Fast/ slow fashion

I attended a seminar some years ago about slow fashion. Some of the speakers were high-end fashion designers who design beautiful clothing in natural fabrics. They spoke about their practice and how it fit the brief of environmental and labour ethics, and how they designed slow fashion. It was all very inspiring; however, I felt there was a rather large elephant in the room - and that was affordability. In an ideal world, we would all have a few stunning outfits made from beautiful fabrics, and fast fashion would become redundant. But world is not ideal. Expensive clothes are still manufactured clothes. 

I pointed out that they still needed to sell clothing to exist and that most of us were condemned to a purgatory of fast fashion and cheap clothing. "Oh, " said one, when the owner of an outfit tires of it, poor people would be able to buy lovely clothes from opshops". However, the maths doesn't math. There is not enough high-end clothing to go around. It also avoids the issue of all the fast fashion that ends up in landfills. We need to start where we are, use what we have and do what we can. What if we made an existing garment more desirable? I have ideas. In the meantime. Here is a small example - a woollen dress I found at a church jumble sale - which I hand embroidered with the depiction of an albatross and an oil slick. Hopefully, I have combined an environmental message, some handwork on a $2 dress to make it more desirable. (This one represents 20 hours of work.)

I run workshops which will inspire you to transform your chosen garment into a work of art in an afternoon. A loved garment is a kept garment.