How Sarah Ratty has inspired people to embrace eco-fashion

As a child, Sarah Ratty would sit transfixed in the Biba store on Kensington High Street as a procession of slender, beautifully dressed women paraded in and out. More than 40 years later, at this week's UK Fashion Export Awards, all eyes were on Ratty. Her clothing line, Ciel, may be known for chic, wearable designs favoured by celebrities such as Cate Blanchett and Sienna Miller. But it was for spearheading a green clothing revolution that Ciel took home the inaugural Ethical Fashion Award.

Ratty has come a long way since she was thrown out of fashion college in Bristol for truancy. As a child in Brighton she was drawing dresses before she could write the word; her mother, a lecturer at the Brighton College of Art, counted among her students the founder of Biba, Barbara Hulanicki. After college in Bristol ended ignominiously, Ratty headed back to Brighton - and became "eco-aware".

"There was this whole green movement down there which had a major influence on me," she says. "It's where Anita Roddick opened the first Body Shop, and companies like Infinity Foods had been trading there for years."

She took a job with a London designer and, while visiting factories in France, had a revelation. "We were driving past this beautiful river and there was a sign that read 'polluted'," she says. "I asked what it meant, and was told the textile mills were dumping into the river. From then on I decided I couldn't be part of an industry that's polluting our countryside. I had to do things another way."

Ratty began looking for a way to combine her environmental conscience with her love of high fashion in a way that didn't mean hair shirts or tie-dye trousers. In the late 1990s she foundedthe Conscious Earthwear label. One early project involved de-tangling knitted jumpers donated by Oxfam and reworking them into cutting-edge streetwear. The Victoria & Albert Museum bought her collection and included it in their influential 1993 "street style" exhibition, and Conscious Earthwear took off. Ratty's clothes made their way into some of London's most exclusive boutiques. But in 1999, just as she was poised to sign licensing deals in Hong Kong and Italy, it all came to a crashing end.

She was in the back of a car being driven by her boyfriend's brother when the brakes failed and it flipped five times. Ratty was thrown from the vehicle. "It took me about six years to recover," she says. "I broke my back, my leg, an arm, and my shoulder. I had to wear a back brace and was in a wheelchair for two years. It devastated my life." Languishing in a hospital bed, Ratty was forced to close the business. But the lifelong Greenpeace member was undeterred in her mission to make fashion green. "I thought, OK, what can I do now to help the bigger picture?" she says.

Soon the Soil Association signed her up to build awareness of organic cotton. "At the first meeting I turned up wearing my back brace and hobbling on two crutches," she says. "I don't think they could quite believe I was there but I just wanted to do something useful."

It wasn't long before Ratty decided she could achieve a lot more by going back to the drawing board. "I wanted to be the person to make it fashionable to be environmentally friendly and wear ethical clothing," she says. "I thought there was nothing out there that I'd like to wear - I wanted to design clothes for cosmopolitan, busy, funky and fashionable people who may well care about the planet but don't want to sacrifice style for content".

Ciel was born in 2004 and has established a reputation among fashion- and eco-conscious celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic. Zoe Ball is a regular, and Cate Blanchett recently bought a Ciel coat. But behind the label's haute-couture credentials lies a genuine concern about the way the clothes are produced. Ciel uses only non-toxic dyes, and the organic fabric comes from Peruvian alpacas. "We wanted to see if organic standards could be applied there, but we were amazed and delighted to discover that they've been doing it for more than 20 years," she says of Arequipa, a town in the Peruvian highlands where she sources the soft fleece that's ideal for making underwear. "We work with a brilliant mill there," she says. "They collect the fleeces from the farmers and pay them a fair price. They then sort them into colour grades so they don't have to dye them. The farms have set up health care for their workers and the animals roam free."

"Sarah has been at the vanguard of the movement for ethical fashion for more than 20 years, long before it became popular currency for UK retailers," says Paul Alger, director of the UK Fashion Exports trade association. Alger calls Ciel an "example" to the industry. "My worry is there are a lot of retailers who say they are eco-friendly and ethically minded but there's very little evidence as to how true to their words some of these companies are being."

Ratty is optimistic about eco-friendly fashion. She predicts that all our clothes could be ethically sound as soon as 2010, and points to the recent craze for "green" handbags and organic cotton. "When I started all those years ago so many people told me that it couldn't be done. Even I didn't know whether I could achieve it, but I hoped. And now you can walk down a high street and even small companies are adding organic ranges. At last the tide has turned."

The rise and rise of green style

* This season, People Tree became the first UK fashion house to gain both Fairtrade and Soil Association accreditation. Over half its latest collection is made from organic and Fairtrade cotton.

* The high street is becoming more ethical with Oasis, Topshop, Tesco and Marks & Spencer stocking organic and Fairtrade collections.

* 12 of Oasis's flagship stores stock ethical designs, made from 100 per cent organic denim and jersey.

* Topshop stocks a variety of ethically conscious labels, including Hug, People Tree, Gossypium and Made.

* Cotton farming uses only 2.5 per cent of the world's cropping space but accounts for almost 25 per cent of global insecticide use.

* Seven tablespoons of chemicals are used to make one cotton T-shirt.

* Half a million tonnes of clothing is added to British landfill sites per year.

Ciel stocks stockists include London shops Koh Samui (020-7240 4280), The Dispensary (020-7287 8145) and KJ's Laundry (020-7486 7855), as well www.thenaturalstore.com and www.my-wardrobe.com