Clothes to go wild for: the animal park that launched a fashion line

A London fashion show and a Kenyan wildlife sanctuary: can two more different worlds be imagined? but, for the past few days, models have been strutting down the runways of Fashion Week, presenting thousands of pounds' worth of designer clothing to editors who might feature it in their magazines, and wealthy film stars and fashionistas who might invest in a piece or two. Compare this to Kenya, a country struggling with the civil unrest that followed the recent, contested, election, and which has only added to the daily struggle to survive that faces many Kenyans (over half survive on less than £1 each a day).

The idea of bridging the gulf somehow between these dichotomous existences seems difficult, if not a little tasteless, but a new wave of supposedly ethical fashion companies is emerging. These recognise that the vast profits that the retail industry generates can be put to good use. One such company is Wildlife Works UK, which showed its collection of imaginatively tailored dresses, luxurious alpaca and cashmere knits, and graphic prints, all made from a variety of sustainable and organic fabrics, at London's Royal Academy of Arts on Tuesday.

If you think that the name Wildlife Works sounds more like a pet-rescue centre than a high-fashion brand, you wouldn't be too far from the truth. The company was set up in 2002 by an English-Canadian dotcom entrepreneur called Mike Korchinsky. On a visit to Kenya from his home in San Francisco in 1998, Korchinsky drove across the immense plains of the Tsavo East and West National Parks. The parks boast all of the "big five" game animals: elephant, buffalo, black rhinoceros, lion and leopard; as well as more than 500 types of bird and many other fascinating species. The parks are crucial for attracting tourists and money to the region, but are split by the road and railway linking Nairobi and Mombasa, which leaves an 18-mile wide corridor of unmanaged land – a bottleneck for animals and a godsend to poachers.

Somewhat improbably, Korchinsky conceived a way of saving the country's precious and endangered wildlife through fashion. It took a few years of negotiating, but Korchinsky bought 75,000 acres of this land between the two parks, and put his own rangers in the area to clamp down on the illegal hunting. As soon as the animals were in a safer environment, he turned his attentions to the local community and tried to figure out how he could stem the fast flow of migration towards the city. Conservation was one part of the puzzle, and he recruited staff for his new "eco-sanctuary". He also decided to build a factory and train people to make clothes – they would receive a fair wage to stay close to their homes and families. The clothes were cute cotton T-shirts and sweatshirts printed with "save the world"-type slogans and pictures of animals. All the profits would be poured straight back into animal conservation in Kenya. Six years on, and Wildlife Works has around 90 employees. Another 250,000 acres of land have been entrusted to the organisation by the Kenyan Wildlife Service, which has even asked Korchinsky to help train and educate its own staff. For each person the company puts into its garment-factory, another is employed in conservation.

Despite all this evidence of good work, Andrew Smith, the chief executive of Wildlife Works UK, is keen to put the emphasis on the fashion. "We don't want to be seen as tree-huggers," he says. "We're serious business people. This is not a mission-led proposition. It's all about the fashion taking off. We are a fashion brand that responds to the consumer in the developed market. We want to sell into Selfridges and Harvey Nichols and upmarket boutiques, and we want to develop that fashion imagery. That is absolutely critical."

If its sister organisation in the US simply sells clothes, Wildlife Works UK is a serious fashion house, headed by the designer Barry Grainger (if you're going to dump £2,000-plus on a dress, even with the heaviest conscience and best will in the world, you will expect something more impressive than a stretch of organic cotton). The big fashion stores that Smith wants to see his clothes in, however, have not yet taken the bait. He and Grainger bemoan the fact it is still difficult to get buyers even to view ethical collections, as they expect to be shown ranges of hippy-ish smocks.

"It is a constant struggle," says Grainger. "Even though there is a rail of nicely-designed, well-executed, lovely clothes in front of them, all they see are hemp T-shirts. Top buyers tell us their customers are only interested in what the clothes look like, not where they have come from or whether they're ethical. All we ask them is to look at our clothes with an open mind."

Wildlife Works UK has managed to engineer several coveted showings with buyers from "top tier" shops like Liberty, Selfridges and Harvey Nichols, and getting their stock in such stores would give them major European credibility. For the moment their clothes are sold in about 10 boutiques, including the exclusive KJ's Laundry in Marylebone, and have just been picked up by major high street store Urban Outfitters. This is their second year showing at London Fashion Week. They have been to Paris, too, and will dip their toe into Milan this season for the first time. Top-end buyers are traditionally wary of new designers, ethical or not, and like to see a little continuity before taking a gamble on them.

Getting ethical clothing into shop windows isn't the only hard bit. Just finding the materials is a major undertaking. All the cotton Wildlife Works uses is organic; some of their other materials are from sustainable sources, but not necessarily organic – certification can get very tricky when you're talking about alpaca in the Peruvian Andes or hand-reared merino rabbits from Austria.

Smith is a marketing man through and through, who has spent most of his career selling cigarettes and alcohol. Grainger is a graduate of the fashion company Arcadia, that organisation being notable for its refusal to sign up to the Ethical Trading Initiative. Two unlikely suspects perhaps, but they both profess to be long-time fans of wildlife and have thrown themselves behind the job in hand with a passion.

From the other side of the Atlantic, Korchinsky's focus is clearly the wildlife. If the money to sustain it comes from fashion, and that provides jobs in Kenya, so be it. He has pledged another eco-sanctuary for every £5m that the company turns over, in Madagascar. Smith admits the profits are some way off this target, but plans are in place should sales suddenly shoot through the roof.

Korchinsky and Smith are diverting cash that they could be depositing in their own bank accounts towards conservation, but they don't want to be thought of as a charity. "It's very much trade not aid," says Smith. "Africa is such a big hole. You could pour all the money in the world into it and if it's just treated as a charity case, it won't improve."

So what do they take home in lieu of a bonus? Smith recalls an email he received from his production manager in Kenya at the end of last year. "He'd seen at least 1,500 elephants that morning, just on his drive into the sanctuary. We worked out there are about 50,000 elephants on the planet, so he had seen roughly 3 per cent of the world's elephant population, on our sanctuary on one morning. That's a certain moment you can't replicate."

The species in the sanctuary

Wildlife Works' Kenyan "eco-sanctuary" is home to five endangered animal species:

African wild dog

Between 3,000 and 5,500 wild dogs remain in Africa. They have been virtually eradicated from much of their former habitat across West, central and north-east Africa.

Grevy's zebra

Numbers of this creature have declined rapidly from 15,000 in the 1970s to fewer than 3,500 today. Most of the population, which is still hunted for its meat, can be found in northern Kenya.

Cheetah

There are between 9,000 and 13,000 cheetahs left in Africa, distributed across the drier parts of the sub-Saharan region. The trophy-hunting of cheetahs is still permitted in Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

African elephant

These immense mammals are the largest on land and are listed as vulnerable on the World Conservation Union's annual Red List. Numbers are difficult to estimate. They are still widely hunted for meat and ivory.

Lion

Over the past two decades alone the number of African lions has declined by between 30 and 50 per cent. In West Africa the species is severely endangered, with as few as 850 animals counted by a recent survey.