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September 12, 2008 2:16 pm
Is anyone else thirsty? This fashion week strikes me as having been a particularly parching experience, and I say this with sorrow, because in essence I am advocating for bottled water. Yes, Evian is at the tents, and certain off-site venues have their own water sponsors. But otherwise, this season has witnessed a steep decline in handouts of H20 at shows. As an environmentalist, I support this. I really do. I was raised on tap. I’ve been to those Charity: Water events where they make you carry those backbreaking jugs, as the women in water-deprived areas of Africa must. Bottled water epitomizes the privileging of profit motive over public good; it’s a pox on our society, the most idiotically wasteful product ever developed—and I want it back at fashion week. Is there any way to square this circle? GIVE Water seems like the closest thing to a reasonable compromise between principle and practice. I first encountered GIVE at Camilla Stærk’s show on Sunday, and after a little sniffing around discovered that, for every bottle it sells, the company donates ten cents to charity; the goal, as 19-year-old GIVE founder Ben Lewis explains, is to make bottled-water consumers accidental philanthropists. “The reality is, even with all the environmental concerns, bottled water is still a growing category,” he said. “I wanted to find a way to leverage that market for some kind of good. And we take care to keep the company as sustainable as possible.” Lewis seems like a good kid, making a smart bet on the fact that people like me will choose convenience over ethics—but why make them choose? Frankly, I hope he’s wrong. I hope that 100 years from now, supposing global warming hasn’t obliterated civilization as we know it, people look back at bottled water as some bizarro fixation, the twenty-first-century’s version of the slammerkin or the powdered wig. In the meantime, however, I’ve got a show to go to, and I’m really, really thirsty.
tags: Give Water
