The Sustainable Stylist

It is the designer who determines the fundamental choices of yarns, dyeing techniques, treatments, knitting and tailoring techniques.

Through style, or the absence of it, the product remains trivial, or otherwise it acquires a soul that shows and tells a story.

This concept is well known by any photographer, communication manager or any social media manager: without a soul, a product is ordinary, difficult to describe and impossible to sell.

Without style, one item is the same as another.

The designer puts a bit of soul into what he makes; each item in the collection will tell a story, tell a passion and communicate without any artifice.

So who is a sustainable designer?

The one who knows how can combine, through his designs, the ethical but also passionate  contemporary people’s choices.

Sustainability is achieved through the choice of yarns and fabrics, through the harmony of colors, to the dyeing and knitting techniques, respecting the 5 golden rules:

• Responsible and conscious personal choices

• Deep knowledge of the product

• Respect for the environment and traditions

• Innovative and global vision

• Deep and receptive soul

The traditional designer creates collections in order to respect the traditional fashion system timings; the seasons with their tight protocols and timelines that are now out of tune with reality.

The collections shows quickly, and do not have the chance to settle in people’s minds and to be properly told and perceived. Only a few great designers have begun to change their fashion weeks schedules.

In a completely distorted logic, the summer collections arrive in the store in the middle of winter and the winter collections are on display next to the first sunburn cream!

To respect these deadlines, the designer must design the winter collections in a time of total confusion, lack of raw materials, excessive increase in transport costs and with a stratospheric incidence of synthetic and artificial materials casts.

Designers have to create with certificated yarns rather than qualitive and fancy yarns. Can a product designed in these conditions really be sustainable? Alongside the sustainability of the yarn, we must also consider  the  designer’s sustainability, that relies on his ability to interpret our needs, the needs of our inner being, that is far from being perfect.

The sustainable designer must create contemporary products that reflect the evolution of the spontaneous trends of the world population. For this reason, the designer must first of all be glocal, because first he perceives the needs of the environment that surrounds him, and interprets them transforming the needs into satisfaction,

Since the glocal world is now a fusion of elements from all over the world, the designer interprets international trends in a glocal way and creates new ones. New products for the new tribes that populate our territories. Only through this glocal vision of the global world, style will be able to evolve in a healthy and innovative way. Alongside vintage themes, contemporary themes must make their way, grow old with us and become the vintage of the next millennium.

Only this kind of designers will be sustainable. Sustainability is not just about the product and yarn choice but also about the ability of the yarn to adapt to our needs. We need a more respectful world and therefore we need certified and sustainable yarns, but we also need respect for centuries-old traditions and small local activities that allow a more open and more spontaneous and creative market to exists. We cannot let disappear very noble fibers that, by their nature, cannot be certified. We cannot discard pure cashmere for recycled cashmere that would be more appropriately defined recycled goat’s wool. We cannot watch entire mohair farms disappear and nomadic goat herders abandon the traditional jobs in favor of certified industrial farms according to stringent global regulations.

This sustainable product must come from the combination of the design and the choices of the sustainable designer and his soul; because the designer is the interpreter of the soul, but the soul is not only that pure, clean and sometimes recycled soul that appears in advertising.

Designers also interprets the dark, obscure soul that is so intense in contemporary people and that has characterized us since the darkest Middle Ages.

It can’t all be purity, it takes shade to appreciate light, it also takes healthy polyamide, ostentatious polyester and the controversial Angora and Mohair.

The only thing that must not be missing is respect, conscious choice and modest quantities.

The real problem is the worldwide overproduction and business for business. Let’s leave  the style free as it’s sustainable by itself as design is studied and conscious.