But while I make no claims to be a data cruncher (what scientific guide is there to unprecedented times, anyway?), I’m still glimpsing something hopeful coming out of these worst of times. The seeds of a better future taking shape; the promise of a time when irresponsibility stops. It’s huge, but it’s small scale and personal, too: somehow, we’re coming to learn that creativity and public-spiritedness are radical superpowers. And they lie in everyone’s hands.
I was at Miuccia Prada’s office in Milan on 21 February, a day I’ll never forget. I was about to start an interview with her for Vogue Japan (whose editors were already in lockdown because of coronavirus in Tokyo), when Miuccia looked up and remarked, “The news of this morning is that there’s a case of coronavirus in Codogno, a little town near here,” she said. The air froze. Who could have foreseen that within a month, on 17 March, she and her husband Patrizio Bertelli would be donating six intensive care units to hospitals in Milan? “That day was our 9/11 in Italy,” says Tiziana Cardini, my Vogue Runway colleague.
The fashion industry has answered the call
As if Wuhan wasn’t warning enough in December, we’ve been seeing horrendous and piteous things as coronavirus death rates climb relentlessly outside China since. The hammer blows have rained down hard on fashion: on laid-off factory and mill workers; on the freelance ecosystem of models, photographers, hair and makeup artists and everyone involved with the production of shoots and shows; on students who won’t get the graduation shows they always dreamed of; on store workers’, retailers’ and designers’ businesses of every size. Yet, wherever it is on the planet we’re holed up, there is no one who hasn’t worried more about pleas of frontline medical staff for protective clothing and equipment. This is the major public health issue that has landed squarely on fashion’s doorstep, knocking on its conscience — and to an amazing degree, the fashion industry has been answering.
Across the board, there’s been a swift response from everyone, from young designers sewing in their bedrooms to factory owners with huge capacity, to the actions of the giant luxury brands and conglomerates. Nobody waited for somebody else to act. “I can’t sit here just staring at the wall,” said young British designer Phoebe English in London, who has spent the past week researching the safe construction of masks, asking, asking and asking, and spreading word to her peers about how to enlist production capacity on the UK government’s hastily set-up portal for goods and services. “At first, we started cold-emailing large organisations to see if there was anything we could do to help,” English says. “We didn’t get any responses. So I thought I’d try social media. We were immediately flooded with advice, tonnes and tonnes of people offering to help from their sewing machines at home; people from Hong Kong sharing videos of how to make DIY masks, people sending charts on the breathability of different household textiles.” She continues: “I’m still carefully sifting through all the information. More keeps coming every day.”
Meanwhile in Prague, self-isolating fashion students from Umprum Academy of Art, Architecture and Design instagrammed themselves sewing masks, heeding a call from Czech Republic local authorities for “simple sewn masks for seniors, volunteers or shop workers — so we got involved,” Czech fashion designer Alice Klouzková messaged me. Having released ‘how-to’ videos, she says, “Now the whole country is sewing!” Just watching videos online of young women such as Alice sewing and ironing piles of masks feels uplifting.
Information is running fast, though, and the technical specifics are vitally important to get right. The MoMu Fashion Museum Antwerp released an open-source design and making tutorial, in conjunction with the Belgian Ministry of Public Health. Kaat Debo, director of the fashion museum, emailed: “We’ve donated our entire stock of Tyvek, which we use to make covers for our objects, as well as our stock of cotton ribbon to sewing ateliers in Antwerp.” Tyvek, she explains, is “synthetic, breathable and water repellent, so ideal for face masks.”
A spontaneous community effort
The fashion industry is often stigmatised for its self-regarding lack of social responsibility, yet exactly the opposite is happening now. People are learning at speed, sharing design intel, becoming conversant with scientific fact — organising, co-operating, adapting and working really hard to come up with new solutions. That this is happening when nobody is making any money — but especially when they aren’t — is of course part of the general mood of volunteering and neighbourliness, which has surfaced as one of society’s biggest saving graces in the last few weeks. Perhaps we’ll look back on this spontaneous community effort to produce face masks as a decisive test-run for a new behaviour and thinking in fashion that couldn’t have been dreamt of even a month ago.
