Critical Fashion

Abundant controversy notwithstanding, Covid-19 has had some beneficial consequences, especially in heightening attention to environmental sustainability and social equity, eschewing practices which harm people and nature. This new sensitivity supports critical fashion orientations, combining style with mindfulness of social justice, animal welfare and ecological integrity. Fast fashion is driven by superficial reflex actions which annihilate the buyer’s personality while producing the heaps of rubbish so famous in Chili’s Atacama Desert where an estimated 59,000 tons of fast fashion garments are dumped every year. Legal waste facilities in many parts of the world will not accept the harmful chemical products contained in these products and thus they are disposed of illegally. The devastating consequences of crass consumerism are multiplied all along the value chain. Take the example of cotton whose industrial production requires as much as 22,500 liters of water for a single kilogram of fiber. Massive water and chemical use desertifies vast territories, most famously in the complete evaporation of what was once the fourth largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea of Uzbekistan. Even Europe produces cotton, including Sicily where cotton cultivation was imported by the Arabs in the 9th century. In the 1950s 350,000 hectares of Sicilian arable were given over to cotton, whose cultivation then declined and eventually disappeared in the 1990s.

Cotton cultivation is now being reintroduced to Sicily by a courageous entrepreneur, Manlio Carta.

He aims to have 5,000 hectares devoted to cotton by 2026, supplying raw material to fabric makers that exalt demand for high quality garments entirely grown and produced in Italy.

This is not the intensive water-thirsty cotton variety of years past, but one requiring little water and no chemical treatment. His success bears witness to the new orientation of fashion users, ever more attuned to environmental and inclusionary issues. Fortunately, today it is increasingly fashionable to support producers who strive to reduce the negative outcomes of their activities while enhancing the positive ones. This is seen in Livia Stoianova & Yassen Samouilov spring-summer collection presented at the 2023 Paris fashion week.

The Sunlightpower collection reflects concern for the geopolitical and environmental implications of energy sourcing whose negativities can be attenuated by using diffuse energy supplies, including these energy producing garments of rare beauty. This refined techno couture captures solar energy as well as the piezoelectric power generated by ordinary movements. Their collection expresses the designers’ membership of a critical community which is drawing together ever more fashion users all over the world.

Gregory Overton Smith D.Phil. Oxford Temple University Rome