The Green Day Out, the Gold Coast’s biggest environmental festival, concluded yesterday with a sustainable fashion runway. The catwalk paraded entries from the Little Green Dress competition, part of the celebrations for World Environment Day and showcased the creativity of Australian fashion designers.
Creations could only use eco-friendly materials including recycled materials, organics or with a minimum environmental footprint. These inclusively interpretative guidelines ensure entries from a variety of designers, and coaxed some unorthodox talent from across Australia.
Anna Itkonen, Event Organiser, wanted the competition to attract all skill levels from high school students to professionals, to get many different approaches and start the dialogue between generations of designers. “Old tyre inner-tubes, shells found on the beach, used plastic bread packets, an old dress from the opshop, or natural organic fabrics - whatever combination of materials used in the design, it must keep in the spirit of being green,” Ms Itkonen said.
This haphazard approach to sustainable fashion actually does some disservice to the concept of sustainability, by focussing only on materials, not the entire life cycle. This approach also sets the scene for a crafty “wearable-art” aesthetic often derided by the mainstream fashion culture, further alienating the concept of sustainability as a radical approach.
The biggest criticism I have is when designers claim to “up-cycle” they often take good second hand clothes and butcher them. These “sustainable” fashion approaches also attract criticism by focussing on areas of minimal impact, such as materials, however, involvement in sustainable events does get designers thinking about a holistic approach.
The leap is to then apply sustainable design techniques across the whole fashion process. Community sustainable fashion events do have their place in the industry, and it's important to encourage participation and involvement, but often these kinds of events do not go far enough, offering no way for sustainability to be incorporated more fully into the way we interact daily with fashion.
Fortunately, some of the designers were already thinking well past inner-tubes. Sonja Maus uses organic bamboo, cotton, silk and hemp fabrics in her No Formula label. In the 5 years since the label was established, Maus has experimented with differing design approaches to sustainability, mainly focussing on the material aspect of her garments.
The thoughts behind the exhibition are idealistic and inclusive, and we look forward to seeing the fashion contingent of The Green Day Out gather momentum and fashion credibility in the years to come, but it would be nice to see this issue explored from a more serious side as well.