SPAIN: Alba Garcia defines her love for fashion as: “Since I was little I have always loved the fashion runways, and the fashion magazines, I would also customize the clothes of my dolls. I have always had my own style and I have liked to dress differently from people.”
Garcia ‘s brand was born in 2015 – Cache Croche. The name of Cache means elegance and Croche, because she started making her first collection with Crochet.
Introducing herself, Garcia said, “ I am a fashion designer of sustainable clothing and accessories. I took my first steps in the haute couture with the famous and renowned international designer Francis Montesinos. In fact, this past year I won two awards, one national for sustainable business excellence known as Prenamo and another European for AETI organization in the same candidacy for innovation and recycling. I have also worked as a teacher of ethical fashion in different centres.”
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Of social entrepreneurship
When asked what inspired her to work towards social entrepreneurship, Garcia said –
“My homeland has always inspired me, the art, the nature and architecture of the city of arts and sciences – Valencia, Spain. During my student days, it was a fascinating time, I began to study the trends and the real ethical problem that the large, fast-fashion textile industries were facing. When we talk about production, for example, and you start watching documentaries about textile pollution in Bangladesh or China, for producing large quantities of clothes to a mass audience that is carried away by the publicity and capitalist, that’s when you begin to understand the dimensions of this industry, and those the facts that also inspire me in my collections to fight for a cleaner and pollution-free fashion world. The climate impact is a reality that is increasingly present and pollution in the oceans becomes more massive as the fashion industry grows rapidly.”
The need of good concepts in sustainable and recycled fashion made Gracia reflect through Cache Croche brand, “I had the urgent need to tell what I knew, and to tell what I knew and the things that I was hearing, so this year I found the non-profit organization “Our Fight” to help clean the oceans of thousand of microfibers that come off of the clothes of low cost or of low quality as well as the large quantities of plastic, which are forming monstrous island in the seas. From the beginning, I knew that I did not want to be a fashion brand that would pollute the world, but to be a brand full of values.”
“For the next year, Cache Croche will be signing up with ‘Our Fight’ project, with the prospect of attending fashion catwalks such as ‘Slow Fashion Next,’ but also to report what is happening, since we are facing an environmental collapse where the future of young people is in our hands. Perhaps, the information is our greatest strength, to help people to internalize these criteria, and to be able to collect plastic from the most polluted beaches of the Mediterranean Sea that cover the Valencian Community, the black flags.”
Dear rising entrepreneurs
“I think that what is most necessary is to excite people and communicate what he or she has to. Emerging designers and new entrepreneurs are beginning to learn and integrate social and environmental criteria and are aware of the importance of a design coupled with the technological innovation offered by new fabrics and processes, but all this from a business thought, there is still much to do and it is necessary that we support each other among designers and be united in this cause as it affects us all.”
Lastly, “Looking to the future, I think that it is not a question of waiting for these ideas to advance by themselves and getting down to work to continue building together that clean industry that we want to see in the world. That new different system with other values is already being born. I encourage people to join the “Our Fight” movement and help us spread it around the world.”
