Artist Anne Patterson is known for her installations made with miles and miles of multi-coloured ribbons hanging from the ceilings of buildings. There's usually art and architecture in these installations as the colours of the ribbons create visually striking effects, at times symbolising rays of light that connect the earth and the sky, while the verticality of the site-specific works highlights the forms and configuration of the buildings where they hang.
Inside the Bovisa warehouse, a former mechanical components factory in the outskirts of Milan where Ermenegildo Zegna's A/W 2020 collection was showcased yesterday, Patterson added another discipline – fashion – to her installation (that will be open until to the public and to schools as well until the end of January).
For Zegna's runway, Patterson designed indeed an installation that features 37 kilometers of ribbons made with leftover fabrics from Sartori's latest six collections for Zegna.
Entitled "Art For Earth", the installation looks beautiful, but, once you realise where the main materials for it have come from, you are put in front of a tragic reality – the waste produced by the fashion industry is immense. In the case of Zegna's weaving companies, the wastage rate is as high as 50%.
Though Creative Director Alessandro Sartori knows that it may be impossible for a company such as Zegna to produce zero waste, a strong will to reduce this percentage prompted him to create designs using recycled fibres and textiles. Sartori started this new semantics of sustainability with the A/W 19 collection and the S/S 20 designs.
The latest Zegna collection adds up new words to Sartori's sustainable language: wool, nylon and cashmere fibers are recycled and upcycled, they are used to make new textiles or employed for the lining and padding of suits and coats and stuffed into puffer jackets. There's a mantra behind all this - #UseTheExisting - where "the existing" may come from waste materials generated during the production of new collections, from unsold garments, prototypes or items with production imperfections.
The outerwear offer was rich and included boxy and roomy coats with voluminous shoulders, blanket coats made with patchwork textiles, puffer jackets in quilted leather or recycled nylon, and bombers made with recycled fabrics.
Suits were characterised by a precise cut and and at times by a visual and tactile quality thanks to the moiré-like weave, check and digital abstract mountains patterns.
There were also optical effects such as zig-zag patterns created with recycled cashmere yarns hand-woven by the spinners at San Patrignano (the Zegna Foundation is a supporter of the rehab community) and characterised by the Zegna Couture logo and the tree, symbol of the community.
The palette of the collection and some of the effects were inspired by photographic filters, but this wasn't the only connection with photography: on other runways you may see a collaboration with a shoe brand, but Sartori opted instead for a project with an iconic camera brand - Leica - coming up with cross body bags inspired by photographers and camera covers. The collaboration between the two brands will continue in the next advertising campaign that will explore modern masculinity and the female gaze.
There is just one problem with Sartori's collections: the designer loves details - double lapels, zipper pockets and double-breasted jackets with soft belts reminiscent of smoking jackets - that in his language represent ways to tweaks and update the sartorial tradition. But such elements are best appreciated when seen in person than from a distance during a runway show.
Yet there is something we can all grasp and understand from such a runway, even if we're sitting in front of a computer screen or watching the show on our mobile phones: deconstructing a garment and using it to build another design and then maybe disassemble the latter to create an art installation, is not a mere arty exercise in recycling and upcycling. Sustainability is indeed not a trend, but a lifestyle the fashion industry must adopt if it really wants to produce genuinely timeless designs.
Comments