The climate activist says that the last piece of new clothing she bought was three years ago
Climate activist Greta Thunberg has used an interview with a top style and culture magazine to call out fast fashion companies for “greenwashing”.
In an Instagram post to accompany her appearance on the cover of the first issue of Vogue Scandinavia, Thunberg spoke out about the contradiction between mass produced fashion and sustainability.
Continue reading...He’s DJ’d naked, put a great dane on the catwalk – and now with an album, Shayne Oliver is on a mission to bring New York’s queer underground to the world. Is the former Hood by Air designer the 21st century Andy Warhol?
Interviewing Shayne Oliver is a conversational rollercoaster. We hurtle from cult 90s guitar bands to Arthur Jafa, from the problem with political correctness to the pressure on creatives, from Kanye West to Vin Diesel, with little warning of which thrill or spill is next. “I’m such a scatterbrain,” he says at the end of our call. “I’m sorry.”
But Oliver is far from a scatterbrain. He is best known as a fashion designer, the former vogue-dancer who founded the critically adored label Hood By Air, or HBA, in 2006. However, he is no longer limiting himself to clothes. Oliver is moving into music, having formed Anonymous Club – a “creative studio” focused on young talent that began as a series of parties. The studio’s debut release is Screensavers Vol 1, a compilation album based on Oliver’s demos, executive produced by Yves Tumor.
Continue reading...Covid pandemic has accelerated shift to online purchases, with big brands buying up startups
The department store beauty hall is facing a fight for survival: the pandemic has accelerated the shift to buying cosmetics, skincare and other pampering products online, and a growing number of sales are now via a smartphone rather than over the counter.
Manicured sales assistants, testing pots and makeovers are being replaced by powerful influencers and digital beauty halls that can switch up the products on offer at the tweak of an algorithm.
Continue reading...Hundreds of thousands flock to cities as government allows manufacturers to reopen, with exporters citing fears Western brands would divert orders
Hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi garment workers have returned to major cities, besieging train and bus stations after the government said export factories could reopen despite the deadly coronavirus wave.
Authorities had ordered factories, offices, transport and shops to close from 23 July to 5 August and confined people to their homes for a week, as coronavirus infections and deaths hit record levels.
Continue reading...Sales of clothes and accessories featuring mushrooms, snails, frogs and worms are booming, but why now?
Mushrooms, toads and moss might not be the most celebrated of nature’s creations, but thanks to goblincore, an aesthetic that is blossoming online as well as in forests, the danker, gnarlier side of nature is enjoying a moment in the sun.
According to the TikTok user @froggiecrocs, AKA Parker, who has more than 90,000 followers who tune in for his goblincore content, it “romanticizes the ugly, lesser appreciated parts of the natural world”. Its trappings include animal skulls and earthworms and its influences range from David Bowie in Labyrinth to the Twilight Saga. According to the trends expert Sabrina Faramarzi, it is about “chaos, dirt and mud”.
Continue reading...To find out the true production cost of a garment is a tortuous process. Here is what you need to know to buy clothes with a clear conscience
What is the true cost of a Zara hoodie? In April 2019, David Hachfeld of the Swiss NGO Public Eye, along with a team of researchers and the Clean Clothes Campaign, attempted to find out. They chose to analyse a black, oversized top from Zara’s flagship Join Life sustainability line, which was printed with lyrics made famous by Aretha Franklin: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T: find out what it means to me”. It was an apt choice, because the idea was to work out whether any respect had been paid to the workers involved in the garment’s production, and how much of the hoodie’s average retail price, €26.66 (£22.70), went into their pockets.
This was no simple assignment. It took several people six months, involved badgering Zara’s parent company, Inditex, over email, slowly getting limited information in return, and interviewing dozens of sources on the ground in Izmir, Turkey, where the garment was made. The researchers analysed financial results and trading data, and consulted with experts in pricing and production. It was, Hachfeld says on the phone, with dry understatement, “quite a huge project”.
