Ethical designer Hamnett enjoys fashionable return

By Deepa Babington

ROME (Reuters Life!) - British designer Katharine Hamnett is relishing a comeback now that the fashion world has finally caught up with her campaigning notions about clothes.

Hamnett stormed off the fashion stage four years ago after her pleas to use organic cotton fell on deaf ears.

But the designer whose oversized T-shirts with slogans like "Choose Life" and "Use a Condom" were all the rage in the 1980s is enjoying a return now that "ethical fashion" is in vogue.

"Years ago when I was talking about this I was a voice in the wilderness and now I have people come up to me and say 'Oh, you were right all along,'" Hamnett said in an interview at Rome fashion week, where she was promoting ethical fashion.

Once a fixture on the London catwalk scene, Hamnett severed her contracts with licensees in 2004 to commit what she calls "commercial suicide" and went back to selling T-shirts when her social and environmental initiatives drew little support.

Today, she is not only enjoying a revival of the slogan t-shirt look -- actress Sarah Jessica Parker wore one in the "Sex & the City" movie -- but also plans to launch an "ethical denim" jeans line that proves ethical doesn't mean frumpy.

"It's got to be fashion first, and then environment," said Hamnett, who created a stir by meeting British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984 in a T-shirt emblazoned with "58 percent don't want Pershing", in a reference to U.S. nuclear missiles.

"Nobody's going to buy clothes out of pity, you're going to buy clothes because you want them, it's something that makes you feel great, it's not anything that's kinda brown and lumpy."