Dozens of containers packed with what for many people would be considered garbage completely line the walls of a waste management warehouse in an industrial estate in the Madrid district of Villaverde. Between them, dozens of models of multiple sizes, ages, genders and origins cross the space from side to side, dressed in garments and designs that are an abyss away from what is usually seen at Fashion Weeks.
Runway 17, in which different brands mix their garments for the sake of a collaborative proposal that breaks the logic of neoliberal hypercompetitiveness, is surely one of the most revolutionary parades on the national and international scene. It brings to an end the Circular Sustainable Fashion Week (CSFW), which started last Monday, April 22, coinciding with International Earth Day; a project within the framework of which various conferences, workshops and fashion shows have taken place with a common objective: to bring sustainable fashion to the streets.
“Behind the brands that participate in CSFW there is an ethical awareness and intellectual development; Behind each dress, behind each collection, there is a commitment to minimize social and environmental impacts. This also represents an enormous degree of demand, because they are brands that renounce the pure and simple economic benefit on which the large fashion industry is based,” explains the founder and CEO of The Circular Project and director of the CSFW, Paloma. Garcia Lopez.
She, who comes from Béjar, in Salamanca, “a very important textile hub, with its super-nice route of textile factories”, over the years she has seen how all those factories were progressively decreasing their activity until, even, having to close the closure. That is why she is aware of the importance, first of all, of relocation and highlighting the production and consumption of local products as an essential step when talking about sustainable fashion. “That does not mean that we become chauvinistic as if ours were the best, but it is true that in Spain we now have all production outsourced,” she laments.
García López defends the need to find the balance to build connections, cultural exchanges and transfer of knowledge between countries in a way that respects that each region can produce without that labor and colonialist exploitation that causes relocation. And also questioning “the scale at which we are doing it, because we are destroying the planet.”
In fact, firms from different parts of the globe, not only Spanish ones, gather at the CSFW. This edition has managed to bring together Portuguese, Italian, Argentine, Chilean, Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Uruguayan brands that, yes, have a shared view of the world, demonstrating the internationalist nature of the movement in defense of sustainable fashion.
They are brands whose collections conform to certain and certified production processes based on the creation of small collections that are brought to life “with transparency and traceability,” García López points out, in terms of the origin of the materials, their composition, the pattern-making techniques used, the location of the workshops and the working conditions in which they are manufactured. At the same time, these are houses whose clothes can be bought, which are not limited to presenting collections designed for the catwalk, because another of the myths that the CSFW seeks to overthrow is “the black legend that sustainable clothing is expensive.” the director points out.
“These brands are making high-quality garments at affordable prices that do not reach 100 euros, garments made to escape planned obsolescence, to last over time and for us to establish an emotional connection with them, since we know who made them. , how he made them… it is another way of understanding how we build our wardrobe,” he says. Garments, he insists, that aspire to end up becoming “part of who we are”, so that later “getting rid of them will not be as easy as any other garment from ultra fast-fashion”.
And another of the tragedies that the fashion world faces today is the extreme acceleration with which trends are born, consumed and die, which generates a huge volume of waste. A volume that in most cases is, in reality, clothing that is in perfect condition for use or, at least, for reuse. That is why the CSFW wanted the place chosen to host this closing parade to be one of the warehouses of the Spanish Association of Social and Solidarity Economy Recyclers (AERESS), to which around 10,000 kilos of clothing arrive every day.
On this day, this arsenal of false garbage fulfills the double function of serving as decoration and as a tool of denunciation and visibility against the immeasurable accumulation of waste. “What you see here today is what was accumulated during a week, but now we will begin to double quantities, because the new season is approaching and, with it, come wardrobe changes,” explains the president of Aeress, Cristina Salvador.
But the clothing that reaches this entity, whose preparation plant for reuse in 2023 included almost two million kilos of textiles, represents only around 40% of the textiles discarded in the Community of Madrid. The other 60% is “clothes that many people throw into the waste container,” Salvador laments.
Even so, she believes that there is a lot of social awareness that textile products can and should be reused, and that is why many people turn to specific containers for this purpose when getting rid of those clothes they no longer want. But beyond raising awareness when giving away clothes, Salvador believes that it is also necessary to promote this entire environmental culture from the other side, and invites us to “begin to be aware of consuming in second-hand stores.”
Given this panorama, García López considers it essential to rebel against the very bases of what the concept of “being in fashion” means, an idea that “mainly interests the market” and that pushes consumers to continue and continue buying endlessly. . “When you get it into your head that something is out of fashion, there comes a point where you are even embarrassed to put it on and go out with it; In the face of that slavery that tells you what you have to wear, we fight so that everyone can express themselves as they are, because fashion is something that goes with the person, not with trends,” García López claims. Something that does not necessarily have to imply a creative limitation or the obligation of having to live condemned to wear the same clothes forever, without the possibility of renewing ourselves.
In this sense, Karol Farias, who has given life to the brand AOBÁ – another of the brands present in this edition of the CSFW – asserts that, in itself, there is nothing wrong with the desire to change your wardrobe every season. The problem, he claims, is how we are doing it. “In a world where 92 million tons of textile waste are generated per year and where there is already enough clothing to clothe the next six generations,” he says, “circularity emerges as the only viable alternative for this.” For this reason, this Brazilian creator with Galician roots who is able to integrate everything from denim fabrics to an IKEA bag into her designs, claims upcycling as “a creative solution to the serious problems caused by fast and linear fashion.”
Precisely to this technique that seeks to use discarded clothing that “no one wants and that, a priori, was going to end up in the trash or incinerated, to dismantle it and make new clothes with it,” as García López details, the CSFW considered it essential to dedicate the opening catwalk of this edition, which took place at the Matadero de Legazpi. “Many people still do not fully understand the concept of upcycling and its environmental benefits; In that sense, the CSFW plays a fundamental educational role by informing consumers about the alternatives to conventional fashion,” celebrates Farias.
Up to this point, what has been said leads to an idea that García López summarizes by quoting Eva Kruser, founder of the Copenhagen Fashion Summit: “If we were able to change the textile industry, we would change society as a whole, because everyone has to dress every day, so we would drag a lot of people along,” he argues. Beatriz Morillas, another of the star designers of this CSFW, tries to focus on the political and communicative dimension of fashion when thinking about her designs. “It’s not about dressing simply for the sake of looking pretty, but about dressing while being very conscious of your values, expressing them through your clothes, because you want the world to know,” she proclaims.
Morillas, for CSFW, has chosen two capsule collections in which conveying a protest message was an essential principle. The first, in which rigid and bulky, very angular structures abound, is inspired by the banditry of the 18th and 19th centuries in Spain, and with it seeks to express “the duality that made the bandits seen, on the one hand , as criminals who stole from the rich, from the clergy and, on the other, as heroes of the people who commit crimes for the good of the majority, giving it to the poor who did not even have enough to eat.
Her other exhibition, which includes proposals in which she integrates everything from collars interspersed with chains and meshes, to a dress inspired by the Palestinian kufiyas, aspires to put on the table the conflicts associated with religion, whether the way in which religious norms They become a prison for many LGTBIQ people and for the free exercise of sexuality, or the way in which religion has ended up being used as an excuse to justify the perpetration of the Gaza genocide.
For its production, it has come to use both recycled fabrics and mono-material fabrics, in order to “facilitate their recyclability”, and has even used squid ink as an alternative to artificial products. And what the CSFW comes to put on the table is, ultimately, that fashion, its communicative and artistic potential, its semiotics, its consumption and, of course, its production, are, as Morillas summarizes, “a form of resistance.”
