Once merely a source of unease for humble farmers, concerns about sustainability have trickled up to the world of high fashion with prominent eco-chic lines emerging within the last decade spurring trendy fashionistas to “go green” in their closets as well as in their refrigerators. Seeking to imbue the eco vocabulary with new meaning, FIT’s exhibition Eco-Fashion: Going Green takes a necessary historical step backward to examine the roots of this pervasive cultural phenomenon in order to discern where it may take us in the future. While the title might suggest that the show traces the linear progression of the green movement throughout history, it more so puts the fashion world’s environmental mishaps in conversation with new efforts to undo them. Moreover, it demonstrates how Thorstein Veblen’s cyclical theories of fashion still hold true.
To set the tone, the show opens with this season’s best examples of eco-high fashion. Proving that sustainable fashions don’t necessarily need to be woven from hemp or without an eye for high style, an interesting unbleached, organic wool coat named the Quasar from Bodkin instantly caught my eye. In a dreamy beige, the coat with its lavish drape rivals some of the best fall 2010 runway fashions from designers like Chloé. With the curators’ clever key at hand, I was easily able to decipher the small icon at the top of the placard, which explained that the coat is deemed sustainable because of its ‘material origins’. Well aware that I have come to accept the eco-lexicon at face value, I found myself seeking a more substantial explanation about what these terms (organic, sustainable, etc.) actually mean in terms of fashion. However, the other five themes—‘repurposing and recycling of materials,’ ‘textile dying and production,’ ‘quality of craftsmanship,’ ‘labor practices,’ and ‘treatment of animals’—were much less esoteric, especially when put in dialogue with one another.
As I meandered into the next dark gallery (almost too dark for my liking as I could barely read the exhibition brochure), I was startled to realize that the curators had taken a 100-year tiger’s leap back to the end of the 19th century. In this gallery, there were only a few dresses—largely repurposed examples—that clearly embodied the eco-philosophy; the others appeared to be distressing examples of where exactly the fashion industry had gone wrong. Garments that incorporated rare furs, lizard skins and feathers were, to my surprise, donning the ‘treatment of animals’ label. It wasn’t only until I had reviewed the entire gallery that I realized that the exhibition would be examining the fashion industry’s triumphs as well as its eco-failures and would be using the same labels for both. Again, from my uneducated point of view, I yearned for a bit more explanation from the curators, as some garments seemed to uneasily straddle either category.As I became more at home in the exhibition, I kept on returning to Veblen’s ruminations on conspicuous consumption and the cyclical nature of fashion. With the galleries arranged by period, it became clear that throughout history, the industry’s interest in sustainability has ebbed and flowed with larger cultural trends. For example, while in the 1970s, “saving the planet” was an inescapable catchphrase that was mirrored patchwork hippie garb, the 1980s were an era of extreme luxury and escalating globalization, reflected in the decade’s over-the-top fashions that frequently incorporated rare or unsustainable materials and a heavy-handed use of petroleum-based fabrics. Today, designers are morally obligated to at least consider in passing what mark they might be leaving on the planet; from this urge, some fantastic fashions have been produced, yet I wonder, where will the next decade take us? Is this ‘eco-thing’ really just a trend or will it prove to be sustainable itself?
I myself grapple with this concern as I take issue with the idea of an environmental movement being predicated on consumption itself. We have been convinced that by buying things with the label organic we are somehow saving the planet while the reuse part of the three R’s (reduce-reuse-recycle) is grossly undervalued. One of the most essential themes from the exhibition, I feel, was the notion of ‘quality of craftsmanship’ which was defined by, “the creation of clothing with lasting value, encompassing the benefits of local production.” Yet, in an industry that is, by its vey nature, based on rapid change and consumer desire, is there a place for so-called “lasting” garments? In week two, we considered the idea of the ‘contemporary’ as discussed by Giorgio Agamben in his paper “What is a Contemporary” (2009). In this text, the contemporary was defined as an individual who “entails a certain ‘ease,’ a certain quality of being out-of-phase or out-of-date, in which one’s relevance includes within itself a small of out what lies outside of itself…of being out of fashion” (49). Perhaps best embodied by Henry David Thoreau, contemporariness implies a liberation from the fashion system and a certain complacency in one’s dress. In Walden, Thoreau writes, “no man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes” (22). In the end, I found myself thirsting for a greater probing into the not-so-fashionable world of truly sustainable, timeless, and worn garments in addition to the curators’ successful exploration of technological advancements.
The exhibition’s shortcomings are due largely, in my estimation, to the limited gallery space the curators had to work with. Regardless, the exhibition required a degree mental heavy lifting from myself and its other visitors. With the exhibition’s text oftentimes speaking louder than the simplistic yet undeniably wearable garments on display, Eco-Fashion: Going Green forced me to reevaluate the modes of my own consumptive practices within the contemporary tidal wave of heightened eco-consciousness.
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