A series of conversations about fashion's relationship to the three pillars of sustainability: people, the planet and profit. 

In May 2019, The Guardian informed readers that it would be changing the language it used to talk about the environment. "Instead of 'climate change'" they wrote, "the preferred terms are 'climate emergency, crisis or breakdown' and 'global heating' is favoured over 'global warming.'" Editor-in-chief Katharine Viner stated the reason was, "The phrase 'climate change,' for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity." 

Reading this piece was the origin of Denier. I began to think about the way language is used within fashion, both written and visual. Fashion is so often positioned as frivolous, although at the same time, we are told that it defines us. How can these two things coexist, and how did fashion become so linked to our sense of self? 

In the March 13, 1978, issue of The New Yorker, the fashion writer Kennedy Fraser forebode this and the impact it would have in a seminal essay called 'The Fashionable Mind.' Preceding her collection of essays of the same name, the piece lays out an argument for society's impending issue if fashion continues to seep into every orifice of contemporary life. "Fashion is good for business, but it may prove very bad for life," the coverline reads. She wrote that "fashion is everywhere around us... It's there wherever political strategies are planned, movies made, books published, art exhibits mounted, critical columns turned out, dances danced, editorial policies formulated, academic theses germinated: wherever people think, speak, or create our shared forms of self-expression. Fashion usually is neither named nor noted but is simply the lens through which our society perceives itself and the mold to which it increasingly shapes itself." 

Fraser warned that continuing along this path would diminish true intellectualism and individual thought. In their place would be "the fashionable mind," a mind that would only be concerned with material goods. She cautioned that "Americans, acting under the combined influence of rampant acquisitiveness and psychoanalytical self-absorption, seem particularly inclined to mesh possessions with their sense of self-esteem, and to view them as social signposts and emotional milestones." She writes, "our carelessly inherited assumption that fashion is spontaneous, amusing, innocent, and amateurish is likely to keep us from examining or questioning how it has evolved."

I urge you to read the piece; it is a startling reminder of how we got here. Forty-two years later, it is unsurprising that there is nearly no mention within the fashion media about the impact that fashion has on the environment. Almost every article within a current fashion publication is selling the reader something. With this in mind, I spoke with Priya Raghubir, a professor in marketing at NYU Stern School of Business. I was interested to learn more about how and why fashion marketing works. I ask about greenwashing and the use of specific copy to gain a better understanding of why we are so drawn to the messages that are being sold to us and whether it does indeed play on our insecurities and vulnerabilities.  

Kennedy Fraser wrote that "Fashions, quite simply, do not exist until a fashionable mind is turned on them." Many of you reading this work within fashion, we must now learn to turn our minds to new ways to communicate. To carve out new fashionable things that are not material goods. It is urgent that we begin to put people, planet, and animals, not profit, at the forefront of our work. I am afraid we are running out of time.  

To read my conversation with Priya Raghubir, click here. 

See you soon, 

Shonagh 

Image featured: David Brandon Geeting for More or Less