If creativity cannot expand on the surface, it descends into the depths. Limits and constraints are needed, to improve the proceed with a responsible design: analysis, examples, chronicles, and references
Limiting creativity: if creativity is constrained by rigor, it becomes skill
Someone raises an eyebrow: Imposing limits on your creativity is the opposite of what you would like to hear. Be constrained. The opposite of what you expect a mentor or teacher or simply an employer to tell you: only the best of these will be able to explain to you that these are prospects of your every ability. The fence is given – and today it must be respected. You cannot use what is outside this fence – that is, almost everything: the bright, garish colors, and so the prints; the nylon threads that all hold; the polyurethane padding; the resins, the plastics; the elastic threads that all allow you to wear and hold. What is left inside the enclosure, available in your hands, to express your creativity? Nothing?
Something remains: the true master among the many who speak will be able to explain to you that creativity does not expand on the surface but penetrates down deep, elaborates, digs deep into every detail. Your skill lies in creating some new thing using what little you have. Creativity is never a matter of availability, resources and thought. The more creativity is constrained by rigor, the more creativity reacts in splendor. When creativity is constrained by rigor, it becomes skill. It is said that Flaubert squirmed all night to write three lines.
Fashion and responsible design: the concept of eco design, definitions and meanings
Responsible design means designing a product – or an outfit, if we are talking about fashion – by imposing limits on your imagination and creativity. You cannot do whatever you want according to eco-design. Eco-Design means Responsible Design, and this second expression, although more generic and less used, is more appropriate.
The most obvious example of unaccountable design: the use of compact, absolute black. Valentino’s fashion show
At the opposite end of the spectrum, what is unaccountable design today? The most obvious example is black. We all wear black, complete and utter black – a color that needs both chemistry and a considerable amount of water to be attached to thread or fabric. The latest Valentino fashion show in Paris: every woman will feel comfortable, and like herself in the mirror, in each of those 63 full and absolute black garments – but we are talking about something else here. Eco-Design and Responsible Design are both synonyms for contemporary design: design that looks to the future.
Sean McGirr for Alexander McQueen: attitude, irreverence, and nods to sartorial analysis
For years, we have observed veils and organza and eccentric sartorial details meant to nod to the sartorial cut – a skill Alexander McQueen possessed. Without overdoing it, Sarah Burton’s McQueen remained commercial and saleable. Sean McGirr presented his first collection: Lee McQueen’s attitude, and irreverence, reappeared. Sean McGirr brought out Lee McQueen’s 2000s traits, reworked them for current times, respecting Hedi Slimane’s general direction on the entire fashion industry (without even showing).
Alexander McQueen died in 2010 – his last fashion show, Plato, had as soundtrack a demo of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance. This was first released on October 3, 2009. Fifteen years have passed. Back come the glass bell volumes, the alien shoulders. The question arises: how were these pieces made today? What materials were used to create tailoring rigidity? An exploded knitwear appears in measurements that could be those of a giant squid head: the yarns used for this knitwear, what are they? If they were wool, the girl would struggle to walk under that weight. If they were synthetic, it would be easy to understand how they were made.
The designer, the available budget: JW Anderson and Jonathan Anderson at Loewe’s
It seems that a designer struggles to work out his ideas by working on a design – be it shape, colors, volumes. How much synthetic glue, how much stable padding, how much elastic will be needed to make what he has just drawn? The materials and workmanship are chosen according to the budget (there are two budgets to pay attention to both the prototyping budget and the industrial production budget).
One can compare Jonathan Anderson’s two collections – the one for his eponymous brand and the one for Loewe. The former, JW Anderson, wants to stay at a more affordable price point and produces with a lower budget – the latter, Loewe, comes out with high front-line costs, and is designed with enhanced affordability. Given this difference in assumption, JW Anderson has not a lower reputation than Loewe.
Microplastics in atherosclerotic plaques
The news has been amplified by national rotogravures: microplastics have been found in atherosclerotic plaques. An Italian study from the University of Campania, in collaboration with the Istituto dei Tumori in Milan and Harvard Medical School in Boston, indicated that the risk of heart attack was doubled in the presence of plaques polluted with microplastics. Microplastics have been detected in the placenta and breast milk, liver, heart tissue, and sperm. The top three sources of microplastic pollution are tires, cosmetics, and textiles. Polyethylene and PVC are used everywhere. In spite of all this, people still prefer sequined clothes.
The starting point must be updated: a designer who wants to be contemporary no longer starts with his design. The designer who knows what he is doing today starts by reasoning about the impact dress will have on manufacturing. From that reasoning, discussing with the supply chain, he will begin by choosing natural fibers, before other options. In order to continue using synthetic, he will not mix it with wool or leather. It will not mix materials with different textures, raising the risk of seams holding (whether cotton or nylon).
Jil Sander and Ferragamo: hints of analysis, designs that can potentially be developed in natural fabric
Two more hints of analysis, again looking at images and videos: Jil Sander has volumes on the arms and cuts in the elbow hollow: how are these volumes made? Is it possible that they were achieved by working only on the fabric weight? The attempt might survive with some wool blended with Liberian fibers, and cutting work capable of lashing warp and weft. With more simplicity, just use synthetic and sufficiently elastic fibers, a layer of polyurethane or smiley padding, laser cutting, or other technology on a responsive material.
