The Frequency of Fabric and How Clothing Impacts Your Health
Interview By Brandi Fleck
Alyssa Couture explores how fabric frequency, materials, and design influence comfort and overall well-being, including why more people are rethinking what they wear every day.
Before clothing became fast, seasonal, and trend-driven, it was designed around how it felt on the body.
Alyssa Couture (fashion author, designer, and founder of the Healthy Fashion Campaign) shares how her experience in fashion, retail, and design led her to question the role materials play in everyday life. Over time, she began to notice a pattern. Certain fabrics felt better, lasted longer, and were worn more often, while others looked good but never quite felt right.
We explore the idea of fabric frequency, the difference between polyester and natural fabrics, and how clothing choices can influence comfort, breathability, and overall well-being.
If you’ve ever taken off an outfit and immediately felt relief or reached for the same few pieces over and over again, this conversation offers a new way to think about what your clothes are actually doing.
Listen to Alyssa Couture’s Interview
Watch Alyssa Couture’s Interview
Fashion as Medicine, Not Just Style
Brandi Fleck: Today, everybody, we are welcoming Alyssa Couture to Human Amplified. Alyssa, please introduce yourself to our listeners. Tell them a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Alyssa Couture: Yes. My name is Alyssa Couture, and I am a fashion author and fashion entrepreneur of Healthy Fashion Campaign. I produced a new book called Healthy Fashion: The Deeper Truths. My line of work is very heavily involved in fashion. I also do energy work, which is in combination with my fashion work. My fashion work really is about fashion for health, fashion for the mind, body, and spirit. It is an advanced New Age, metaphysical, and modern approach to fashion, a very ultra-modern approach to how we practice fashion, how we design and partake in fashion within the fashion industry and within our own wardrobes as fashion consumers.
What I really like about my line of work is the way I have been able to develop concepts for the fashion industry and for fashion consumers so that we can take a new approach to fashion and see fashion in a new perspective, and that being treating fashion as an alternative health remedy, treating fashion as a form of medicine, as a form of spa-like treatment, something that can work to heal us, to make us feel and look healthy, and do a numerous amount of different things in the ways of our five bodies: our mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, and energetic bodies in relation to fashion.
The Name That Pulled Her Into Fashion
Brandi Fleck: Okay. I really love this approach, and gosh, we're going to dive so deep into this, but I just have to ask you about your name. It's so related to fashion. Do you get asked about it a lot, or how does that usually go for you? Tell us about it.
Alyssa Couture: I do get approached, and people say, “Your last name is Couture. Is that like a pen name?” I say, no, I actually was born with Couture. It’s pronounced Couture, and couture is the French fashion term for high fashion sewing.
In college, I was spoken to as Couture because that’s how you say it in the fashion world. When I grew up, living with a French Canadian father who was born and raised in America, he called it Kutcher. I’ve been raised Kutcher, but then when I went into fashion school as a teenager, it all of a sudden was Couture. So now I’ve been sort of battling how to pronounce my name. I actually pronounce it both ways. Sometimes I pronounce it Kutcher, and sometimes it’s pronounced Couture.
Brandi Fleck: Awesome. I mean, gosh, do you think the fact that this is your life path and that you’re in fashion, but this is also your name, what do you think about that?
Alyssa Couture: I do believe it was some sort of destiny because when I was a teenager, that’s when it all started, my love for fashion. It was growing up in middle school and grade school, but it really started unraveling in junior and senior year of high school.
I didn’t get approached a lot about my last name being Couture. Unfortunately, when you tell people your last name is Couture, people don’t even know what you’re talking about most of the time. If they see it in handwriting, then they’ll say it. I wish I had gotten approached more about my name being a fashion term, but I haven’t that much. You see it on the internet, and when I meet people, people like yourself, it does get approached more in that way.
Why We’re Drawn to What We Wear
Brandi Fleck: Okay, all right. Well, very cool. I have so many questions for you. Let’s just dive into why you think humans are so drawn to fashion in general. Let’s start there for a foundation.
