But will They Rename Them BioDiesel Jeans?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 02. 5.07
Everybody is jumping on the green bandwagon; now Diesel Jeans has launched its "Global Warming Ready" campaign, complete with an movie explaining global warming for the brain-dead, and how we should all wear tighter, more revealing clothes; 10 often inane things that you can do to stop global warming, and a plug for the Inconvenient Truth to make it all better. "We've touched right now on what is a tremendously hot button issue," said Joelle Berdugo Adler of Diesel . ". . . Global warming is the new issue of the decade, superseding things like health and poverty." Not a word anywhere about how or where their jeans are made, what the company is doing about its own carbon footprint, just silly pictures making a flooded New York and Mount Rushmore look very sexy and attractive. Derek Zoolander has more brains than this campaign. Watch and be appalled as ::Diesel redefines Greenwashing. All in vile flash so you should click on the fourth button over on the bottom. via ::Globe and Mail
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I feel must jump to the defense of the thin and gorgeous.
I don't wear Diesel because they don't come in my size and I spend all my money on a terrible rent addiction.
Since we're dumping this terrible problem in the laps of our young people, let them at least have a laugh while they come to grips with how bad it's gonna get...
this is the way i like treehugger reporting the green strides of conventional companies: CRITICAL
i find it very interesting to read about those steps and they should not be ignored cause they:
- reflect the current power of the critical stakeholders to force companies to change for sustainability (evendently not enough power yet)
- make us think about new ways of greenwashing we have to be aware of and should inform the public about
seems that more and more companies are introducing some green products to mask slavery-like working conditions along their supply-chains.
NOT WITH US!!!
Wow, the Diesel website is so incredibly offensive! The #10 thing that Diesel people can do is to "eat steak in a restaurant", because your refrigerator at home uses too much power, and you're doing the world a favor by eating a methane-flatulence producing cow. That is just wrong on so many levels!
heaven forbid that the ecoconscious could have a sense of humor about things or recognize a little bit of irony.
Come in guys lets think a little outside the enviro-finatic box for a moment. True, brands like Diesel and Levis are not great at advertising their own sustainable initiatives (which by the way have been in quiet and purposeful development for the last 10 years), but who else besides the tastemakers of urban fasion are going to shift popular cultural in a big way? Is it a bunch of of environmentalists yelping at eachother on treehugeer about their greenwashing woes? Or is it a handful of billion dollar corporations who have an intimate understanding of the American consumer?
Sad to say I beleive it is the latter. Diesel knows their consumer. And they understand the marketing machine that needs to be put in place to redirect popular sentiment. I believe the Diesel campaign, while unsettling to say the least, marks a long-need turning point in the green movement -- intelligent, bombastic, irreverant and (yes) sexy marketing.
What does Diesel accomplish with these images? First, the re-envision (quite sarcastically) a post polar-melt world in which fashion, romance and discretionary income live side by side a flooded New York skyline. It's not the hopeless doom which so often leaves us feeling powerless..."Why bother recycling if we're all going to be dead?" Secondly, it manages to make global warming real for the first time as far as I've seen, by re-rendering the world of the future from the fashion photographer's eye. As shocking as Al Gore's satellite view of a flooded world were, these images to me are far more devastating -- realistic renderings of what the world might actually look like in 50 years.
On top of it all, they bring something which has been missing FAR too long amongst the Ed Bagley's of the green movement -- humor. Who doesn't want to swim up Abe Lincoln's nose?
Finally on Loyd's last point: it would indeed by greenwashing if Diesel didn't have the goods to back up their campign. But in fact they do. Their stuff is not cheap (an issue for another time) but tell me where else I can find a pair of organic cotton jeans, naurally dyed with soy ink, for less money than a comparable pair of jeans. As far as I know it Diesel. Also they just put out a line of the most exquisite naturally dyed hemp sweaters. I succumbed and got one. I might not look like Mr. Sexy on top of the Empire State Building, but at least I'm stylin' hemp for the first time.