At the beginning of December, the winners of the Environmental Photographer of the Year competition were announced. Divided in different categories, the competition is organized by CIWEM, an environmental and water management charity, and WaterBear, a free streaming platform dedicated to the future of our planet, in collaboration with Nikon and Arup. The event is conceived as an international platform to raise awareness for the environmental issues that put our planet at risk.
One of the categories of the exhibition is entitled "Keeping 1.5 Alive" and features action-focused photography that highlights the urgency of curbing global warming. The title of the category refers indeed to reducing emissions and ensure that global warming stays within the 1.5 degrees Celsius increase above pre-industrial levels, to prevent the worst consequences of climate change and protect nature and humanity.
The 2022 winner of the category was a picture by Subrata Dey showing the aftermath of the chemical explosion and fire at the BM container depot in Sitakunda, Bangladesh, in June 2022.
Among the finalists in this category there was also a picture by Accra-based Ghanaian documentary photographer and independent researcher Muntaka Chasant from his series "The Environmental Cost Of Fast Fashion".
The aerial image, taken in July 2022, shows discarded garments washing up on the coast of Jamestown in Accra, Ghana. The mass-produced clothes imported as waste from industrialised countries are unsellable (some counties mark the waste as exports, but illegal waste trade is also booming), and end up decomposing and polluting the water and the beaches.
Chasant has been documenting the damages caused by electronic waste and plastic pollution in Ghana for a while now, while his series about the damages of fast fashion remains an open project chronicling from the front lines the consequences of our collective obsession with fast fashion. His image of decomposing garments on a beach should deeply shock us, yet fast fashion remains for many of us an addiction.
At the beginning of December, it was indeed announced that Chinese fast fashion giant Shein has overtaken Zara as the most frequently Googled fashion retailer in the world. According to keyword data analysed by price comparison website Money.co.uk, Shein was the most-searched retailer in 113 countries, leading across Africa, South America and Australia and Oceania. The retailer remains extremely popular for its extreme bargains and ludicrously cheap goods (over Black Friday this year it came up with crazy offers and discounts with some products sold for a few Euro cents or offering 90 percent off some items).
Yet there are ways to do things differently and a younger generation of designers seems genuinely interested in changing our attitudes towards waste. For example, Guangzhou-based designer Yueqi Qi is intent on changing our attitude towards made in China designs.
A graduate of Central Saint Martins, Yueqi Qi interned at a few luxury houses, including Chanel's embroidery atelier, before founding her own independent womenswear brand in 2019 and setting on finding new paths that can bridge the East and the West and bring back slow and intricate work from the Chinese tradition, rediscovering her country's handicrafts.
Yueqi Qi's S/S 23 collection started with an outer space inspiration, as the designer moved from astronauts, planets, the universe and the United States' Apollo 11 mission in 1969, the first crewed mission to land on the Moon. These elements materialized in abstract prints, tops and skirts made with patchworked images of planets or integrating embroidered and beaded planets.
While imagining astronauts in their freetime on planet Earth wearing blue jeans, Qi decided to include in her collection a sustainable elements. The designer comes from Guangzhou, an area known as a big supplier of denim and the waste in these factories proved an inspiration: Qi approached one of these factories and asked if she could use the discarded textiles and eventually ended up creating her new designs upcycling the materials she was given.
The collection is therefore balanced between two different moods – urban and luxurious. The upcycled denim pieces, including baggy pants and cropped tops and jackets at times evoking '90s silhouettes, fall in the former category, while the latter features designs made with reworked textiles transformed through surface techniques to resemble a rocky surface or the bark of a tree, and dresses or tops made with laser cut hearts, folded, twisted and chained through a suspension system the designer devised by herself and she also used to create long trains to transform a denim jacket into a dramatic coat.
The collection seems to tell us that, while we await the new era of space tourism and a confirmation of intelligent life beyond the solar system, we should take care of our planet, coming up with more sustainable options in fashion that allow us to rediscover handicrafts we are forgetting, while coming up with genuinely innovative techniques.
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