Cuts in the crook of the elbow are typical of natural fabric. This is because in those places a stiff fabric would become bad after short use. Emphasizing a flaw, and turning it into an aesthetic detail, coincides with contemporary research and conversation-both in tailoring and communication.
Ferragamo’s runway show emphasized high beads around the waist in off-the-shoulder garments, jackets or vests. The rivets are a visible sign – to the eyes they seem to turn the hemming into a belt – and they produce sturdiness. Such a use of seams, evolving them into patterns, enables the working of natural fabrics, stabilizing them.
Leather, intensive animal husbandry, the Tuscan tannery – and the saddlery of Hermès
Leather may well be understood as a waste material, but it remains the waste of one of the most polluting active industries, namely intensive livestock farming (we have experienced days of panic in Milan, Italy, over air data, confirming that intensive agriculture is responsible for about a third of emissions). By using leather, you will understand where it comes from. You will investigate the quality of the farming from which this leather originates, the treatments after and necessary for textile use (remember that 25 percent of all leather in the world passes through Italian tanneries in Tuscany).
Even more so, if this leather produces bags or jackets that the public can buy for over five thousand euros. Hermès, when processing an equestrian saddle, knows exactly where leather comes from. As well as the quality of breeding and health conditions of the animals, it knows whether they live free.
The ethical responsibility of luxury, Lampoon and the word transparency
Luxury has responsibility for eco-design, of responsible design. We need to use the word ethical and connect it with the word civil. Ethical luxury, ethical design and civil living. A remarkable aegis: ethical entrepreneurship. Today luxury can only exist if it presents itself as an ethical value – and only luxury can afford to commission ethical designs. There is nothing more expensive today than manufacturing that can produce a positive impact on the district and the community in which it operates. There is no reason – there is no decorum, no sympathy, no beauty – that can be worth the price charged for a dress, if that dress has not been made by a positive manufacturer.
In all the lines, I did not use the word sustainability on purpose. Sustainability is a word that has been abused, that has lost all possibility of gaining a foothold with the public – a word that too many Boomers can dismiss as a bore that no one cares about. Instead of sustainability today we use transparency, sincerity – human respect. This is what we continue and will continue to write about in Lampoon.
Useless are the yawning out of boredom that I move you reading my lines, just as useless are the brightly colored prints you like to collect on creative mood-boards. As of Oct. 17, 2023, the European Commission Regulation known as the Fight against Microplastics is in effect. This limits their use: in cosmetics, scrubs and makeup; in textiles, limiting glitter. In 2024, a contemporary designer will hopefully know how to stop using glitter.
The end-of-life of textile garments, pre-loved, the difficulty of textile remanufacturing and recovery
To date, there is no real garment recycling chain – precisely because every garment is a mixture of plastics, fibers, leathers and metal. True, for the fashion of the big houses – what we call the first tunnel – a garment is unlikely to end up in the trash. The data show how the resale market – or more elegantly, pre-loved – has grown.
In the same way, it is always the big houses that lead the market’s desire: when clothing or fast fashion companies need to decide what to sell, they watch fashion shows so they can reproduce in simplicity. It follows and can be confirmed how it is still the first houses that have the duty of ethical design, the responsibility of creativity developed in the rigor and with the logic of low-impact manufacturing. Energy, chemistry, plastics – end-of-cycle and textile regeneration. I summarize, I trivialize: no more lurex, no more sequins.
Paris: Saint Laurent collection for men, The Row in New York
Back in Paris, let’s review the fashion shows developed on a single material, a fabric: largely Saint Laurent’s collection for men. I can’t say whether that textile deployment involved wool unmixed with spandex and stabilized by polyester – but potentially, those effects can be achieved with natural fabrics. The direction is viable.
The same thing springs to mind when looking at The Row in New York (incidentally, the twins abolished cell phone use and social sharing during the show, they are the first to do so – and released a photo slideshow).
Manufacturer and Designer: prototype, production process, design must be responsible
Eco-design and the EPR principle are not synonymous. The former is about responsible design, the latter is about manufacturing, the manufacturer. The unbelievable still occurs today: it is the manufacturer who decides, by finding the right idea, how to solve and make real the designer’s imaginative design. It happens – or hopefully it used to happen – that the designer did not even discuss the merits of the making of his line. He would simply see the result and congratulate himself on how well it turned out when it was presented to him – or he would send the prototype back because he was dissatisfied with it when he requested it, according to his creative design.
Today, design must be based on production processes. Design must be responsible. Creativity, and even communication – are based on manufacturing steps, on virtuosity enhancement by avoiding waste and dirt. Today, releasing a plastic product, or releasing a product that contains synthetic microfibers, is synonymous with soiling. There is also the bad smell of our skin when dressed in polyester.
Today, luxury is having few things, but good – preferably gorgeous.
