Last Wednesday, October 1st, marked the last day of fashion month: a whirlwind of a time in the fashion industry, when the Spring/Summer collections for 2015 were unveiled in New York, London, Milan and Paris. Glamorous, fabulous, stylish, chic – all of these are easy words to grab for when writing about fashion week, but there’s a new kid on the vocabulary block, and it’s ‘sustainable’.
In a hopeful sign that the fast fashion world is finally thinking about more than just the race, ‘ethical’ is gaining traction as a buzzword too. Of course, in such a gigantic industry, these small movements might do little to affect real change. But one thing we can take advantage of, is that fashion is a trend-driven machine; and the ‘cooler’ sustainability gets, the more we’ll see it on runways and shop floors.
So let’s do our part to make it cool. Below we’ve gathered some of the latest sustainable stories from the fashion world: read it, share it, tweet it, and let’s hope we’ll all be wearing it sooner rather than later.
Garment Workers in the Spotlight
London Fashion week kicked off with demonstrations calling on the British Fashion Council to end the silence on garment workers and the human cost behind clothes.
A week earlier, labor activists in New York also took to the streets in remembrance of the Rana Plaza garment factory disaster earlier this year. One of the most striking images from the campaign came from an installation by photojournalist Ismail Ferdous and filmmaker Nathan Fitch, in which the faces of Rana Plaza’s victims were projected onto the exterior of the Lincoln Center.
Stella McCartney’s Green Carpet Challenge
In collaboration with Eco-Age‘s Green Carpet Challenge, British designer Stella McCartney brought sustainability back to London Fashion Week by presenting her new eco capsule collection. The 13-piece collection was made only by using recycled or certified sustainable materials, and are sleek and stylish to boot. According to the designer herself, “I am proud to be expanding the boundaries of what sustainability can look and feel like.”
Also at London Fashion Week, check out the British Fashion Council’s Estethica showcase, which puts the spotlight on young cutting edge designers who are committed to ethics as well as aesthetics.
New York Fashion Week Gets Raw
On September 8th, G-Star held its first ever ‘Ocean Night’ event at NYFW, where the brand unveiled it’s new RAW for the Oceans collection. Curated by Pharell Williams, RAW for the Oceans is “a collaborative project that takes plastic from the world’s oceans and transforms it into innovative denim and apparel”. The presentation included a discussion on how the initiative plans to recycle tons of plastic debris from the oceans. See also our earlier story on this.
More on Monday in Part 2.