Alyssa Couture: That’s a really interesting question. I believe we are born naked, so we have to dress ourselves no matter what for survival, for function, for protection. What we’re drawn to more is the metaphysical creative aspect, the emotional aspect, using fashion for comfort and for healing, using fashion for identity.
People are drawn to fashion from the ergonomic perspective, the aesthetic, but also the functional perspective. When we wear clothing, it can hurt us or it can comfort us and soothe us and treat the body well.
We have actually been bombarded in this fashion industry with sacrificial fashion. People are drawn to both sacrificial fashion and positive, healthy fashion. Sacrificial fashion is, for example, myself growing up and wanting to be in trend and seeing a garment but not taking into perspective that it itches or it pokes or it prods or it’s pulling in certain areas of my body or it’s scratching or just being annoying.
There are actually two types of fashion. There is fashion that is uncomfortable and really sacrificial because we’re trying to look good but we don’t really feel good. Then we’re also drawn to fashion that is treating the body well, moving with the body, designed to help connect us to our soul and be grounded and feel at ease.
There’s this kind of push and pull. I still get drawn to the temptation of going to buy a pair of jeans, but I really have to be careful about that metal zipper and that button for me personally because I have agitations. I need to find a jegging, a jean with maybe an elastic waistband, because those types of things bother me, and those little details count.
I feel like the future of fashion, what we’re going to be drawn to especially, is more minimalistic fashion with high-function details that are designed for the body, specifically for everybody. A lot of times you find this type of fashion for people with disabilities. People who are autistic like to wear seamless fashion. More and more, we’re going to be designing seamless fashion for everybody because nobody really likes to take off a sweatshirt or a long sleeve or a pair of pants and see indents of seams all over, markings all over our body.
Seams are just one small detail. I wear seams and have no problem. There are different types of seams that are designed, like my leggings, which have an overlock seam, so it’s attached and in the middle there’s no large crease.
Comfort Is Reshaping High Fashion
That’s just one example, but what we’re getting into is we’re going to be drawn to fashion that is much more ergonomically designed and treats the body in a very healthy, balanced way.
Brandi Fleck: Why do you think that is? Why do you think we’re going that direction in the future?
Alyssa Couture: I believe the coronavirus kind of kicked it off a little bit because everybody kind of stayed home, and they wore their sweatpants and their sweatshirts, and they were just very comfortable in their garments. That’s actually typically clothing that I wear. I love my sweatshirts and my leggings. I live in them.
When you see high fashion, ready-to-wear runway fashion, you come to find that there are thousand-dollar pieces of sweatshirts. Sweatshirts for a thousand dollars. We’re wondering, how can a sweatshirt be a thousand dollars? It’s designed in a high fashion way.
I think the new approach to modern fashion is ultra high fashion that looks glamorous, but it’s super comfortable. It’s going to be the design caliber and the taste level that’s really going to bring more athleisure, minimal design into a high fashion perspective so that we can wear comfortable clothes that don’t look like we’re wearing our PJs.
I think that’s really where we’re going. We’re going toward high fashion that can be at a specific caliber that makes us feel glamorous, makes us feel dressed up, but treats the body well and is not sacrificing in the name of looks and aesthetic and design details that don’t treat the body well.
The Hidden Health Impact of Clothing
Brandi Fleck: Yeah, okay. Well, that sounds great. I look forward to that. You probably touched on this a little bit, but I feel like a lot of people don’t typically connect fashion to their health like you said. It can help us with our confidence, it can help us feel a certain way, but I don’t know if a lot of people go deeper than that. Can you take us a little bit deeper into how it’s connected to our holistic health?
Alyssa Couture: Yes, I can use myself as an example. When I was in my 20s, in my late 20s, I was wearing lots of clothes. I had a large wardrobe, and nothing was really satisfying for me enough to wear all the time. I felt like I was gravitating toward a bunch of stuff, and I wasn’t really claiming my presence and who I was within clothing.