Continue reading...He has dressed Beyoncé and Lady Gaga – and now he’s dressed Birmingham. As his ‘infinity pattern’ is unveiled, the artist talks poverty, class – and why he’s not interested in being a ‘good immigrant’
Approaching Birmingham New Street station on the train, you’ll normally spot the scaly curves of Selfridges’ landmark Future Systems-designed building nestling in the cityscape. But right now, rising into the summer sky in its place, is a bright pink and black structure. Startling, cheering and entirely unmissable, Infinity Pattern 1 is a giant installation by the multidisciplinary artist Osman Yousefzada. He was formerly best known as a fashion designer, whose beautifully tailored and elegantly architectural pieces have been worn by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. Now the 44-year-old has tailored a distinctive look for the Selfridges store, said to be the height of three jumbo jets, surrounding the building during a year of restoration.
Infinity Pattern 1 is Yousefzada’s first piece of public art, selected by Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery from an international shortlist. “You can read it clearly from a long way away and that was something we considered when we were selecting,” says Jonathan Watkins, Ikon’s director. “We wanted it to ring out from afar. The fact that Osman comes from Birmingham, but is so cosmopolitan and such a Renaissance man, it’s wonderful that he was the one who won.”
Continue reading...The perfume was specially commissioned by organisers of the annual Bergman Week festival on the island on which the Swedish director was born. But what does it smell like?
On Monday morning the postman delivers a parcel from Sweden. Inside is Persona, a perfume inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s most demanding, difficult, abrasive film. It gives us Bergman in a bottle; the arthouse atomised. I spray it on my wrist and then on my wife’s and we stare at each other through a mist of droplets. The perfume is distinctive, but does that mean it’s good?
After a long, anxious moment, my wife nods in relief. “This is actually all right,” she says. “It’s herby. It’s lavender. It smells like the sea.”
Continue reading...She’s out of the Olympics, but the US sprinting star’s ‘extra’ style makes an important statement about black womanhood
Despite not being part of Team USA after a failed drugs test, Sha’Carri Richardson made a reappearance yesterday in an advert for Beats by Dre soundtracked by a new song from Kanye West. With her trademark long nails, long lashes and fire-cracker hair, Richardson has underlined the point that, Olympian or not, she is one of 2021’s most electrifying style icons.
Continue reading...The industry’s first hijab-wearing model speaks about the ‘internal conflict’ that made her quit the catwalk
Halima Aden, the Muslim model who became a trailblazer for wearing her hijab on the catwalk and in photoshoots, has hit out at the fashion industry and its exploitation of young models.
Aden quit the industry in November 2020, citing compromised beliefs and feeling like a “minority within a minority”.
Continue reading...Model, who is black and Filipino, is also the first ever trans woman of color to be featured in the magazine
Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue has unveiled its first ever transgender cover star, Leyna Bloom.
The model follows in the footsteps of model Valentina Sampaio, who was the first trans model to appear in the pages of the magazine last July. Bloom, who is black and Filipino, is also the first ever trans woman of color to be featured in the magazine.
Continue reading...After 50 years in fashion, the designer is having new adventures. He discusses love, work, Madonna – and why Eurotrash couldn’t be made now
Jean Paul Gaultier is waving his hands and talking nineteen to the dozen in French with a smattering of heavily accented English. I’ve only been with him for a few minutes, and already he is tearing through his thoughts on love, life, death and London, punctuated with self-deprecating comments and shrieks of laughter, as if we have known each other for ever.
We are supposed to be talking couture; he is after all fashion’s anointed “enfant terrible”, the designer celebrated for dressing Madonna in a conical bra corset, popularising skirts – well, kilts – for boys and turning the French navy’s famous marinière striped T-shirt into a wardrobe classic.
Continue reading...Pan-Asian labour rights group launches groundbreaking attempt to hold global labels accountable for alleged rights violations during pandemic
Legal complaints are being filed against some of the world’s largest fashion brands in major garment-producing countries across Asia in a groundbreaking attempt to hold the global fashion industry legally accountable for human rights violations in the countries where their clothing is made.
The Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA), a pan-Asian labour rights group, says it is using legal challenges to argue that global clothing brands should be considered joint employers, along with their suppliers, under national laws and be held accountable for alleged wage violations during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Continue reading...Transportation and dry cleaning make it the worst green option for consumers of fashion, study finds
A study has revealed that renting clothes, long touted as one of the “answers” to fashion’s sustainability crisis, is worse for the planet than throwing them away.
The study, published by the Finnish scientific journal Environmental Research Letters assessed the environmental impact of five different ways of owning and disposing of clothing, including renting, resale and recycling.
Continue reading...No laws were broken but brands failed to ensure workers were paid properly during the pandemic, says Clean Clothes Campaign
Campaigners claim to have found evidence of “wage theft” in the supply chains of Primark, Nike and H&M in a report that outlines the devastating consequences of the pandemic on garment workers in Indonesia, Cambodia and Bangladesh.
Research by the Clean Clothes Campaign found that, while none of the brands had broken any laws, they had failed to ensure that their workers were properly paid throughout the pandemic.
Continue reading...Analysis: Could Marco Gobbetti be followed out of British luxury brand by creative director Riccardo Tisci?
The departure of Marco Gobbetti as chief executive of Burberry raises the key question of whether Riccardo Tisci, whom Gobbetti appointed creative director soon after he joined, will remain at the luxury fashion brand.
A desire to be closer to his family in Italy was given as the reason behind Gobbetti’s decision to quit Burberry, and Tisci too is thought to have found it difficult to be away from family in Italy for prolonged periods during the pandemic. The designer was a fashion student in London in his teens and has a deep affection for British culture and subculture, but the pull of his homeland remains strong. Italy has many deep-pocketed luxury brands and a shortage of exciting design talent, so opportunities are likely to present themselves.
Continue reading...Though 25 years apart in age, their ideas are locked in sync. Andreas Kronthaler, husband of the couture queen, reveals his plans for the maverick fashion house
On 21 March 2020, days before Britain’s initial lockdown, Vivienne Westwood shared her first isolation address to the nation. Royalty, of sorts, she delivered it in her trademark fashion: she spoke of saving the planet and her new manifesto, while donning couture – and surrounded by curiosities – in her south London home.
These impassioned speeches became a year-long weekly occurrence. Westwood offered anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and a stern rebuke of the arms trade; in wig, blue dress and floral-print platforms, she spoke of the need to rescue the oceans, while standing in her tiled bathtub.
Continue reading...Italian designer says fashion cannot survive in exclusively virtual form
Such is Giorgio Armani’s eagerness for getting back to holding physical fashion shows that not even a nasty fall resulting in a fractured shoulder and 17 stitches 20 days ago could stop him from holding his first show in 16 months on Monday evening in Milan.
Addressing the rumours that he had recently been in hospital, the 86-year-old designer explained to waiting press after taking his bow at his spring/summer 2022 menswear show that he fell down the stairs while leaving the cinema but wanted to reassure everyone that he was fine and still raring to go.
Continue reading...This summer is officially sexy – and the hottest look for men is short shorts. But are we ready for this much male flesh?
In April the US actor Milo Ventimiglia, star of This Is Us, was photographed leaving the gym in a sleeveless vest and a pair of shorts so short you could barely tell they were there: two thumb-sized rims of black material gave way to legs so round and meaty they could be shoved in the oven for three hours at 180C.
It was one innocuous paparazzi photo that broke a dam of desire. The image was reshared on social media tens of thousands of times, users claiming: “Every thought in my head has been replaced with these images.”
Continue reading...Cruise collection at Panathenaic stadium includes pieces inspired by contemporary Greece
The 2,000-year-old Panathenaic stadium in Athens could hold 70,000 on marble seats for the first modern Olympics in 1896. So there was plenty of room in the front row at Dior’s catwalk show at the venue this week, where the guest list was capped at 400.
