Back in mid-April, in the midst of the pandemic, Vogue decided to set up an online seminar with some of the most important figures of fashion to discuss how the industry will change after Ciovid-19. The seminars, called Vogue Global Conversations, grouped the likes of Olivier Rousteing, Stella McCartney, Marc Jacobs and Natasha Ramsay-Levi. With them there were the editors in chief of different editions of Vogue, such as Emanuele Farneti from Vogue Italia, Edward Enninful from British Vogue and Eugenia de la Torriente from Spanish Vogue who were acting as moderators. With them, the guests talked about how brick and mortar will evolve, how fashion shows and future collections should change and how being creative will differ due to the pandemic. All these conversations were tied together by one common denominator: sustainability.
A few months have passed since the first edition of Vogue Global Conversations and while every guest had many opinions and good intentions, have these high fashion brands actually changed things? Has there truly been a shift or was it just, once more, pure talk followed by little to none action?
It is undeniable that the fashion industry is in need of a long overdue and radical change in the way it operates, especially regarding sustainability. Talks about how fashion is the second most polluting industry in the world after oil and how to change that have been in the news nearly on a daily basis in recent years. But for the most part these discussions about change have just remained that, words floating in the air and haunting runways and ateliers.
During the Vogue Global Conversations the guests mentioned these topics once more. For example, when Emanuele Farneti asked Pierre-Yves Roussel, the CEO of Tory Burch, what the company’s take on slowing down the rhythm of presenting new collections was, Roussel answered that what it all comes down to common sense. “I think we’re losing it [common sense] under certain aspects. Sometimes we put products on sale even before the season starts,” said Rousseland he continued, “I think it would be better to produce the right amount of products instead of having to mark them down only a few weeks after having them out in the stores because they’re not selling fast enough.”
His remarks very much align with the contents of Giorgio Armani’s open letter to WWD published on 3 April, only a few days before Vogue’s seminars. In it, Armani expresses his repulsion towards the current calendar of fashion shows and collections. He points out how “absurd the current state of things is, with the overproduction of garments and a criminal nonalignment between the weather and the commercial season.” To him the only way out is to slow down and bring back the original value of high fashion. In fact, Armani believes that high fashion’s downfall happened when it tried to emulate fast fashion’s rhythm in an attempt to sell more - but luxury cannot be fast. “It makes no sense for one of my jackets or suits to live in the shop for three weeks before becoming obsolete,” writes the Italian designer. “Enough with fashion as pure communication,” he continues, “enough with cruise shows around the world to present mild ideas and entertain with grandiose shows that today seem a bit inappropriate, and even a tad vulgar.” Still, Armani ends on a positive note, asking the industry to work in unison, as change can only happen when working together, and seizing the opportunity that the pandemic has offered us.
About a month after the publication of this letter, Armani released a new calendar for his shows putting his foot down against the frenzied rhythm of fashion. He declared that he would not be presenting his men and women’s shows at Milan fashion week in July but rather in September on his own terms. The same thing he did regarding his haute couture collection. Couture Fashion Week happened this past July in Paris, but Armani decided not to partake in it and instead present his Armani Privé in January 2021 in Milan instead of the French capital as a seasonless collection, therefore presenting garments suitable both for summer and winter. Armani moved quickly to show the world that he really believes in what he preaches and that for him it is time to change things in the fashion industry. However, four months after Vogue Global Conversations, there is no trace of this same willpower coming from Tory Burch. There seem to have been no changes in the way they present their collections nor any statements informing their costumers that the brand is moving into that direction.
On the other hand, Balmain’s creative director Olivier Rousteing has followed up on his claims during the seminars. During the Zoom call he said that to him sustainability is one of the most important topics at the moment, yet he acknowledged that becoming sustainable it’s a long process. “We have already began hiring experts on the subject at Balmain,” said Rousteing. “Sustainability is so important and crucial but at the same time it’s complicated to make an entire collection sustainable because the process is so long. But after quarantine I think we’re all going to be on top of our sustainability game”, continues Rousteing, “And we also have to think about the consumers. If you have to sell a lot of products you can’t make everything sustainable so we will have to reduce the number of items in our collections to make it sustainable.”
Two months after he pronounced these words real changes, although not perfect, arrived. He presented Balmain’s Resort collection on 15 June in a digital showroom exhibiting more than 400 looks for women and 300 for men. While the number of items presented did not truly reflect his claims to reduce the number of clothing in each collection, he did include a capsule collection made up of a selection of Ecocert-certified organic cotton tees, hoodies and sweats. Rousteing also said that the brand put a lot of effort in reducing the carbon footprint during the manufacturing and transportation of the garments. The designer said that great effort was put in every detail. For example, all the ‘extras’ coming with the collection rely on 100% compostable corn-starch plastic bags, as well as recycled polyester labels and hang tags created from recycled strings and paper from the Forest Stewardship Council’s sustainably managed forests. Rousteing stated that at Balmain they believe that these first steps forward are only the beginning of bigger ones to come, letting the consumers and the industry know that the French atelier will continue to move towards a more sustainable approach to creating fashion.