I think it’s definitely a process and a phase. I think we all go through fashion phases, and we’re always typically drawn to those specific pieces in our wardrobes that make us really understand who we are.
Looking back in my earlier 20s, it was those specific signature pieces that really gave me a strong connection to fashion.
This new approach with fashion being holistic and healthy is we can group it together in the different five bodies: the physical, the mental, the emotional, the spiritual.
We can start with the physical. The physical is the type of materials that we wear. Right now, we are having a battle between plant-based fashion, animal fashion, and polyester. Polyester is taking over the textile industry in such large lengths.
The problem with this is polyester was designed in the 1930s, and before that we were wearing hemp and we were wearing cotton predominantly. With this drastic change of everybody wearing polyester, it has caused problems. It has caused problems for the climate, but also for our body.
I have done research finding that polyester is not breathable enough for our skin. It is okay to wear as a third layer. I have a coat, for example, that is a third layer and it’s loose, so it’s not hugging me.
For instance, a pair of nylons, they’re super hugging and tight, and they could be blocking the airflow within the body and the external environment.
Another example is underwear. All doctors prescribe cotton underwear if you have any form of infection. I know it sounds blunt to say that, but it’s true. Nobody prescribes polyester underwear when you have an infection because of that lack of breathability.
With polyester being petroleum oil, we are a water-based body, so we do need hydrophilic materials, which is plants. Hydrophilic meaning the water in the materials can actually absorb within the fiber. With polyester, it’s hydrophobic. It’s a very drying material. It’s a very waterless type of material.
We’re moving in the direction of more and more plants. How do we really do this? We can’t just do it with cotton and linen. Where we are headed is there have been experiments, and it’s in minor phases of production, of numerous types of plants being produced for textiles. That’s not just cotton and linen and hemp. I’m talking about ramie, Tencel, bamboo, kapok, lyocell.
There are new developments of cactus fiber, aloe vera fiber, and also rose bush stem fiber, fabrics made out of rose bush stem.
We need to use a lot of different plants in order to make it predominant in the textile industry because right now only about five percent of the textile industry is cotton and linen, and 80 to 90 percent is polyester.
Cotton and linen cannot clothe the entire world. That’s why we need to bring in more plants. I actually created a glossary in my book of 36 different types of plants. We can Google them and find fabrics in textile markets and even in clothing shops, sparingly right now.
There’s a design of a kapok fill coat, and kapok is an alternative down. It’s not a feather down or a polyfill down. Kapok is the fluff in a shell that grows in a tree, and it’s a perfect alternative to feather and poly.
That’s basically where we’re going. We need to clothe our body with plants. When we go out into nature, the beaches, the deserts, the wilderness, the Arctic, what we’ve come to find is we need nature, and we need it on our bodies.
Polyester is not fulfilling that because it’s petroleum oil. It’s acidic and deep within the Earth. It’s not the type of material that is going to create serious medicinal treatment. Plants definitely are.
We eat plants. We live in a breeze around plants. Putting that connection on top of our bodies is going to give us a stronger connection to the universe, to the planet, to other planets. The plant-human connection is very sacred. It’s scientific, but it’s also spiritual.
That’s one mode of where we’re heading toward, bringing fashion more into the holistic health field, wearing plants designed for the body in a therapeutic way.
We could also jump into the spirituality of fashion. There is a new age happening, a spiritual awakening. This ascension is sort of end times on planet Earth. There’s a battle between Satan and the divine realms, and creating more spirituality and divine action into our clothing, making clothing a spiritual activity.
The gurus, the ascended masters, the angels, the priests and priestesses, they wear the robe. It’s typically made in cotton. This signature design is a symbol. It’s also a piece of material that is sacred.
When you see the robe, you’re seeing something that’s more than just fashion. It’s not costume, because the robe has been kept modern within tradition and modern lifestyle arts.
