What fashion's past can teach us about sustainable futures...
Working with Fashion Museum Bath over the last month has been astonishing, perspective-shifting and rallying in equal measure and last week was no exception. As part of Sustainable Fashion Week 2023, I was lucky enough to attend the in-person element of a talk between presenter Sharanjit Leyl and Fashion Museum manager Rosemary Harden exploring the lessons we can learn from fashion history in our pursuit of a more sustainable world today.
Hosted at the Clore Learning Centre in Bath and broadcast to a global audience by the Bristol Old Vic production team, Sharanjit and Rosemary travelled through centuries of dress, as they discussed the opportunity for us all to embrace our inner makers, made the case for a shift in our mindset when it comes to sustainable fashion practice and looked to today's innovations as well as history's habits to help us shape a better future for all.
?Here are my talk highlights:
?1.”Do not be put off by the tyranny of perceived perfection.”
From a seventeeth century 'star' embroidered waistcoat, to the mystery of a morphing eighteenth century dark ground silk dress, we were given a deep dive into some key pieces in the Fashion Museum’s collection (currently taking a rest in storage, while a gamechanging redevelopment project gets underway), and the tradition of altering, repurposing and reusing. The star embroidered jacket was resplendent with a set of hefty white back pleats, demonstrating how it had been ‘let out’ over time, while the dark ground silk fabric had been used decades apart in dresses of very different styles, proving how fabric was often unpicked and reworked to keep up with changes in fashion.
These acts, Rosemary explained, were likely not the work of tailors or professional seamstresses. In the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries it was expected that garments would be altered – not by individuals trying to save pennies or make a point about being more sustainable – but simply as common practice. Retrimming hats with ribbons to freshen up a look as (No-trip-to-Bath-can-go-without-mention-of) Jane Austen wrote about in letters to her sister, creating detachable, replaceable sleeves so shirts could be multipurpose, or sewing up seams to extend use, as one of the Museum's iconic 1600s waistcoats demonstrates. Expertly embroidered but roughly sewn together, Rosemary showed us how such a contrast suggests a ‘multi-maker’ garment, with the fine work done professionally while the joining was undertaken by someone who knew how to sew and was happy to do so, but not at a proficient level.
"There’s a message to us from the 17th century, if ever I heard one," Rosemary added. "Let things out; take things in; alter, mend; darn; patch. And don’t be put off by the tyranny of perceived perfection, the idea that all stitching has to be neat and ‘perfect’. Alter your clothes. Mend them. Even if you think you can’t sew. You can!"
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2. “Turn every scrap of fabric accessible to you to your advantage.”
Quoting from the famous ‘Make do and Mend’ booklet from 1940s wartime Britain, Rosemary also encouraged us to think about waste. How to minimise it, reconsider it, challenge it wherever we can. She pointed to some particularly ingenious reimaginings of materials from the war as a starting point (as dress made of blackout curtains and a silky pink duvet cover was a particular standout), but went on to highlight the story of the Dress of the Year in 2010.
An annual expansion of the Fashion Museum's collection, Dress of the Year has been running since designer, collector, writer and scholar Doris Langley Moore gifted her private collection to the people of Bath in the 1960s. Selected by eminent designers, journalists and commentators in the industry, each dress is chosen for its impact that year. In 2010 it was Dame Vivienne Westwood’s turn.
"The world is burning and we need to change what we do."
The pale green ribbed watered silk dress selected as Dress of the Year by milliner Stephen Jones is made from long lengths of fabric that loop and hang in full swathes, a striking piece but also a commentary on the need for more thought in how to operate sustainably. Famously announcing her autumn/winter 2010 collection with the statement, "the world is burning and we need to change what we do," in its long lengths the dress references off-cuts dead stock and the waste that the industry creates on a daily basis. Fashion as protest in all its glory, using every scrap of material available to make the point. Dame Vivienne Westwood trailblazing as always.
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3. “Have a play.”
Shoes made from vegan leather, shirts made from plastic bottles, dresses made of defunct doilies. Sustainable fashion is a place of experiment and innovation, where fabric is being forged from all sorts of new materials. Rosemary left us with a message of future hope, embodied in a doily dress and a pair of 'cactus leather' mules. The shoes, donated to the museum's collection by Beyond Skin footwear are an example of some of the alternatives to animal leather. Formed from a bi-product of an existing cactus farm in Mexico that requires very little irrigation or intervention to yield, it's a material increasingly being used by brands the world over as the demand for vegan leather grows. And the doily dress? One of the selection for dress of the year in 2020, a special commission from designers Ibrahim Kamara and Gareth Wrighton. It’s made of pre-loved, sometimes discarded white embroidered fabric, tablecloth edging and doilies and Rosemary told us it came to the museum with suggestions of different ways to wear it – the most pertinent of which was, “Have a play!”.
"It feels like that sums up the whole approach we should be taking to sustainable fashion," Rosemary concluded. "We need to enjoy ourselves with our fashion, experiment, personalise, create. To make fashion truly sustainable we have to take back some of the fashion practises in the past which we have lost sight of today and give ourselves permission to make different choices about the clothes we wear now and in the future."
A pretty motivating note to end the talk on, for sure.
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Find out more about the Fashion Museum’s redevelopment – fashionmuseum.co.uk/ourfuture
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