Despite most international buyers, editors and clients watching from home on their laptops, Dior’s Cruise collection was a blockbuster live event. The brand was keen to point out that the ancient stadium made for a responsible choice of venue, being well-ventilated and spacious. It was also undeniably grand, especially when backlit by fireworks and soundtracked by a full orchestra. A mostly Greek and Italian audience were joined by the Greek president, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, and the actor Anya Taylor-Joy.
The catwalk show remains fashion’s most powerful lever for generating attention and prestige. For luxury brands who are watching profits dwindle – and observing with envy, as the cult leggings label Lululemon announces 88% revenue growth in the first quarter of this year – there is a strong business case for keeping the catwalk alive. But there is more at stake here than luxury brand profits and designer egos. Catwalk shows are symbolic of fashion’s identity as a creative art as well as a business. They give fashion a voice in wider conversations. It is in this spirit that Kerby Jean-Raymond, the first Black American designer to show at Paris haute couture, will next month livestream his Pyer Moss catwalk show from Villa Lewaro, the elegant Hudson River estate built by Madam CJ Walker, the African American entrepreneur who was America’s first self-made female millionaire.
Now designers are pulling out all the stops to lure hearts and minds away from trainers and drawstring waists and back to dressing up. Dior’s Athens spectacular is just one of a raft of upcoming fashion blockbusters. Earlier this week, Louis Vuitton staged and filmed a space-tourism themed catwalk show outside Paris, without a live audience. Max Mara are taking their catwalk to the Italian island of Ischia next week, while Valentino and Saint Laurent have announced catwalk shows in Venice in July.
For the Dior designer, Maria Grazia Chiuri, each catwalk collection is “an immense atelier for research and imagination. For a creative person, it is a beautiful thing to do, an opportunity to collaborate”.
Chiuri used the Athens show to explore how the relationship between a prestigious Parisian fashion house and the global cultures and traditions which appear as references on its catwalk has evolved. In 1951, a famous set of pictures by the photographer Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini showed models in Christian Dior ballgowns posing in front of the sculpted female figures of the Caryatids of the Acropolis, mirroring their graceful poses. Seventy years later, Chiuri is aware that a French fashion house using an ancient Greek monument as mere stage props for its latest silhouette would not fly with modern sensibilities.
“As a designer, if you are careless, then you diminish beauty and culture so that it becomes a cliche,” she said. “That is what we work to avoid – we were very focused on what is contemporary to Greece now.” The collection shown on this catwalk will provide work for local Greek fashion businesses, with houndstooth pieces woven at the Silk Line, an Eastern Macedonian factory which uses traditional Greek jacquard techniques. The Greek fisher’s caps on the catwalk were made by Atelier Tsalavoutas, which has manufactured the caps since the 19th century. In a statement, the house of Dior emphasised their respect for the iconic venue, where they “worked hand in hand with Greek archeologists to ensure the site’s complete and unconditional preservation”.
Travel is a fantasy for most people right now – but billionaires have had a very different experience of the pandemic. On 20 July, the 11-minute inaugural staffed flight of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket will inaugurate the era of space tourism. If it is a success, the 1% will soon be needing a new holiday wardrobe.
So for Louis Vuitton’s latest catwalk show the house’s creative director, the lifelong space travel enthusiast Nicolas Ghesquière, created the ultimate new season capsule wardrobe: a space capsule wardrobe. Images of an escalator leading up to a planet, surfers on an moonscape beach, and a motel car park in an alien landscape were emblazoned on to spacesuit-quilted trousers, Courrèges-style futuristic flat boots, and gravity-defying ovoid silhouettes. “It is a fantasy that has become real, now that it has turned into a competition between titans,” said Ghesquière in a videocall after the livestream of the show, which was filmed without a physical audience. The designer is keen to make a trip himself. (“But not the first flight. I’m not that brave.”)