With that being said, the robe and the way it is worn is a blessing onto the human being. We wear clothes that bless us and bless others. That is a spiritual act. It is a spiritual practice.
It’s hard to say what fashion blesses us and what fashion doesn’t. It can be based on the material, the color, as simple as a color, a design feature, and also the energy of the garment.
Sometimes you can read fabrics and materials based on its aura because everything is made up of energy. The material of the fabric and the design has a specific aura.
What we can do is see the difference between a divine, sattvic material. There are two terms. There’s sattvic in India, which is positive, high vibration, and there’s tamasic, which is toxic vibration and negative frequency. There’s a spiritual research center in India that claims polyester is tamasic. It has a sort of negative frequency, and cotton has a sattvic, positive frequency.
I don’t know how much has been scientifically researched, but it appears that plants do have a high vibration and a high frequency. Polyester, because it is made up of dead fossil fuels, could very well have more of a negative vibration.
To be able to explain what negative frequency or vibration is, it means so many different things to so many different people, so I’m just being general about it.
We’re dealing with fabrics and designs and materials that could actually hold a negative, occult, evil frequency versus a high frequency. Like I said, I wear polyester too, and I don’t think it’s the devil. I truly think it’s kept us alive and comforted us.
There are a lot of textures out there that mimic plants. Polyester mimics plant-based fibers. You go into the stores and you feel a garment, it feels just like cotton, and then you read the label and it’s polyester. I’m like, are you kidding me? How is this happening?
It comes to find out that a lot of these polyester textile manufacturers are mimicking plants and plant-based fibers because that’s what people naturally want to wear. It’s naturally more comfortable.
Clothing, Energy, and Emotional Residue
We’ve touched on the physical body in relation to fashion, the spiritual body in relation to fashion, and also a little bit of the energy body. There’s also the emotional and mental body.
What that is, is we’re talking about how our materials and our garments throughout the day absorb residual emotions that we release nonstop throughout the day.
We can actually use fashion as a tool and as a healing modality when we wear these garments, especially plants, because it’s sort of a conductor of holding in these emotions. It’s like a crystal.
Take a crystal, for instance. A crystal absorbs negative energy in a household. You put a crystal in a household, it takes in and absorbs all the negative residual energies, and it holds them in the crystal. You have to release the negative emotions out of the crystal through purification.
You can put it in the soil, run it under water, put it through sea salt water, put it in sunlight. There are various ways to release residual emotions.
That’s where our laundromat happens for fashion. When we’re washing our garments, we’re actually washing away the emotions. We’re washing away the residual energies that are constantly being absorbed into our garments.
This is a natural holistic healing process that we do day to day. You don’t always have to launder your clothes constantly. You can spray them with essential oils, you can sage your clothes, you can spritz them with water, you can do all sorts of things. You can just air dry them on a hanger, and it will release naturally.
I think it is really important to know that our fashion really does this for us. It acts like a crystal. Cellulose and fiber, take linen cellulose for instance, the fiber down to its molecular structure is crystalline.
We really are scientifically absorbing these energies and these emotions that we have throughout the day, and they need to be released. They do become released out into the air, but it’s the clothing too that really acts as the channel and acts as a way to take on these emotions and these residual energies and release them.
We are having true purification throughout the day and throughout our lifetimes with our wardrobes.
Fashion Archetypes vs Surface-Level Labels
Alyssa Couture: I’d like to also embrace one more concept that I really like to take note of, which is fashion and the archetypes. This is really the mental approach to fashion.
We have the fashion stereotypes versus the fashion archetypes. The fashion stereotypes are what we have grown up with and lived with. It has functioned as a part of our lifestyle through fashion industry marketing. We see in newspapers, magazines, TV, that fashion is approached a certain way.
The fashion stereotypes are something that we typically jump to conclusions about when we look at a person. I’ll talk about it as a personal example.
