Revolutionize textiles with ecology
F.or an industry so dedicated to the concept of beauty that fashion has an ugly underbelly. It's not the "world's second largest polluter," a claim that still circulates despite being eliminated in a 2018 New York Times article. But between the production of environmentally harmful substances, the 21 billion tons of textiles that overwhelm the landfill every year, and the CO2 emissions in the bloated calendar of Fashion Week (buyers and designers alone caused 241,000 tons of CO2 emissions at the four major Fashion Weeks in 2019 ) it's no surprise that the industry is at odds with the environment.
However, brands and organizations have started to respond with concrete steps. Last year the British Fashion Council launched the Institute for Positive Fashion to help eco-friendly businesses succeed. This May, Gucci was the youngest in a line of fashion houses to ditch the Fashion Week carousel and instead go seasonless – a move made easier by Creative Director Alessandro Michele's fluent approach to gender in his shows, where he tends to be disregards the gap between men's and women's collections. "Our reckless actions have burned the house we live in," wrote Michele at the time. “We saw ourselves as separate from nature, we felt torn and all-powerful. We have usurped nature, dominated and wounded it. "
Above and above: textiles that have been dyed with Streptomyces coelicolor, a soil organism that naturally produces pigments. Images © Immatters Studio
While other brands have been doing this for a while, Gucci, which had sales of more than 9.6 billion euros last year, is without a doubt one of the biggest to have done so.
Of course, building a less destructive fashion industry isn't just about producing fewer collections and shows. A growing number of innovators are looking for ways to change the ways of production as well. Among them is Natsai Audrey Chieza, who founded Faber Futures in 2018, an award-winning laboratory and studio dedicated to harnessing the intrinsic power of biological systems to rethink materials and production systems.