Starting Slow
What is Slow Fashion? Roger Tredre deciphers the newest trend to catch the fancy of designers and labels alike.
British fashion designer Christopher Raeburn makes clothes to last from materials that have already enjoyed a previous life or two. He has used cotton from old military uniforms to make bomber jackets, and recycled parachute fabric to make anoraks. There was a time when designers like Raeburn were a niche concern, favoured by ecoactivists and tree huggers. Not any more: Raeburn is red hot on London’s fashion scene. He’s at the heart of Slow Fashion.
From America’s West Coast to Japan, Australia, and a swathe of European countries, the concept of Slow Fashion is catching on fast (now there’s a paradox.) Los Angeles-based designer Lily Ashwell, who designs pretty dresses and dungarees using vintage trims and dead-stock fabrics, sums up the appeal: “I think my customers like knowing every piece has been lovingly crafted and made of limited, hand-selected materials.”
In the beginning, back in the late 1980s, there was Slow Food, a movement created by Italian Carlo Petrini who believed the fast food culture was trampling over his country’s heritage. Slow Food opposed a world dominated by McDonald’s and KFC and championed home-cooking from locally sourced ingredients, lovingly prepared and slowly indulged around a family table. There was something nostalgic about this vision—a romanticised version of the past where mealtimes were associated with communal experience and shared living.
Petrini’s ideas struck a chord with Italians and a wider community, both in Europe and beyond. With surprising energy, Slow Food morphed into a broader movement that promoted a slower pace of life and an appreciation of long-cherished values, as well as finding natural common ground with the sustainability cause and other environmentally focused groups. Its rallying point is the annual Salone del Gusto festival in Turin, Italy, where more
than 2,00,000 visitors and exhibitors gather every October to swap recipes and inspiration, both for the kitchen, and for life in general. When I attended in 2010, the e nt husiasm and friendliness of the scene were palpable.
Slow has since been added to just about every sphere of human activity. There’s Slow Parenting, Slow Gardening, Slow Travel, Slow Art, even Slow Media (Hey, read this slower! Start from the beginning again and savour every word.) As a father of two young children, I like to think I am a major exponent of Slow Parenting, the idea being that we plan less for our children and allow them to develop at their own pace. My wife, however, has other ideas…
And now, it’s fashion’s turn to participate. A new wave of designers, led by the likes of Christopher Raeburn, are arguing that Fast Fashion is unsustainable in a world of limited resources. They say low-priced Fast Fashion should be replaced by higher-priced Slow Fashion that is less driven by trends and hype, and more focused on quality and enduring design values. We need to learn to value clothes on a deeper level, argues UK-based sustainable design consultant Kate Fletcher, who is generally accepted to have first coined the idea of Slow Fashion in 2007.
American journalist Elizabeth L Cline has this year highlighted the iniquities of so-called Fast Fashion in a book with a title that sums up her stance— Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of
Cheap Fashion. Her support for Slow Fashion extends way beyond buying recycled clothing, right through to altering and mending our existing clothes to prolong their wardrobe life. In her vision, we won’t really throw away any clothes: We’ll simply get out the sewing kit and start darning.
Much of this philosophy chimes with long-established Indian approaches to fashion, with an emphasis on bespoke pieces and intricate handiwork, creating clothes that transcend the week’s fashion trend. It could be argued that Slow Fashion has nothing much to teach India; indeed, India might be well placed to play a leading role in this movement. Slow Fashion suits India very well indeed. How curious, then, that fast fashion global retailers are salivating over the prospect of entering the Indian market in the years to come and selling Indians their buy-it, wear-it, dump-it approach.
In truth, it’s a bit simplistic to divide fashion retailers and designers into those who are on the side of Good (Slow Fashion) and those who are Bad (Fast Fashion). For all of us, life is full of muddled grey rather than the stark clarity of black or white. Retailers such as Sweden’s H&M don’t much like the Fast Fashion label and point out that they are thinking Slow too, with H&M recently creating a Conscious Collection of organic cotton-based clothes.
In Europe, the lead for Slow Fashion may have come more from men rather than women. Men, after all, pursue Slow Fashion by instinct. We prefer to buy stuff that lasts. As a young man back in the 1980s, my first designer purchase was a pair of Oliver Sweeney shoes that cost me a fortnight’s salary. However, I wore those shoes for nigh on 10 years, lovingly resoled over and over again. Slow Fashion, indeed.
The current appeal of minimalism in women’s fashion this season is certainly helping Slow Fashion enthusiasts. If you shop cleverly, the minimalist look can be achieved with clothes that can be worn forever. The London department store Selfridges created an in-store concept called Forever Shop back in 2010 in response to the trend, noting that many of their customers were focusing on ‘item-driven shopping’ rather than fashion trends. Maybe, just maybe, the fashion system is on the verge of a revolution.