I will look at a fashion garment or a wardrobe, or take a person, and see they are wearing athletic clothing. I’m going to call them a jock. The stereotypes are the jock, the homeless, the cheerleader, the hippie. There are all these stereotypical names that when we see a person wearing a specific outfit, we automatically judge them.
It’s a little shallow, and we’re not getting deeper into a person’s approach to fashion.
What I have looked at through my research with Jungian archetypes is that when we look at fashion as archetypes, the hero, the innocent, the adventurer, the magician, when we look at clothes and see a person wearing an athletic outfit, instead of perceiving him as a jock, I will look at his outfit and see him as an adventurer and a hero.
The fashion archetype of athletic wear is the hero and the adventurer versus calling him a jock.
I’m trying to approach it as respecting and honoring human beings more. The fashion industry has not really approached deepening our perspectives of fashion as a communication in this way to the degree that I am speaking about.
We have a lot of quick approaches, quick perspectives in the name of fashion and how we treat fashion. This is from basic psychology, from what we are fed and what we are used to from public perception.
Fashion is not just superficial.
I’ll give you one more example. Say a person dresses like a hippie. A hippie can be very derogatory because it can mean a lot of things, and not everybody wants to be named a hippie.
I do it a lot and still do it, but I figured instead of calling the person a hippie, I can see through the clothing in a deeper way and call them an innocent.
The opposite of a hippie or bohemian clothing is the innocent, the free spirit. I can look at that person and channel what they are trying to archetypically express within their clothing.
Brandi Fleck: Okay, this is amazing because I feel like when you become conscious of all the ways that the things you’re doing in your human life are impacting your health, your wellness, and your existence, it’s amazing and it’s a lot. You can start to see all the connections between everything.
Thank you for those very helpful explanations. Since it was a lot of information, let’s take a little break from the technical aspect of things for a moment and talk about your life.
From Fashion Career to Spiritual Work
Can you tell us your life story and how you arrived at the need for healthy fashion?
Alyssa Couture: Yes. I do have a multi-approach to fashion, and it’s definitely a part of my lifestyle and what I have grown through and developed.
I’ll start when I was a teenager. That’s really when I got involved in fashion. I would draw stick figure fashion illustrations that were totally awful, and I ended up getting good at drawing illustration.
I started with fashion illustration. I started with collaging and taking newspaper and magazine clippings and putting them into a collage. I really wanted to get into design. That was what I wanted to do.
I traveled to San Francisco. I grew up in New Hampshire, and I traveled to San Francisco and went to college at the Academy of Art University for fashion design. I loved every minute of it.
It was a part of my life, and it helped me in many ways, but I also constantly had this feeling that fashion could be more. Fashion could be deeper. Fashion could be perceived and thought of in a lot of different philosophical and creative ways that aren’t typically approached.
That was really my beginning stage in college when I wanted to really see past the superficial of fashion, which in my age when I was a teenager, fashion was a little bit more superficial. I was really obsessed with the design of it and the artistic approach to it, but I also realized that it felt a bit frivolous when I was constantly obsessed with the design and I wasn’t focused on the other elements of fashion.
I was having my own battle with myself, trying to figure out why I loved fashion so much. It had to be more than just aesthetics. It had to be more than just fun and interesting.
Moving down the road, I spent a lot of time in retail. I was assistant managing, supervising, styling, doing a lot of customer service, and being with the customer. I learned a lot about different products.
Because I’ve traveled and moved around a lot, I’ve probably worked at least 12 different retail shops. Every single retail shop had something special about it that I was able to learn from and express myself in.
I worked at a thrift store for a time, and I really got into visual merchandising at that shop. I was at a retail shop in Montmartre, and I got into visual merchandising there as well. I did a lot of styling. I styled hundreds of customers, and I got into the person’s mindset of dressing and styling.
That really helped me figure out the type of product I wanted to create and work on.
After retail, I ended up creating and launching a small handmade fashion brand called Alternative Fashion. It sold into boutiques, online shops, and pop-up shops. It was something that was really a part of my passion and mission.
