Spring is the season of fashion weeks and our yearning buttons being pressed. Floral dresses are out, the fashion industry says. Slouchy suits are in. I find it hard to celebrate this wash-rinse-repeat cycling of trends without picturing this season’s “must-haves” atop smoldering landfills in developing countries in a few months’ time.
This year, another horrible shadow casts itself over the glamour of the catwalks. April 24th marks a decade since Rana Plaza, the fourth largest industrial accident in history, happened. The collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh Rana Plaza exposed the human cost of fast fashion. Eleven hundred people died in the disaster, and 2,500 people were injured.
So, I’m much more drawn to Fashion Revolution Week, which starts next weekend. Part of a global Fashion Revolution movement, of people who “love fashion, but we don’t want our clothes to exploit people or destroy our planet”. The Irish website offers the tools for you to go all in and host an event like a clothes swap or repair cafe, or just join in the social media promotion of the Fashion Revolution manifesto. But what if you’re tentatively putting away winter layers and thinking about new things for summer? Can we have our fashion cake and eat it, helping to create as Fashion Revolution Ireland puts it, a “safe, clean and transparent fashion industry”?
If you’ve no idea where to start with this challenge, Kit Christina Keawwantha and Malú Colorín of Fibreshed Ireland can help. They will be hosting a series of free online tutorials and events to promote the Fashion Revolution manifesto, explaining the array of problems with our current fashion system and some of the ways we can fix them. The answer lies not just in consumers buying differently, but also in manufacturers putting a regenerative agriculture model back into the heart of how we dress. This is a project with deep roots that could create a fashion model that does good for people and the planet.
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Throughout the month of April, we are promoting a ‘nothing-new’ approach to clothes, wherein we support the idea that we can make, do and mend rather than buy new items with dubious environmental and socio-economic impacts
— Kit Christina Keawwantha
In the meantime, for Fashion Revolution Week, the Fibreshed Ireland free workshop series will be a brilliant way to learn mending and upcycling skills.
“Throughout the month of April, we are promoting a ‘nothing-new’ approach to clothes, wherein we support the idea that we can make, do and mend rather than buy new items with dubious environmental and socio-economic impacts,” Kit explains.
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The tutorials will include darning, patching, creative felting and natural dying. At the end, they are planning an online social media “fashion show” where people can showcase some clothes or an outfit which they have upcycled or mended. A community-building fashion show which does good and teaches new skills? Sounds to me like the new black.
