coming year. Really stylish female-owned slow fashion brands can be hard find, but we've made it our mission to source the best for our Dazey Lady shop. The two main designers featured below Tamga Designs & Father's Daughter Denim are perfectly examples of slow and ethical fashion. The designer Yana behind Dazey Lady brand Tamga has seen the damage of fast fashion first hand and had built her brand around that experience. Below is a piece she wrote on the importance of pushing the slow fashion movement and what she is doing. We are proud to carry such powerful brands in our store! 

After food and shelter, clothing may just be the most important product in our lives. But how much do we know about the clothes that we’re wearing every single day? I started my ethical fashion brand TAMGA Designs because this question is way too hard for most of us to answer. And when I moved to Bangladesh in 2014, I realized that what we don’t know is causing real harm.

Arriving in Dhaka, Bangladesh for the first time is a sensory overload. Heat, mosquitoes and a whole lot of attention from strangers awaits you as soon as you land. My partner Eric had landed a job with the UN and already been there for 6 months. It wasn’t long before I noticed the impact of the fashion manufacturing industry on this city. The rapid growth and construction, the thousands of young women in colorful traditional attire making their way to work in the factories, the stalls on the side of the road selling popular Western brands at impossibly low prices. The country had just gone through a painful experience when the Rana Plaza complex, a shoddily built building containing several garment factories, collapsed and took more than 1,100 lives with it.

Our demand for cheap clothing in the western world has created a highly efficient, industrialized and global fashion manufacturing machine. In Bangladesh alone more than 4 million people create our clothing for a living – and around 80 percent of them are women. These jobs have been an incredible force for poverty reduction in the country, but as Western brands push for lower prices and faster turnaround it’s the workers and their natural environments that suffer. Visiting factories around Dhaka I saw why the bright, trendy stores back home could sell fashion for such ‘bargain’ prices.

When my work had finished in Dhaka, I put together a small team and we spent a year setting up a responsible and transparent supply chain. We set out to produce bright and exciting clothing from the world’s most progressive fabrics and eco-friendly dyes. I had to go through this process to prove to myself that great clothing can be created responsibly from start to finish. We list every factory, every material and even the environmental impact of every garment on our website so that our customers can join the journey as well.

I started TAMGA Designs because I love the possibilities for self-expression, individuality and creativity in fashion. Rather than just feeling let-down by the dark realities of fast fashion, we choose to foster positivity, creating bright and beautiful clothing that does good for people and the planet. It’s not too late for the fashion industry to turn itself around, but we have to talk about issues like working conditions, pollution and waste. It’s my hope that, along with other inspirational brands in this space like Dazey LA, we can get this conversation going.

Written By: Yana Barankin, Co-Founder & Creative Director at TAMGA Designs

Below our own @danidazey models with the adorable Brit Kemp @britt.kemp! Recently as Dani was walking around downtown Brit recognized her from Dazey and they got to chatting. She had the coolest style and we obviously had to shoot her! She moved to LA earlier this year and works with awesome female owned brand Vrai & Oro as well as picking up occasional modeling gigs. We headed to the Art's District and did a little double-dazey shoot!

Photographer: @phillipbutler

Models: @brit.kemp & @danidazey

Brands: @dazey_la, @fathersdaughterla, @tamgadesigns

SHOP ALL YOU SEE HERE