FASHION Consuming Fashion Consciously and With Joy

Interview with designer Gráinne Binns

WORDS by Margot Guilhot Delsoldato

The growing awareness about the huge human and environmental cost of fast fashion as well as the current emphasis on sustainability have led many to reflect on how, and how much, they consume when it comes to clothing. Many young people who can have ditched fast fashion altogether, others try and avoid it as much as possible. All of this has been made easier by platforms such as Depop or Vinted, resale apps where you can find unique gems at extremely discounted prices. The lucrative opportunities of these apps, and new trends that have proliferated on social media, however, have created a new kind of consumerism that is not only unsustainable but detrimental to personal style.

Due to recent social media trends, fashion has grown to resemble a process of identification. There seems to be a popular understanding of fashion as a signifier of what group or subculture you belong to, what kind of media you consume, what music you listen to; but also how educated you are, how much money you have, and what your political orientation is. Especially on TikTok, where every viral trend is pushing to reach new levels of micro-individuality, insanely niche aesthetics are invented every single day, some so specific (and short-lived) as to become unintelligible to anyone who isn’t on the app. Whether it’s ‘old money / quiet luxury’, or ‘coquette’, or even ‘tomato girl’ (I don’t know what that means either), it’s actually stripping personal style of that individuality these trends so fervently claim.

This, in turn, makes it extremely easy for Depop resellers to justify charging 42 euro for an old Brandy Melville top, just as long as its name is preceded by “insert social or aesthetic ideal here –core”. The consequences of this are that even on these (usually affordable) apps, thrifting is no longer as accessible to people with less disposable income, and rather than being a fun and creatively inspiring activity, finding your personal style has become another step in the endless process of categorization characteristic of the current social climate. I think fashion is so much more than that, and I think we as consumers have the nuance to shop in a better way – both environment-wise and in better spirit. I talked to Gráinne Binns, the founder of the independent festival-wear brand Subtle Poison, known for its bright colours and trippy prints, manufactured in Europe with sustainable fabrics. I asked about her relationship to trends as a fashion designer, wanting to know whether they were stifling inspiration on the creative side of things.

“I think you do have to take trends into consideration to some extent – but I try not to” she said. “When I’m designing I sometimes go back in time, I look at shows from the 90s or 60s, and because trends loop this has worked to my advantage”. Gráinne recalled being asked whether the pink disco-inspired garments she had designed three years prior and was selling at a pop-up store were for the Barbie movie. “But otherwise I’ve always wanted to do the opposite of what everyone else was doing with their clothes. I started shopping in charity shops around 15 years ago, when it was still considered kind of icky; I take the same approach as a designer: I try not to look at what others are doing”. “If I followed trends”, she remarked, “I’d probably have no colour”.

When I asked Gráinne about what inspires her to create a brand-new collection, what came up was an experience-based creative process that is very intuitive and centred around feeling, in a way that is totally disinterested in matching what the mainstream fashion industry has to offer at a given time. “What I have upcoming is based on the sunset, drawing inspiration from being home during lockdown and only being able to meet then. I just had loads of photographs of sunsets on my phone and thought they needed to be turned into something. (…) I draw a lot from my surroundings. The first print I ever did – I wanted it to scream fun, I had just started roller-skating again and I wanted to express how I felt when I did it, even if it was just in my kitchen during lockdown – so when it’s not from the outside it’s from a feeling”. When I expressed my appreciation for the wholesome nature of her artistic process, she added: “It’s interesting because looking at last year, I was feeling really disconnected from my work and I pulled from trends more than usual, and a lot of the stuff I released then didn’t do as well”. images courtesy of subtlepoison.com

Gráinne finds that we’ve shifted to a place where it’s no longer just about the clothes, it’s about the story, and the lifestyle, and the sense of community that comes with the clothes. “This is what was missing for me last year”. The ethos of Subtle Poison is independence, freedom, and adventure – which is why Gráinne also runs community events featuring beach yoga, meditation, and sea swims. “This lifestyle I live (roller-skating, surfing, traveling, going to festivals), it’s brought me so much peace and fun and I want other people to experience it”. “I had a business mentor at the start of the year”, she told me, “after I came home from Bali, absolutely broke, and I was like ‘yeah, I’m not sure it was the best business move but I just needed to go and be twenty-five for a while’, and they said that it was the best business move I could have ever made. ‘Your brand is about freedom and fun, and running away to Bali is exactly that’”.

“I realized it wasn’t easy to find clothes that would allow me to enjoy all of my passions” Gráinne says in a video where she explains how Subtle Poison came to be. We often hear the phrase “you’re not made to fit clothes, clothes are made to fit you”, and I think it extends beyond discussions of just size inclusivity. Seeing fashion as the extension of a lifestyle that makes us feel happy is endlessly more fulfilling than it being a function of categories that don’t fit us, and this counts for consumers and designers alike.