Ethical fashion does not necessarily mean goodbye to animal skin and fur. It does mean though that you have to be discriminating in choosing the clothes that you buy to ensure that none of the animal skin and fur used to trim the clothing come from poached animals.

One way you can fuse your love for fashion and exotic sealskin is by buying your clothes directly from Greenland. While there is a ban on the use of sealskin all over Europe, you can shop to your heart’s content for clothes that use sealskin in Greenland without any guilt since the ban does not include Greenlandic sealskin.

Using Greenlandic sealskin is ethically acceptable because none of the seals that provide the skin were killed for the purpose of harvesting the skins itself. The seals are captured and shot in the wild for food, with the harvest of their skin considered only as a secondary reason, after all why waste perfectly good skin?

Two of the rather popular designers in Greenland are the mother and daughter team of Rita and Nickie Isaksen of Isaksen Design. Proud of their heritage, they always manage to incorporate their culture into their designs, not just through their choice of colors, but also with the use of ethically harvested sealskins. Their use of the sealskins is also very smart, using them mostly as accents to make an otherwise plain piece pop. Their Autum/Winter 2011 collection focuses on comfort and functionality using muted grays, blacks, browns, with white and red accents.

Image Courtesy of Isaksen Design Autumn/Winter 2011 Collection