Hello lovely friends. I needn’t tell a style icon like you that we’re into fashion-week season, when the industry places itself under greatest scrutiny and the public’s opinion is most potent. Nowhere is this more evident than in fashion magazines, where the bumper September issue is conventionally the biggest-selling. And yet…
Slow fashion: Over the last few years, though, fashion titles seem to have less and less to say. September has become almost indistinguishable from any other month. Why is this? We’ve heard a lot about declining readership of print media, but not nearly so much about a decline in content. It may be the result of a few things happening. Not only fewer print ads and loss of style attention to the likes of Pinterest, but pressure to be more diverse, more inclusive and maybe more stylistically conservative.
But worse is coming. Compared with food, pharma and the like, the fashion industry is still enjoying an easy ride in terms of scrutiny of its corporate and social responsibilities. But there are many uncomfortable truths about industrialised fashion that are at odds with an awakening public consciousness. Our clothing is probably the biggest source of microplastics, and cheap clothing production carries a high social cost.
Perhaps in anticipation, the industry is already making changes, and not just to be less distinctive. Gucci announced a move to carbon neutrality while Dr Martens’ profits are surging thanks to their vegan range (which of course replaces leather with plastics, but what better way to make baby-steps than in ten-hole cherry reds). Even so, clothing production continues to climb while utilisation falls, trends that needs to reverse if we are to dress ourselves sustainably. 👚
🤤 Superfans: A Love Story. Like never before fans have a powerful relationship with creators. Now that fans can easily make themselves heard, in droves, how does affect the things they love?
🍽 The World Wastes Tons of Food. A Grocery ‘Happy Hour’ Is One Answer: a store in Finland uses aggressive discounting in an effort to cut the third of all food that is wasted.
💿 The technological world of Massive Attack: 21 years after Mezzanine, Robert Del Naja on the intersection of art and technology.
🌍 No deal, no thanks is a Friends of the Earth campaign to drive awareness of the environmental (rather than ideological) costs of British politics’ worst-case scenario.
👵 Like We Care: a beautiful web project arising from a year-long investigation into America’s care system.
🔥 The Fire Age: how humans made fire, and fire made us human. An interesting essay argues that the human discovery of fire, and all that has burned since, defines this era of natural history.
Making sustainability fashionable:Perhaps only for alliterative purposes, this month is also Second-Hand September, a campaign by Oxfam to reduce the impact of fast fashion with help from superstar printmaker Anthony Burrill. The charity has published research into the carbon cost of manufacturing new clothes and, as you might expect, it doesn’t look good. Like the moths that invade my wardrobe, it’s easy to pick holes in the Oxfam campaign. The answer clearly isn’t to ask people to haul their old t-shirts to a gallery to be re-printed, and buy a tote bag while they’re there. But campaigning has needs all of its own.
More promising is Adidas’s efforts to make a single-material running shoe (therefore straightforward to recycle). While the shoes themselves are a tiny contribution to recyclables, the idea of a product made to be remade at least accepts that it is both finite and incumbent on its manufacturer to offer a good option at the end. Similarly, this rapidly-decomposing t-shirt also considers the impact of its obsolescence.
Making well-thought-out products is good, but anything you needn’t manufacture is better still. There’s upwelling interest in pre-owned clothes, egged on by online marketplaces and eBay rivals such as Depop, thredUP, Poshmark, The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective and Grailed. A positive sign but not enough to dent the manufacture of clothing generally. Plus, fashion is fashion: people don’t use Depop because it’s lower-impact any more than they buy Teslas because they care for the environment. ♻️
Finally: Hat-wearing is now a snub to authority: an Economist columnist complains that the most popular hats are also the ugliest. 🧢