via @kristiankirk
The opening show is tasked with setting the tone of any fashion week. And, in the case of Copenhagen Fashion Week,which opened yesterday, Danish brand Carcel put sustainability at the forefront of the conversation. Rather than presenting a new collection, the forward-thinking brand took their runway time to screen a video about how they implement consciousness above an empty catwalk instead.
“I want to create a business model that has social impact and reduces our environmental footprint,” Carcel’s co-founder Veronica D’Souza says in the runway video, before backing up her words with compelling evidence. The brand works on multiple levels of eco-sustainability and social consciousness, starting with the garment production.
The clothes are made in Thailand and Peru from natural and locally sourced materials, cutting down on travel costs in production. While their carbon footprint could be further reduced by moving their factories to Denmark, they have a pretty good reason for producing the garments in South America and Southeast Asia: they employ female inmates in areas with high levels of poverty-related crimes, allowing the women to save up for after their release. The names of the workers who make each garment are placed under the brand logo. For example, Rocio, from Cusco, Peru, explained in the video how she got into drug trafficking to provide for her family and is serving a close to 13-year sentence.
Carcel also calls out fashion’s huge overproduction problem—which contributes to yearly fabric waste totals of more than 15 million tons—and offers a solution that challenges the core of modern shopping culture: no seasons and no sales. If there are no new batches of clothing coming in at regular intervals, there is no need to clear out older stock with low prices incentivising customers to buy more. “It takes time to do it this way, but we need to slow down, we need to produce less, buy less and design better quality that lasts,” D’Souza says. At the end of the presentation, Carcel invited the guests to “walk the walk” down the runway together, a cheeky nod to how the fashion industry has been accused of being all talk when it comes to environmental measures.
With thousands of runway shows happening across dozens of fashion weeks every year, there is creative fatigue as well as an environmental exhaustion from the way the industry currently runs. It is one of the reasons why climate change groups like Extinction Rebellion are protesting for the end of the fashion week cycle in light of crisis levels of global warming. While Carcel makes a case for keeping fashion weeks, maybe more brands should be presenting new ideas, instead of more clothes.