Changing the way that an already established brand operates to make it more sustainable is undeniably complicated. During the first Vogue Global Conversations Zoom seminar Marc Jacobs said to Edward Enninful that he wasn’t even sure he could create a Spring Summer 2021 collection due to the pandemic and the impossibility to get fabrics from the mills in Italy. At the same seminar, in stark contrast to what Jacobs said, sustainable designer Stella McCartney said that to her working during the pandemic didn’t really change anything. “I was listening to Marc speaking before and saying that his production has halted because he can’t get the fabrics form the mills,” said McCartney, “But we have been working in a sustainable way since the begging so we already have all the materials we need because we have to plan and work so many years in advance if we want the crops to work more efficiently and want the materials transported more efficiently too.”
The same line of thinking came from another sustainable designer, Gabriela Hearst, who said that working during a pandemic and lockdown didn’t really have an impact on her due to the fact that she founded her namesake brand on the two pillars of sustainability and long-term view. “I’ve been working for years against another crisis which is the climate crisis. I was already working with the limitation of an environment which is in distress” said the Uruguayan designer. Hearst’s brand, being sustainable, sets itself challenging goals. She spoke about wanting to use at least 80% of non-virgin materials by 2021, which means using materials that are already in existence. At the moment Gabriela Hearst has already managed to use 60% of non-virgin materials in her latest Spring Summer collection.
Using non-virgin materials helps the creation of a circular model within the fashion industry instead of the linear one we are currently using. The linear system leaves economic opportunities untapped, puts pressure on resources, pollutes and degrades the natural environment and its ecosystems, and creates significant negative societal impacts at local, regional, and global scales. This model of working creates two types of waste: industry waste, which refers to the waste that has been generated through the manufacturing process and avoiding the use of non-virgin materials; and post-consumer waste, which are the clothes discarded after having served their purpose.
Many speakers at Vogue Global Conversations pointed out that fighting against the production of waste is the biggest challenge to reach the path towards sustainability and the most important too. For example, Natasha Ramsay-Levi, creative director of Chloé, said that while the house is already dipping its toes in sustainably, fighting the production of waste is something they can’t do alone. “Waste comes from everyone,” said Ramsay-Levi, “Especially if we have to put out new collections every three months that have to have a novelty to them. So even if you make a product which is 100% sustainable it will be thrown away after three months.” She also mentioned her discomfort in knowing that people just won’t accept it when brands re-use fabrics form past collections, which is a “form of resistance to the fight towards sustainability.”
Gabrela Hearst acknowledged too that waste is one of the main issues. “We need to learn to value quality over quantity and how to use the materials with the limitations that we have because we don’t have infinite natural resources,” she said. “But also, we have to balance production and consumption, and this is not only a problem within the fashion industry. For example, one third of food goes to waste and waste is a design flaw because it doesn’t exist in nature.” Stella McCartney also agreed that the industry has to start thinking in a circular way, because “at the end of the day a lot of it is about waste.”
At Stella McCartney everyone thinks following the circular model of fashion. As an example, McCartney said that her atelier works with sustainable viscose but it cuts down around 150 million trees a year to produce it. McCartney took three years to find a forest in Sweden that they could replant after they used it to make viscose. “Clearly this process takes much, much longer,” she explained. McCartney added that even before the pandemic she was thinking of creating a spring collection with all the leftover fabrics that they already had so they wouldn’t have to order anything new. “My mind wants to disrupt the system and that’s just the way you think when you work sustainably,” she explained.
This shows just how easy it is to be sustainable when a brand is founded on this principle and how hard it is to transition a brand like Balmain, which has decades of history on its back, into even trying to be more sustainable. But if talks and seminars about making fashion more sustainable have not brought about enough changes by now, what is the industry waiting for? The perfect opportunity presented itself with Covid-19 giving brands and CEOs even more time to think and act. Still, only a few guest speakers of Vogue Global Conversations actually tried to make this change happen within their brands. What about the others? What will Tory Burch or La Rinascente do? Perhaps it is time for these brands to sit down and talk to Gabrela Hearst and Stella McCartney, who combined have 24 years of experience in the sustainable field, and take notes on how to have a successful, sustainable, luxury brand.
Komentáře