Thursday, September 24, 2020

“We Can’t Keep Filling Fashion Weeks With Endless Product”: Marques Almeida Is Launching A Sustainability Manifesto

Talk to any designer about the fashion industry and it’s likely the phrase “hamster wheel” will come up in conversation more than once. For Marta Marques and Paolo Almeida, the defining metaphor of the modern fashion industry is something they’ve been trying to hop off for a while. Now, having experimented with the see-now-buy-now model, swapped London briefly for a catwalk season in Paris, cut back on the size and number of their collections, and introduced an upcycled diffusion line of one-offs made from deadstock, the duo’s latest Marques Almeida project in service of a slower, more realistic pace comprises a magazine.

Titled ‘See-Through’, the zine is the result of the last six months they’ve spent with their young family – the couple has two daughters, Maria, three, and Alice, eight months – and their parents and relations in their native Portugal. The duo has always split their time between Porto, where Marta grew up, and London, though this is the longest they have spent “at home” in a very long while. “It’s very hard to make any concrete plans – we’ve been just going with the flow,” Marta told Vogue, in a recent phone conversation.

The pandemic has been a time for reconnecting: with family, with nature (“I’m picking figs and olives straight from the trees – it beats Tesco on the Hackney Road!”) and with their manufacturers. They have a second, six-man studio set-up nearby, which works in tandem with their existing studio in London, and have been closer than ever to the Portuguese craftspeople who produce their off-beat, cool-girl clothes (on that note, a capsule collection with local artisans is in the works).

But back to the magazine, which comes in two parts. The first is what Marta calls “a community book”, curated by her sister and filled with photographs of friends, teachers, mentors, supporters and family in Portugal and London accompanied by quotes. “We asked them, ‘Who are you and what’s important to you right now?’ It was interesting to set our communities side by side, to share their struggles and vulnerabilities.” The second is a manifesto for sustainability, a driving force for the brand. 


Marques Almeida will release a small collection to market at the end of September or early October. Ultimately, however, the designer duo’s adventures in upcycling have radically changed their mindset. “After launching Remade [the upcycled collection they launched in June], which was in response to all our concerns about sustainability, we knew we couldn’t go back to just releasing collections as normal,” Marta explained. “We decided to set out our pledges – everything we do from now on will abide by those rules.”

These rules include talking to manufacturers to ensure fair pay; conducting a full-scale audit of the fabrics they use, and never using petroleum-based fibres unless they’re recycled; producing fewer collections a year that are more focussed. Other brands, energised by their approach to deadstock materials, are lining up for collaborations. Nevertheless: “For LFW we didn’t want to release a collection per se, we wanted to talk about the change that needs to happen, creating clothes that are geared towards finding solutions rather than trends,” said Marta. “We can’t keep filling Fashion Weeks with endless product.”

There is lots that remains uncertain. Everything – from weighing up whether organic cotton is “better” for the environment because it doesn’t require pesticides, though it does use more water, to whether the young family will come back to London in the immediate future – is up for discussion. “I miss the city, I miss the people, the proximity. But here, there is this whole other way of life that is calm,” she said. They are determined to remain experimental and curious. “Our motto was always about making a meaningful difference in fashion,” said Marta. “That’s what powered us to put an emphasis on diverse casting years ago, empowering the fashion industry to become more inclusive. But then you’re in the hamster wheel. And you realise – we can’t be part of this problem any more.”

She continued: “We are going to make mistakes, whether it’s in terms of social responsibility or community. It involves so much research. But lockdown totally reignited in us the problem-solving mentality. Hopefully amazing, beautiful, creative things will come out of it.” 

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