Today due
to the devastating impact of the fashion industry, many high-street brands are
promoting a new ethical and sustainable collection but what about the other
garments that aren’t ethical and sustainable that they produce?
Recently I
have discovered new ethical collections that have been an addition to brands
that have been advertising as a more of a trend than serious campaign to make
the consumers aware of why and how this came about.
I have
noticed that all campaigns about this ethical “trend” are so engaging by the
pure and natural lighting and that sense of warmth – almost as if the garments
are connecting with the earth. The advertising, the layout, the pictures and
the compositions are really a major importance for the social media of today
because Its almost the only way that the message about ethical and
sustainability can be known but that’s all it seems to be (more cosmopolitan
than anything else) but nowhere have I found the reasons why the fashion
industry has suddenly presented this direction for a collection.
If we did
have more of a sense to advertise the situation that fashion industry has
caused to environment then I think consumers would second think about their
favourite brand and what they actually mean as an influence to society.
What does Ethical Fashion mean to me?
I have
always been a very considerate person therefore I think it has made be more
aware of what goes on within the production of garment making. I think because
of the, almost, necessity to have mass-production it has made the headlines a
few times recently because of the lack of respect for the workers and how it is
more about making a profit than having equal fair-trade labour.
For me it
is about taking care of the clothes you wear, appreciating the people who made
them and understanding how your world has blessed with this necessity in
everyday life.
Are Fashion Shows still relevant?
(So what’s the role of the fashion show now? “It’s a spectacle,
and a social-media push,” says Martin Raymond, founder of trend-forecasting
agency The Future Laboratory. “The catwalk show has moved into the arena of
culture and awe. I remember Angela
Arendt’s,
now at Apple – one of the things she said while she was CEO at Burberry was:
‘We are no longer in the business of fashion, we are in the business of
entertainment.’ The idea of spending a million on a West End show is nothing,
spending that on a film is a drop in the ocean, so the notion of spending a
million on a fashion show is relative.”)
Bibliography:
Harris, S. (2014) Show business: Are
fashion shows still relevant? Available at:
https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/show-business
(Accessed: 1 March 2017).
In-line Citation:
(Harris, 2014)
As the status quo of the fashion
shows like London Fashion week, it is a four-week,
biannual tour, from New York to London to Milan to Paris, from location to
location and all for being squashed on benches before being pushed and shoved
back out sometimes almost 10 times a day.
Fashion
shows have become more of an entertainment industry with an estimated value of
£15.1bn e.g. Louis Vuitton and this has influenced the designers to create
collections that might not be create again and more of a visual communicative
statement. The pressure of the shows have signifiatnyl effected the designers
creations making them more akin to couture, with craftsmanship,
precision and fantastical ideas.
Brands
are now choosing the runway as a forum to build their identity for the season
and show something outstanding and inspiring. “Sarah Burton is a prime example: the Alexander McQueen catwalk
collection is purely about image. “Sometimes you can buy one out of her 25
catwalk looks exactly as it appears on the runway, but the other 24 would be
impossible to produce on any kind of scale,” explains O’Shea. “But shows like
McQueen’s are very important in this industry. It’s a dreamland, a fantasy
world – you’re seeing something you have never seen before, and that breeds
excitement. Fashion needs those kind of visionaries to evolve it into the next
phase.”
The fashion shows
create a platform and a hub for designers, bloggers and photographers to meet, swap
ideas and gather a collective on the season. For the designers it can be their only opportunity of communication, especially
those who don’t have other means, such as a string of glossy campaigns.
There are so many difficulties in the Fashion Industry and here I have illustrated a brief list of the situations that occur in every section of the Fashion Industry.
To make an ethical approach to the fashion industry
There are so many ways that we can make this global industry work and give back to our environment. Here I have a list of techniques, strategies, alternative processes and approaches for designing products that have a low environmental impact and positive social purpose:
- Zero waste pattern cutting
- Minimal seam construction
- Upcycling
- Design of disassembly
- Multi-functional
- Design for longevity
- Craft preservation
- Fairtrade
- Human rights
- Unitarian
- Common good approach
- Fairness and justice
