David Bowie, music and fashion icon, said it in the early 1980s in his piece Fashion: fashion plays with us. It makes us turn left, then right. It asks us to listen to it and then not anymore. It asks us to dance, but only one piece.
In the 1950s, fashion went from being made-to-measure to become the prêt-à-porter of the mass public. Today, this process has culminated in “fast fashion”: a product of excessive consumption that also shows a great disregard for natural resources. The data are overwhelming: according to a recent publication by McKinsey and Company, consumers buy 60% more clothes today than in the year 2000, and we wear them only half the time.
When we buy the latest fashion shirt, we don’t think about its environmental footprint. We don’t care about the thousands of miles traveled, the shirt and its components. Fortunately, this has not gone unnoticed by some. The French government recently announced that it will support a proposed law against fast fashion and that, by April this year, it expects to have the result of a public consultation on how to label each garment, with information on its environmental impact.
Nor did it go unnoticed by actor Joaquin Phoenix, who decided to wear the same tuxedo to all events during the 2020 film awards season, with the aim of reducing waste. 100 points for Phoenix.
In the same line, there are companies that are making efforts to reduce the environmental and social impacts of their products. Levy’s, Adidas and Patagonia, to name a few examples. Here, in Costa Rica, we must recognize the work of small businessmen and women who reuse, make and generate individualized pieces with great character, such as Lalo Clothing or Guayaberi.
I invite you to listen to the latest episode of La telaraña, entitled Moda Sostenible, in which our guests, Irene Jones (designer) and Liliana Abarca (chemist), listen to music, talk about fashion and even dinosaurs, which feed our polyester and nylon fabrics with their remains. Why don’t we print synthetic fabrics with tyrannosaur figures? Maybe then we would remember that it was better to leave them underground. That would be my proposal.