Sustainable Fashion & Soft Power

Fashion is often equated with a frenetic and unregulated system of consumption. This is perhaps where the distinction between the terms fashion and clothing is interesting to make. There is a fundamental difference between clothing and fashion, in the sense that we all need to dress up, whereas fashion is based on a desire for continuous novelty, which by definition leads to a kind of planned obsolescence resulting in a frantic and permanent consumption.

The whole fashion system that exists today is crumbling in places, transmuting and reinventing itself. I think we're moving towards some really different things. I see it with the young people I have taught at the Arts Décoratifs or at the French Institute of Fashion. They wonder a lot about these subjects, reject certain things, especially the patterns imposed by the system.

“ In essence, fashion is made to renew itself permanently and generate new desires that resonate with the times. ”

Should We Reject Fast Fashion ?

Why should some people have the right to wear fashion and others not ?

These are quite complex questions that the new generation of designers wants to think about, which was not the case at all ten years ago. If this system exists, it's because, historically, fashion is marked by certain elements that you have to keep in mind. It is marked by this pyramid structure carried by a certain number of creative personalities who, through their lives and their encounters, benefit from a balance between creative intuition and understanding of systems, which has allowed them to rise to the head of major fashion houses or to create their own fashion house.

At the Arts Décoratifs, I had ten students per year, hand-picked. They too have this desire to transform the way they look at the world and society, to translate this look into clothes, which can give rise to a fashion trend. But this is a permanent movement and not an event that happens twice a year. This means that this creation is almost permanent in the system of artistic creation.

Seasonality and Sustainability

Another point that seems simplistic but is very important: we live in an industry that must respond to seasonality. In France, we do not wear the same clothes in winter and in summer. It is natural for us to change our wardrobe all the time. So it is quite complicated to switch to something more sustainable. On the issue of sustainabilitý, there is a very interesting area to look at for our Fashion industries, that of gastronomy, which has undergone many, many changes: we are more careful, we are wary of junk food, we care about our health, we have rediscovered taste, etc. We should accelerate these behavioral changes in the fashion world: spending the same amount of money but differently, buying less frequently but more sustainably, and putting know-how and creativity back at the heart of our approach.