Image inspiration - Salvador Dali - link
Milan Fashion Week is upon us again. For several glorious days, beautiful people sit beside a runway looking thoughtfully at clothes that in almost any other circumstances would result in somebody quietly asking whether you'd dressed in the dark. This is fashion.
Normal rules don't apply. A jacket is no longer a jacket, it's a statement. Trousers cease being trousers and become an exploration of form and if somebody walks onto a catwalk wearing what appears to be a dismantled camping chair, half a duvet and a pair of safety goggles, nobody shouts: “oi mate, you've got your trousers caught in the gazebo', instead, fifty photographers start taking pictures.
Looking at some of the creations appearing around Milan this week, i've reached the conclusion that fashion designers and waste managers have more in common than either profession would care to admit. We both spend an enormous amount of time looking at things and wondering what on earth it's made of? The difference is that the fashion industry then charges £4,800 for it whilst the waste industry charges £59.50 for the consignment note.
However, there is something wonderful happening behind all this theatrical nonsense, because while Milan is busy deciding which entirely serviceable items of clothing we should consider hopelessly unfashionable by next Thursday, another part of Italy has spent decades becoming extraordinarily good at dealing with the crap they made last year. Welcome to Prato.
Prato, in Tuscany is one of Europe's great textile districts and has a long history of taking unwanted textiles, sorting them, pulling them apart and turning them back into useful fibre. In other words, while Milan is busy inventing clothes nobody knew they needed, Prato has developed an industry dedicated to dealing with clothes people have discovered they really didn't.
The Circular Economy
This is the circular economy, or, as previous generations occasionally called it, not chucking perfectly useful stuff away because you're a fashion victim. The concept is simple - old clothing arrives, sorted, buttons, zips and other unwanted components are removed then the textile can be mechanically broken back down into fibre, blended and potentially made into new material. There's nothing particularly glamorous about textile recycling; no photographers; no champagne; no celebrity sitting in the front row unable to see anything because they're wearing sunglasses indoors. Just machinery, people who understand textiles and an inconvenient appreciation of physics, and therein lies one of the fashion industry's little problems. Fashion exists because fashion changes - deliberately - routinely - rapidly.
If everybody bought six decent shirts, two pairs of trousers, a coat and a jumper and then wore them until they fell apart, Milan Fashion Week would become a very short event indeed. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen; jumpers are practical and perfectly adequate, see you next year".
The entire fashion machine depends upon newness - new season - new colours - new silhouettes - new fabrics - new collections - new reasons why the thing you bought eighteen months ago now apparently identifies you as an out of date loser, and at the luxury end of the market, the results can become magnificently absurd.
Human beings have been making clothing for thousands of years, but the fashion industry continues to behave as though nobody has quite cracked the problem. Sleeves are questioned - why should they have to be where your arms are? Shoulders expand. Trousers widen until the wearer resembles a yacht under full sail. Then trousers contract until bending over becomes an insurance issue. Occasionally somebody removes half the garment entirely and the price goes up four fold. This, allegedly is innovation.
Meanwhile the environmental consequences of clothing have become considerably harder to ignore. Manufacturing fabric consumes raw materials, energy and water. Clothes are transported enormous distances. Synthetic fibres introduce plastics into the equation. Blended materials can be difficult to recycle and ultimately an enormous quantity of clothing reaches the point where its owner decides they wouldn't be seen dead in it which is unfortunate, because only seventeen months earlier they couldn't be seen dead without it.
Italy already possesses something environmental policy frequently talks about but rather less frequently achieves: an established industrial ecosystem capable of collecting, sorting, processing and manufacturing textiles. Prato has been doing versions of this for generations. Modern technology is now being added to the process - optical sorting, fibre identification and increasingly sophisticated methods of separating materials. The ambition is textile-to-textile recycling; a jumper becomes fibre; the fibre becomes textile; the textile becomes a three armed jumper; the fashion industry photographs it; some mug buys it, then six months later somebody decides three sleeves is so yesterday and the whole thing begins again. This may sound cynical, but there's an important distinction. Recycling is extremely useful, reuse is better, but neither entirely addresses the question whether we're simply making too much stuff? This is where environmental discussions about fashion sometimes become wonderfully complicated.
92 Million Tonnes Of Textile Waste Per Annum
A company may proudly announce that a garment contains recycled material but if we manufacture three billion environmentally improved garments that nobody particularly needed, we've merely created a more sustainable route to having too many clothes; rather like manufacturing biodegradable leaflets explaining the environmental benefits of not printing leaflets. There's also a temptation to confuse the catwalk with the real problem. The bizarre outfits appearing in Milan aren't going to bury Europe beneath discarded twelve-foot feathered hats - catwalk fashion is theatre. The real volumes come from ordinary clothing, mass production, fast fashion, short product cycles, overstock and a culture in which clothes can sometimes be astonishingly cheap and that's where the recycling challenge becomes industrial rather than amusing which brings us back to Prato.
