What on Earth is going on?!
That was my first thought when I saw the offerings of the first fashion shows for this Spring/Summer. How dare they!
Now, as we all know there is so much talk everywhere about plastic waste poisoning our oceans, environment and thus also our food (Guardian, Wikipedia, BBC, etc.) And as a solution we are all asked and encouraged to recycle plastics separately from everything else: bottle banks are appearing in stores, where you can leave empty bottles instead of sending them to landfills, and plastic bags have gotten a price tag all over the world to raise awareness of the fact that this stuff really is destroying our surroundings.
And at the very same time the fashion industry marches out an outfit after an outfit made of the most un-cool material on this planet: see-through plastic! WTF?! I love fashion but these pictures teeming on my Instagram feed make me angry.
When I was in primary school over 20 years ago we were already then taught about the dangers of oil, aka plastic; how it never disappears from this planet, only disintegrates into tiny pieces, which at this very moment are consumed by, for example, a lot of the fish that we like to eat.
I feel so let-down. I had the impression that the big fashion houses cared about quality and environmental values when it comes to materials as well as life. How, just HOW could a fashion brand like Chanel go wrong this badly?? Not only is plastic unsustainable, it’s also questionable quality-wise and practicality-wise. Basically useless as far as I am concerned. Unless you live in Estonia where it rains 95% of the year.
As if human beings hadn’t already done enough irreversible damage on this planet. Apparently fashion industry thinks not since they deem it totally OK to sell even more of this unsustainable crap. Unbelievable!
Well, all I can say is I really hope that nobody buys these items because first of all, no matter what fashion industry says, they don’t look or feel particularly good. Secondly they certainly won’t stay in fashion for long and what do we do then? Throw them away just like we do with all plasticky things.
Landfills all over the planet are already overflowing. And a lot of us don’t even bother to throw the trash in the trash bin but instead discard everything into nature, which we can see in the fact that some of the paradise beaches, that tourists have favored for years, have been turned into small landfills instead (Bali, Thailand, even Wales). That’s how much shit has floated onto shore all over the world.
Consumerism for the sake of consumerism is a desease down to its core and while the fashion industry pats itself on the back for this “ground-breaking” revolution of making plastic fashionable, we individual consumers should use our voting slips, also known as wallets, and cast our votes on some of the more sustainable fashion trends this Spring and Summer. Anything’s better than putting plastic on your back anyway.