Facts must be adhered to. Designers have quickly established that although homemade masks are not suitable for hospital use (so donating them is redundant), wearing one if you venture out, or if you’re working in a public-facing job or with vulnerable people, is of public benefit. (However, if you’re wearing any face mask — homemade or bought — it’s vitally important that you must not remove the mask and put it on again, or touch your face while wearing it. And don’t put it in your bag after — machine or hand wash it straightaway.) The terror of Covid-19 is that you’re at your most infectious two days before you realise you’re sick; and some remain asymptomatic. But there is also social responsibility in not using up supplies. “There is more and more evidence from countries where people are being advised to make their own at home in order to free up reserves of the certified ones for medical teams and their support staff,” says English. “Either way, we’re in a worldwide pandemic, and stocks of these items will be suffering.”
The generosity movement
The emergency response across the fashion industry has been quicker than that of most western governments. The sudden realisation of how unprepared and uncoordinated they are — and of how the competitive free market works against fair distribution of supplies — surfaced on 22 March when New York governor Andrew Cuomo posted on Twitter: “I’m calling on the Federal Government to nationalize the medical supply chain.”
One of the first responses was from Stacey Bendet of Alice + Olivia. “I have factories that can make masks and gowns. We need help identifying what is most urgent and we can mobilise the fashion manufacturers,” she wrote. “But we need guidance in terms of [medically] approved materials.” Cuomo replied: “Thank you so much. Really appreciate this. DM-ing you.” In Britain, the flood of fashion volunteers, from sample machinists at home to brands with UK factories suddenly lying idle quickly overwhelmed the first government point of contact: they have not been prepared. Now, the British Fashion Council has been asked to filter and channel requests. “There is a sense that the fashion industry will do the right thing,” says BFC CEO Caroline Rush.
So it is proving, right to the top. Could it be that living through time of coronavirus will reconfigure the organisation of fashion, fundamentally changing how brands practice their role? I hope it can be so. The big guys — normally ruthless competitors — immediately opened their financial reserves to try to save lives in Italy. Giorgio Armani (who had been prescient in running his women’s mainline show without an audience back in February at the Milan shows) pledged €1.25m (£1,101,169) to Milanese hospitals and to Protezione Civile, Italy’s civil defence. Donatella Versace and her daughter Allegra Versace Beck donated €200K (£183,528) to the ICU at San Raffaele hospital, saying: “This is when we, as a society, need to stand together and care for one another.”
Remo Ruffini of Moncler committed a further €10m (£9,189,160) to assist the emergency construction of a hospital in the former Fiera Milano area — where the international fashion audience used to flock to shows in the ’80s and ’90s. “Milan is a city that has given us all an extraordinary time,” he said in a press release. “It is everyone’s duty to give back to the city what it has given us so far.”
What we know now is that vast companies can think on their feet and change their practices, just as quickly as they wish, and are doing things they never imagined they could: a new-think time that surely has long-term potential for a revolution in sustainability. LVMH, L'Oréal and Coty have swiftly repurposed factories to produce hand sanitiser for medical use. Gucci is awaiting medical authority go-ahead to make hospital masks and overalls in its Italian factories. Its parent company, Kering — which owns Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen — has donated $2 million (£1.7 million) to coronavirus medical research. In Sweden, H&M, and Inditex — the owner of Zara in Spain — are stepping up to offer the EU mass manufacture of protective masks, gowns, gloves, goggles and caps to meet the emergency.
The big question is whether this spontaneous surge of human spirit, practicality and creativity will grow strongly enough, for long enough, to turn fashion’s priorities around. Will this nightmare time actually become a historic and positive turning-point, converting both industry producers and wearers to, literally, a new way of seeing and valuing clothes? There’s a possibility that all these weeks of staying at home will result in discovering a streak of waste-not creativity we never knew we had, also giving children the knowledge that they can use their hands to make things. Already the mushrooming crafting and mending DIY videos on Instagram and YouTube say that. By all means, have fun making face masks! (There are patterns for children’s sizes, too.)
These unprecedented experiences — the grand corporate gestures, and the personal ones being of equal moral value — will change us in ways we can’t yet foresee. So far, fashion and the many people working within it have behaved in exemplary ways. I’m hoping that this hideous time will make so many things so much better.
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