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Buy Clothes! But Also Don't! And More Fashion News.
Tis the season of flammable Halloween costumes.
Well another season of collections is behind us and they were breathlessly covered in the usual outlets. (My take is here.) Yet they were breathlessly covered alongside the now routine drumbeating about the catastrophic environmental effects of our shopping habits. Fixing fashion’s environmental impact is clearly not going to be as simple as the fur issue, where the answer all along, though only recently embraced, was just stop using it. But educating ourselves is clearly a start so let’s begin there and then move on to other news bites.
“This is a major graveyard for fast fashion waste”: The BBC has a fascinating and disturbing look at what happens to discarded fast fashion. Western shoppers buy 60 percent more clothing than they did 15 years ago, and huge shipments of used pieces go to Ghana’s second-hand clothing market. But many fast fashion items are in such poor condition that they can’t be resold, so they end up in sprawling landfills roamed by cows. If the landfills don’t horrify you, the next shot will — of the clothes poking out of the beach with all the joie de vivre of the dead pets clawing back to this plane in a Steven King novel before, yes, washing into the sea.
Vogue magazine exists to sell us clothes but also, like, cares, you know? Hence the site’s great interview with Aja Barber, author of the new book Consumed, about how to be a better consumer. Regarding improving the environment via government regulation vs. individual choice — everyone’s favorite cocktail party climate change debate — she said:
“…People will always go back and forth between regulation and individual change, and it’s the argument that no one will win, because you need both. The only way that lawmakers will care about this issue is if we as voters and citizens start to care about the issue, because nobody is going to change anything about this if there is no public outcry. And, yes, part of that also comes with not giving your money to these [fast fashion] companies anymore, if you can afford not to.”
Wow, so, if you have small children, maybe don’t put real candle inside your Halloween pumpkins. Because do you know how flammable their costumes probably are? This Daily Mail article will absolutely freak you the fuck out about it.
Visual palette cleanser: Did you also know it was recently Bridal Fashion Week in New York? Today’s wedding dress shopper is apparently looking for, designers told the New York Times, “something new that she has not seen before,” “romance and drama,” and “creating a visual moment.” In non-sky-is-blue bridal trend news, there are also black bows, gloves, and — drumroll — puffy sleeves.
Are you jonesing for more information about model Eve Jobs, daughter of Steve, but also deeply averse to giving a website a “who is eve jobs” Google click? Allow me to read WWD and scratch that itch for you: she is a competitive equestrian who, before appearing in the Coperni show this season, attended Stanford.
Oh also, Dazed draws your attention to Ella Emhoff walking in the Miu Miu show.
Do you hate Facebook, but use its products like Instagram, WhatsApp, and maybe even the Big Daddy News Feed, because you don’t want to bother with TikTok and these things serve a real purpose in your life? Advertisers are basically like, yeah, same. So if you thought these recent weeks of embarrassing and odious revelations about the company thanks to whistle blower Frances Haugen was going to really weaken Facebook, the New York Times is here to remind us that brands are scarily reliant on the company for advertising. Some spend 100 percent of their ad budgets with Facebook because there is just not a better place for that money to go.
The Guardian is here to remind you that abs are so hot right now. Citing fashionable midriff moments on women like Zendaya, Carey Mulligan, and J. Lo, Jess Cartner-Morley writes, “It would be nice to be able to say that society has evolved into inclusivity and the placing of equal value on each and every human body, but, sadly, that would be total nonsense.”
Well, if you, like the rest of us, weren’t at Paris Fashion Week, you missed the awe-inspiring power of Christian Louboutin’s “360° immersive experience and event—Loubillusions!” reports Daily Front Row. Grab your ring pop, press play here, and be transported back to both a 1990s nightclub and 2019’s uncomfortable footwear.
Zendaya wore a dress from the new Loewe collection five days after it appeared on the runway in Paris. Fashionista wins in the coverage of this with the headline, “Well, That Was Quick.”
Squid Game actress HoYeon Jung is the new face of Louis Vuitton. She has been modeling for years, for the likes of Marc Jacobs, Fendi, and Max Mara, and the new LV image is very pretty.
In other “faces of stuff” news, Ryan Gosling is in ads for Tag Hueur and he had to give a phone interview about it to WWD, in which he said things like, while filming the 2018 movie First Man, “I tried to use [watches] to communicate something that may not be obvious or in the script.” And how when he was a kid he “would watch people checking their watches and wonder what exciting things were going on in their lives.” Oh you know, Ryan Gosling, probably just figuring out how to dressing their kids up for Halloween without setting aflame.
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