It also tied in with my eco-fashion blog that I was doing. I was really heavily immersed in eco fashion, fashion for ecology, and into plants like hemp, linen, and some bamboo.
I wasn’t really focused on fashion for human health yet because my product was super ergonomic and modern and minimal. It just ended up being therapeutic and doing those things that I’ve been starting to unravel in my book and work.
Along with my fashion work and career, I’ve developed collection after collection. I’ve been in runway shows. I was an attendant in the Saks Fifth Avenue Talent Search Competition in 2015. That was really exciting.
Brandi Fleck: Awesome.
Alyssa Couture: It was kind of a milestone for me because it showed the taste and caliber of my work. Saks Fifth Avenue is a major department store in America, and they sell a lot of high fashion, ready-to-wear work.
That was a lot of fun. I’m also a fashion show producer. I produced a fashion show in 2014, so that was me being immersed in eco fashion and bringing in speakers who were talking about eco fashion, as well as different collections that were creative and artistic but also focused on recycled and thrifting arts.
On top of all of this, I had a parallel lifestyle living in ashrams and monasteries. When I wasn’t working in fashion, I was living and working at ashrams and monasteries.
Brandi Fleck: Wow, that’s really cool.
Alyssa Couture: Thank you so much. I was doing hospitality quite a bit, and then I was doing cooking quite a bit. I ended up being a kitchen manager at my last monastery that I worked at in West Virginia at Bhavana Society.
That’s where things took a turn and where I started to say, okay, I’m going to write this book. This was back in 2018.
The head monk, Bhante Gunaratana, is a renowned author of many spiritual meditation books. He really inspired me to say, you know what, I’m actually going to put this book into motion.
Back in 2016, when I was working in retail and doing my handmade fashion collection, I said I had to write a book. I had all these thoughts and ideas.
Year after year, and then living and working in these ashrams and monasteries, delving into the spiritual arts, delving into yoga, working on my meditation, trying to be in that energy of spirituality and metaphysics, looking at the unknown and the invisible, and trying to unravel that side of me, which I am heavily immersed in through energy work and planetary energy healing.
That piece put fashion into the realm of health because I wanted to bring fashion into a deeper, more spiritual level, an energetic way, something that we can all relate to because it’s part of our lives.
Being a dabbler of different things and having different interests in herbalism, fashion, creative arts, and being a fine artist as well, I’ve had a couple of published works in fine art.
I visited Mount Shasta, California after I left Bhavana Society, after the monk inspired me to write the book. I went to Mount Shasta and started writing my book.
Mount Shasta is a beautiful energy vortex. The mountain is actually an extinct volcano, and it is one of the most powerful vortexes in California, possibly in the world.
An energy vortex is basically connected to all the energy grid lines around the Earth. This massive vortex is like a hub for universal energy to come through.
When you go to a vortex, you can feel it. The energy is so powerful. This crystalline, pure energy is so powerful you may start having strong emotions.
I remember my first visit to Mount Shasta, I started crying uncontrollably. It was actually tears of joy because it was a release. It was this ultimate knowing.
I had a divine connection through this mountain because it is a channel. Vortexes are a channel to the divine. I believe I was connecting with my higher self and with a greater spirit.
I’m not a religious person, but I definitely connected to the divine and had an awakening.
This was leading me down the path of writing this book and channeling it through my higher self, knowing that this planet is not what it seems. There’s something much deeper going on on planet Earth and in the universe.
A lot of what we go through in this world can bring things to a lower vibration. Day-to-day living can be consuming and feel negative because of destruction, chaos, and war.
But when I visited these vortexes, and I’ve traveled around and visited over a dozen vortexes on the West Coast, probably more, I began to become an energy healer and channel for planetary awakening.
A lot of people are doing this unconsciously. You could be a channel of energy. Most people are.
