“You can have fun and still be [eco] conscious,” Taymour tells Vogue ahead of her AW20 show at New York Fashion Week. “What’s going on with the planet is serious — we know that. Let’s talk about it in a way that doesn’t sound so depressing and apocalyptic. No one’s going to change the way they live if it isn’t represented in a fun way.”
What was the starting point for your AW20 collection?
“Everything started around the print and the fabrication, and we went with the theme from there. This season, everything is about gardening. The prints include lots of flowers, hand-drawn houses and gardens. Models will be gardening, picking vegetables on the runway. [The idea is] you can start growing your own food and utilise our spaces as much as possible to make yourself sustainable.
“It’s also about community, the greener community. What if we all lived together? What does our family look like? How do we dress? Everything in the set — the plants, grass, trees — is going to be donated to the garden down the street from our studio. It’s truly giving back to the community, my literal community.”
What eco-friendly practices have you adopted this season?
“We have fabric made from rose petals, so we’re printing on and hand-dying that. I would say 60 per cent of the collection is made from that fabric. It’s the most sustainable version of silk that we can make today.
“The rest of the collection is made from deadstock. We’re doing a programme with The OR Foundation, which works in Ghana (the world ships 15 million items of clothes to Ghana every week). The clothing [waste] is going into the ocean, the kids are playing soccer on top of fields. So we’re taking T-shirt bales from Ghana and making clothing; we’re going to start bringing all that stuff back and using it.”
You’ve spoken about not being 100 per cent sustainable in the past. Why is that important for you to emphasise?
“Whoever is saying they’re 100 per cent sustainable: tell me where you get your plastic buttons from, where you get your zippers. Do you know where your trims are getting made? You can always be better, but we’re not leaving zero footprint on Earth. We’re doing the best we can.”
Do you have any concerns about growing your brand in a sustainable way?
“That’s a battle I have continuously as we grow. It’s great we’re growing, but then we can’t just use deadstock because we can’t fulfil all the orders with deadstock. I’d love to help create jobs and set up a fully sustainable factory for the brand. But the more you grow, the more business people are involved and the more people want to cut corners to increase the margins. At this level, where we are now, I’m still able to 100 per cent control and oversee what is in the collection.”
How do you think conversations around fashion and sustainability have developed in the past year?
“[People are talking about it] way more; it’s great. But we all need to start learning from each other, and have discussions [such as], ‘This is how I’m making my brand sustainable, how are you making your brand more sustainable?’ We can all learn and share from each other because there is no school for sustainability; everyone’s learning the answers together. Every day you learn new information — no one’s sharing that information, really. It’s about the whole industry coming together to do better, not just one person.”
Is there one message you’d like people to take away from your work?
“It’s just about being as conscious as you possibly can. Like learning to grow vegetables; we all need to start learning these things, and how to be better. But you can have rhinestone garden hoes and rakes – be chic while you do it. It doesn’t need to be so serious and granola.” (Chan 2020).
I think there’s many successful things about Collina Strada. The brand maintains its aesthetic while still sticking to its idea of sustainability, allowing the brand to target a different demographic of eco-conscious consumers that maybe aren’t as minimalist-minded as other brands that have an emphasis on sustainability initiatives.
It’s admirable that Taymour chooses to strategically approach the expansion of her brand in a way that allows her to maintain control over process and production in order to fulfill the brands sustainability missions without sacrificing her values for profit.
Lastly, it’s promising that Teymour recognizes and wants to counteract the fashion industry’s tendency to gatekeep it’s knowledge as a tactic to sharpen its competitive edge.
Collina Strada confronts sustainability on multiple fronts, but all of these principles fall flat when the A/W 2020 show asked people to be more sustainable by growing their own vegetables…
My gut reaction is that sustainability is a very complex topic, and to advocate as a brand that wants to set an example for what sustainability can look like in fashion only to promote vegetables seems shallow. As a fellow designer who wants to critically look at how to address sustainability through design, I find myself expecting just that, a more critical message on how to address sustainability. Yet, Teymour’s brand is about fun, about helping individuals make decisions that may be small, but at the very least don’t make them feel like they are making the world a worse place. Perhaps from Teymour’s perspective, because I only look at sustainability as a critically complex issue, I lose sight of the fact that people don’t want to engage in sustainability in such a heavy manner that makes them feel as though every action has grave consequences, they want to have fun.
I personally conclude there are flaws to Collina Strada’s philosophy considering the people who can afford to purchase their garments have the money and privilege to do much more than plant some vegetables…still, I’ve learned from Collina Strada that people do want to engage with sustainability, but there are lots of different people who want to engage in different ways, and at different degrees.
Chan, E. (2020, February 11). “It doesn’t need to be so serious and granola”: How Collina Strada is making sustainable fashion fun. Vogue India. https://www.vogue.in/fashion/content/how-collina-strada-is-making-sustainable-fashion-fun-hillary-taymour-on-her-latest-eco-conscious-collection
