BLOG POST 1
During the first week of the Better Lives project I had the chance to participate to a various number of lectures focused on themes such as sustainability, diversity and social responsibility. The first lecture I have attended is the one which has impressed me the most, in which Julia Crew discussed the topic of Power and how this is related to the world of fashion.
At first glance, I’ve not immediately connected this topic to the Sustainability concept, as while doing my everyday choice I have been underestimating the power of my action towards the subject. However, going further in the discussion I have realized that Power is one of the main characters in the world of fashion. The lecture made me reflect on the concept we have about fashion which most of the times is blurred by a purely positive idea leaving out the dark sides of it. As Vestoj writes in his Issue 4 “On Power”: “Idealistically power should lie in the origins of creativity. Right now, power in fashion boils down to economic power”.
The first correlation we have analyzed in the lecture is the one between Power and Money, if initially the power of fashion was represented by the clothing as a manifestation of cultures and societies, expressed by Royalty, Military uniform and Politics. Nowadays the power is laying on money and its strength is no longer purely visual, and this is due to the change of our society which has become a Capitalist society, where clothing is now seen only as a commercial product. In my point of view this might be the reason of why fashion has changed the way it operates; now fast fashion has become the new productive system consisting in continuous delivery with the will of selling more.
Considering the fashion system, I’ve been thinking of the consequences of this way of operating.
One with the biggest impact on our world is the Overconsumption, where nearly 75% of clothes are left in landfill polluting the environment. Certainly, one of the contributors of this phenomenon was the use of social media which through advertising and fashion bloggers led us to an increasingly irrepressible desire of buying something new.
The use of social media should not only focusing on advertising cloths, instead, social media can give its contribute to the society by becoming a tool to inform and make people aware of the reality of fashion and make people conscious of the consequences of our actions, communication can change the consumer behavior which could became more responsible and sustainable.
Moreover, in order to make this possible it is important that fashion business CEOs should lead and drive a change in the fashion industry. In my opinion one of the solutions could be eliminating the fast fashion system or at least limiting the number of collection and products sold on the market, eliminating the waste of money for fashion shows.
This will lead to manufacture less, increasing the quality, making cloths more durable, and reducing the waste.