What we’re doing is trying to activate the consciousness of this planet as energy channelers. Once the energy grid of the planet becomes activated from these vortexes, the whole planet is going to ascend and become more high vibration.
Some of this dark activity is going to deactivate. We’re in a process of awakening and ascension.
This fashion book and my work is about bringing fashion in a supernatural way, activating our consciousness through the power of fashion, and using fashion as a tool to enlighten our beings, to wake us up, and to create a deeper, more sacred connection to our clothing as a force of communication, as a language, and as a creative activity that is artistic and divine.
Brandi Fleck: That’s awesome. I was going to ask you if you could connect fashion for health, how that relates to planetary energy healing, but I think you just did that. Gosh, all that energy vortex stuff is so interesting, and I wish we had time to dive into it more. One thing that you touched on when you were talking in your life story was that there must be more to fashion than just fun and aesthetics, but is there value to just having fun and enjoying the aesthetics of fashion?
Alyssa Couture: Oh yes, absolutely. I’m glad you mentioned this because I do feel that fashion is an art form. It’s fun. Fashion is fun, and it’s truly a healthy escape.
When I watch the ready-to-wear collections and the design line shows all over the world, especially in places like Paris, London, Tokyo, and New York City, these are major hotspots on the planet that have such a high level of creativity in fashion.
These high fashion designers, as much as it can feel a little unapproachable, everything they do trickles down into the mass fashion industry, which is important.
These high fashion design collections and ready-to-wear collections are also a tool. The beauty, the art, and the design, the aesthetic of fashion alone, makes fashion a tool.
When we have this source of inspiration from fashion, we become inspired. It goes beyond inspiration and becomes a spiritual activity through the power of creativity.
I agree with you 100 percent. Fashion in the name of aesthetics is very important. It is not just about beauty, it’s about creativity. The creative aspect of fashion and aesthetics makes it one of the most important reasons why fashion exists.
How to Build a Healthier Wardrobe Without Overspending
Brandi Fleck: Okay, awesome. Let’s get into right now. I feel like a lot of us do have a lot of polyester in our wardrobe, in our closet. It’s everywhere. It would be sort of expensive for us to say, I want to be healthy, I want to be conscious, I want to be mindful. What is your advice for how someone can start consuming healthy fashion without maybe breaking the bank or changing their habits too drastically?
Alyssa Couture: Yes. I will go straight to it. A lot of eco-fashion advocates don’t want to talk about fast fashion, but I do.
Fast fashion is negative, but there is mass fashion. Take Target, for instance. It is fast fashion, but they’re trying to do their part. Some collections there have organic materials, or capsule collections that are more sustainable.
Mass fashion is never going to go away because there is a population of seven billion people.
However, if we reduce our wardrobes into more plant-based pieces, we’ll find we don’t need as much clothing because the pieces will become more meaningful to us. We’ll probably start downsizing our wardrobes little by little.
You can buy a sweatshirt at Target that is cotton and stylish. I’m wearing a sweatshirt from Levi’s that was about forty-five dollars.
You are also creating an investment when you buy more investment-worthy pieces. I don’t cater to specific markets, saying only wear mass fashion or only wear high fashion. I think we can celebrate every market: mass fashion, contemporary fashion, high fashion.
If you have the budget and want to, you can explore those options, but what you really have to focus on is going into the market and picking clothes that are comfortable, that cater to your needs, that are versatile, and more long-term.
You can judge it by how you approach fashion yourself. There will be phases where you buy a lot of clothes and phases where you buy very little. That’s completely personal.
Plants can be more expensive, but we do have to create demand for them because we’re buying so much polyester.
I believe we buy more polyester fabrics and designs because they’re not giving us enough. If we went into a boutique that was 100 percent plant-based, we would see a completely different approach.
You would see a high fashion caliber. When you walk into a high fashion store like Balenciaga or Chanel, you’ll see a minimal selection, maybe fifty pieces.
When we get into that mindset of less selection but higher taste, we’ll begin to understand what plants can give us, and polyester is not giving enough.
