Response to Li Edelkoort, Li. Anti-Fashion: A Manifesto for the Next Decade：
In the video Anti-Fashion: A Manifesto for the Next Decade, Li Edelkoort claims that “Fashion is old-fashioned” and makes her Anti-Fashion declaration. After watching the video, I think the core of Anti-fashion can be called as creative fashion, not following the trend. Edelkoort summarizes the reasons why the fashion system was broken. They can be roughly classified into six categories. There is one I specifically want to talk about – the designer is reusing the ideas from the past.
Some designers make clothes for making clothes, and they are only looking for cool and unique visual effects (to please the group of people who don’t want to understand the cultural ties behind fashion which has a large amount), but they don’t care about changing and developing their design according to the changes around them. Even if there is a change, it is only a change in the sales and display mode of the clothing. “With this lack of conceptual innovation, the world is losing the idea of fashion,” Edelkoort says. Things happen around us, I always see fashion design brands in the name of “tribute” or “retro” continue to use the former designers’ designs. This is the most “in sheep’s clothing” style “fashion” – change the face but not the heart. But what makes me speechless is that these products are still hot sought after by large amounts of consumers. On the surface, what we see is that the brand still probably earns a bucket of money through these ways. However, there’s always an end for “retro”, leftovers cannot be fresh again no matter how you cook it. Then, what is the way out for fashion?
Nowadays, fashion almost equals as business, especially in the social environment where consumerism is paramount. To my opinion, I think the most important thing for the designers is to find out their own design style and stick to it. Don’t get lost in the flow of trends. If they want the consumers to pay attention to the culture value behind the products, they have to give them value first.
Response to Kate Fletcher “Slow Fashion: An Invitation for Systems Change” ：
After watching the speech by Li Edelkoort, reading Kate Fletcher’s article helps me gain a better understanding of why we should talk about sustainability with fashion. When Fletcher talked about fast fashion, she mentions that it is a kind of behavior that the companies respond quickly to “fashion” and then pushes the products to consumers. The ultimate goal of that is to increase sales profits. Slow fashion is a more rational and lasting fashion, emphasizing the eternal and individual style, and it is hard to copy. Its connection with business is as direct and profound as fast fashion.
I think that we can’t say fast fashion has no style. As far as I know, some e-commerce companies in the Chinese market not only have fast-paced production, but also maintain a good level of design, it can still make consumers “slow down” to some extent. But it is undeniable that most of the fast consumption has an important feature – cheap. Cheap helps to reduce the cost of people’s impulse consumption, blind waste. While impulsive consumption is an innate habit that many people can’t get rid of, cheap stuffs just make them enter a Buy-throw-buy loop.
I think that neither fast fashion nor slow fashion can be entirely praised or denied. They each have their own principles and reasons to exist. For example, H&M and Stutterheim are both from Sweden, the former is a representative of fast fashion, selling cheap clothes in their own created high-end fashion atmosphere to satisfy consumers’ pursuit of “latest” psychological needs. Although the raincoat made by Stutterheim is expensive, it is said to be a raincoat that can be worn for a lifetime. It is also one of the representatives of persistent fashion. To sum up, I think the relationship between fast fashion and slow fashion is like the relationship between people’s desires and needs. Neither of them should be gotten rid of. Instead we need to find a balance between them.