A wedding day is supposed to be special, a day of superlatives to be remembered forever. In South Korea, 340,000 weddings are held every year. ‘That’s an average 1,000 flowers, 1,000 litres of food waste and up to 1,500 guests throwing out exhaust fumes from their cars each time,’ notes Kyoungjae Lee, the young CEO of Sewing for the Soil. ‘It makes for a lot of wedding pollution!’ Tired of what she sees as excessive waste and commercialism, Kyoungjae wants weddings to go back to being about sustaining and developing society by creating a union and a family.
White is black!
Her initiative started with a dress she designed in 2006, a biodegradable wedding dress made of eco-certified fabric and natural dyes that can be redesigned into a day dress once the ceremony is over. Not a pure white dress, of course, because, as Kyoungjae explains, ‘they involve chemicals to bleach the black petroleum from which 65% of the materials in them are made: they can’t be incinerated without producing formaldehyde or buried without contaminating the soil.’
Before abandoning the idea of sashaying down the aisle altogether, take heart: Sewing for the Soil’s eco-friendly weddings offer a fresh, green take on the concept. Cut flowers are replaced by living ones that can then be replanted; catering is organic; invitations are printed in bean-oil ink on recycled or Han-Ji paper (an ancient mulberry paper) and will become photo frames or handkerchiefs later; even the cars can be done away with: ‘Why not invite people to come by bicycle or public transport in cities, or else rig up Web 2.0 video relays?’ she suggests.
A promising market
Kyoungjae’s ideas are sparked by her artistic drive and a deep commitment to making design responsible. After studying fashion, she took a Masters in Green Design, where she expounded the eco-wedding dress in her thesis. She was spotlighted for this innovation in a solo exhibition and developed her interest in social enterprise, before deciding to set up her company in 2009. To date, 39 couples have chosen a Sewing for the Soil wedding. Although the eco-market in Korea is still in its infancy, government policies and the Kyoto protocol obligation to start controlling CO2 emission from 2012 make it a promising sector, in which Sewing for the Soil is uniquely placed.
The green way to say ‘I do.’
To consolidate her position, Kyoungjae plans to sell her products to large wedding consultants seeking to offer an eco-option, giving her enterprise an economic edge over traditional revenue from service charges. The prospects look positive: the average wedding in Korea costs US$15,000 and marriage remains popular at 6.6 weddings per 1,000 inhabitants – the levels Europe enjoyed thirty years ago.
The company has forged partnerships in Japan for technological expertise and with Korean professionals in the field of organic nettles and natural dyeing processes. It is also developing offshoot lines for eco-friendly hospital garments and other items such as towels and aprons. Kyoungjae even carries the marriage theme into her employment strategy too, as she intends to foster employment for women who lose their jobs on becoming wives or mothers.
So far, the main obstacle she has encountered is, perhaps unsurprisingly, bound up with tradition: ‘When I meet government agencies or fashion firms that are interested in my company, they often ask where the CEO is! They don’t imagine it can be a young woman like me.’ They might do well to think again: Kyoungjae is out to change the wedding culture. Only the wedding bands will still be made of gold…