The most interesting thing about textile recycling is that many of its central ideas aren't new at all. Our grandparents reused clothes, clothing was repaired - fabric had value. Buttons were removed, material was saved and garments were handed down, no sustainability consultant standing nearby holding a reusable bamboo clipboard, things simply weren't thrown away if they remained useful.
Modern textile recycling is obviously more complicated, particularly with synthetic fibres and blends but the philosophy is surprisingly old-fashioned.
This is the circular economy, or, as previous generations occasionally called it, not chucking perfectly useful stuff away because you're a fashion victim. The concept is simple - old clothing arrives, sorted, buttons, zips and other unwanted components are removed then the textile can be mechanically broken back down into fibre, blended and potentially made into new material. There's nothing particularly glamorous about textile recycling; no photographers; no champagne; no celebrity sitting in the front row unable to see anything because they're wearing sunglasses indoors. Just machinery, people who understand textiles and an inconvenient appreciation of physics, and therein lies one of the fashion industry's little problems. Fashion exists because fashion changes - deliberately - routinely - rapidly.
If everybody bought six decent shirts, two pairs of trousers, a coat and a jumper and then wore them until they fell apart, Milan Fashion Week would become a very short event indeed. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen; jumpers are practical and perfectly adequate, see you next year".
The entire fashion machine depends upon newness - new season - new colours - new silhouettes - new fabrics - new collections - new reasons why the thing you bought eighteen months ago now apparently identifies you as an out of date loser, and at the luxury end of the market, the results can become magnificently absurd.
Human beings have been making clothing for thousands of years, but the fashion industry continues to behave as though nobody has quite cracked the problem. Sleeves are questioned - why should they have to be where your arms are? Shoulders expand. Trousers widen until the wearer resembles a yacht under full sail. Then trousers contract until bending over becomes an insurance issue. Occasionally somebody removes half the garment entirely and the price goes up four fold. This, allegedly is innovation.
Meanwhile the environmental consequences of clothing have become considerably harder to ignore. Manufacturing fabric consumes raw materials, energy and water. Clothes are transported enormous distances. Synthetic fibres introduce plastics into the equation. Blended materials can be difficult to recycle and ultimately an enormous quantity of clothing reaches the point where its owner decides they wouldn't be seen dead in it which is unfortunate, because only seventeen months earlier they couldn't be seen dead without it.
Italy already possesses something environmental policy frequently talks about but rather less frequently achieves: an established industrial ecosystem capable of collecting, sorting, processing and manufacturing textiles. Prato has been doing versions of this for generations. Modern technology is now being added to the process - optical sorting, fibre identification and increasingly sophisticated methods of separating materials. The ambition is textile-to-textile recycling; a jumper becomes fibre; the fibre becomes textile; the textile becomes a three armed jumper; the fashion industry photographs it; some mug buys it, then six months later somebody decides three sleeves is so yesterday and the whole thing begins again. This may sound cynical, but there's an important distinction. Recycling is extremely useful, reuse is better, but neither entirely addresses the question whether we're simply making too much stuff? This is where environmental discussions about fashion sometimes become wonderfully complicated.
92 Million Tonnes Of Textile Waste Per Annum
A company may proudly announce that a garment contains recycled material but if we manufacture three billion environmentally improved garments that nobody particularly needed, we've merely created a more sustainable route to having too many clothes; rather like manufacturing biodegradable leaflets explaining the environmental benefits of not printing leaflets. There's also a temptation to confuse the catwalk with the real problem. The bizarre outfits appearing in Milan aren't going to bury Europe beneath discarded twelve-foot feathered hats - catwalk fashion is theatre. The real volumes come from ordinary clothing, mass production, fast fashion, short product cycles, overstock and a culture in which clothes can sometimes be astonishingly cheap and that's where the recycling challenge becomes industrial rather than amusing which brings us back to Prato.
The most interesting thing about textile recycling is that many of its central ideas aren't new at all. Our grandparents reused clothes, clothing was repaired - fabric had value. Buttons were removed, material was saved and garments were handed down, no sustainability consultant standing nearby holding a reusable bamboo clipboard, things simply weren't thrown away if they remained useful.
Modern textile recycling is obviously more complicated, particularly with synthetic fibres and blends but the philosophy is surprisingly old-fashioned.
- Value materials.
- Recover materials.
- Make things last.
- Stop pretending recycling gives us unlimited permission to manufacture disposable rubbish.
So perhaps Milan and Prato represent two halves of the same extraordinary Italian textile story. Where Milan asks what should we wear next, Prato asks what are we going to do with everything you told us to wear last year? One attracts models, celebrities, designers and photographers, the other attracts tonnes of old clothing.
If the current collections in Milan are anything to go by, the distance between the catwalk and the textile recycling centre may occasionally be considerably shorter than anticipated. More like this - (Prato) - link - more like this (textile recycling) - link - more like this (Milan) - link - note like this (Italy) - link - more like this (fashion/PPWR) - link
If the current collections in Milan are anything to go by, the distance between the catwalk and the textile recycling centre may occasionally be considerably shorter than anticipated. More like this - (Prato) - link - more like this (textile recycling) - link - more like this (Milan) - link - note like this (Italy) - link - more like this (fashion/PPWR) - link
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