Welcome to City Totes

A slow fashion company offering handmade small batch production & limited edition collections.

City Totes is committed to designing with unused textiles that are designer leftovers, remnants & deadstock. This practice diverts these materials from the landfill to address the fashion industry's impact on the climate crisis.

Vivienne Westwood said it best: ‘Buy less, choose well, make it last.’

  • Small Batch Production

    Small Batch Production is distinguished by quality, locally sourced & manufactured items that are produced on a smaller scale with slower production time. It also includes spending more time on the design process, ensuring that each piece is quality made.

  • Why Slow Fashion?

    The Slow Fashion movement encourages a variety of sustainable practices, including environmental consideration to water usage, waste & landfill diversion. The principles of slow fashion include: sustainable materials, fewer collections, fair trade, minimizing waste, making great use of resources and transparency.

  • Locally Sourced

    The Greater Philadelphia area's textile recycling movement is having a renaissance. The goal is shifting the local textile system into a circular one that seeks to eliminte waste, keeps textiles in use for longer periods & redesigns end-of-life materials into new, usable items. 

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At City Totes we are passionate about the fashion industry's impact on the climate crisis and creating solutions.

The fashion industry is one of the biggest contributors to the climate crisis. Due to fast fashion the industry accounts for nearly 10% of global CO2 emissions and consumes around 80 billion cubic meters of water (equal to 32 million Olympic-size swimming pools.) Only 15% of discarded textiles are recycled while the rest to end up in landfills.

Here is a Forbes article on Slow Fashion to learn more.