There are many different perspectives and ways to approach your question, and I don’t think I can answer it completely.
For one, shop what is meaningful to you. If you buy 100 percent plant-based fashion, you will notice the difference, and you’ll likely wear those pieces more than your polyester garments, unless you find a polyester garment you absolutely love.
Down the road, there will be a demand for plant-based fashion because polyester is a non-renewable resource.
Across industries, things are changing. They’re making vehicles out of hemp. They’re making car tires out of dandelion roots instead of petroleum.
There’s a new direction we’re going on this planet, and being able to cultivate and harness plants is going to feed our soul, feed the economy, and support developing countries. It’s going to do many things.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah, gosh, it really is all related. One more big question for you, and then we’ll get into where our listeners can find your book and your website.
You’ve mentioned a couple of times that this is the direction we’re going, that this is what’s going to happen in the future, but how do we make that happen? How do we shift the industry as consumers?
Alyssa Couture: The fashion industry definitely has to be involved. I think it’s an evolution on this planet ascension, and it’s naturally going to occur to us that we just have to do it, and it’s going to be a natural process. I think instinctively and intuitively we’re going to know, and we’re going to all collectively engage in fashion in a new way.
I think it’s going to start in the fashion industry. There are some sectors in the fashion industry where the health and wellness trend is occurring. It’s not popular, but it’s occurring, and there’s demand.
I do feel that there is an evolution on this planet. I do feel that there is a spiritual ascension, and we’re not going to have to take on a burden and fight for it. There’s not going to be a lot of control issues. It’s going to naturally happen.
I’m an advocate talking about it. I can already see it happening. I’ve done the research. Things are naturally unfolding.
There are experiments in the Philippines creating fabrics out of water hyacinth root stem. Because it’s a wild weed, it’s a perfect way to create a new fabric. The Philippines is going to have their economy flourish more and more when they develop this fabric and harvest the water hyacinth, which is local to them.
That’s just one example of how things are already happening and changing. Our modern approach to advancing fashion is a collective energy and something that’s going to be natural.
I believe it’s going to happen, but of course we do have to make the demand, and we have to try to get involved, learn, and educate ourselves.
Once we activate the consciousness of fashion, then we can become aware of it, understand it, and practice it. If we don’t have that knowledge and awareness, there’s nothing we can really do about it.
I believe having the tools and being able to be a part of it and naturally be interested in it is going to help a lot.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah, I really like the sound of not having to fight for it, just a natural evolution. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you think is important to put out there?
Alyssa Couture: I love your blog, Human Amplified. I think it’s such an important platform for people, and for people like myself who are trying to amplify humanity.
I think it’s a solution in what you’re doing, and I’m really all about it. I’m all for it. I think it’s such a positive way to help yourself and help others.
I wanted to say thank you for creating this platform and this opportunity for people because it’s going to be a promising solution for everybody.
Brandi Fleck: Thank you so much. That’s really encouraging when I get feedback like that, so thank you, and thank you for coming on the show.
How can our listeners find you and your book and your campaign website?
Alyssa Couture: You can find me at my website at Healthy Fashion Campaign. I also have the book Healthy Fashion: The Deeper Truths out now.
It is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, IndieBound, and many bookstores worldwide. You can search Healthy Fashion: The Deeper Truths, and it will be available, probably online, and potentially in a local bookstore near you.
You may have to order it through your bookstore if you go into a local bookstore.
Brandi Fleck: Fantastic. Guys, all of that will be in the show notes, so make sure you hop over there and check out those links. Alyssa, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Alyssa Couture: Thank you so much, Brandi, for having me.
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Hi, I’m the founder of Human Amplified. I’m Brandi Fleck, a recognized communications and interviewing expert, a writer, an artist, and a private practice, certified trauma-informed life coach and Reiki healer. No matter how you interact with me, I help you tell and change your story so you can feel more like yourself. So welcome!
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