The Coronavirus outbreak halted many industries, among them fashion. Yet in Italy, despite the country is registering new cases, the peak seems to have passed, and a few shops started reopening. A final decision regarding specific industries (in particular the garment, textile, accessory, leather goods, furniture and automotive sectors), will arrive shortly before the end of the lockdown (currently set for 3rd May). But at the moment there are already debates about plans for reorganising working shifts, to guarantee the health and safety of the workers, especially for those regions who weren't hit as bad as the North of Italy.
Fashion industry insiders, in the meantime, have expressed their worries about the orders for the A/W 2020-21 collections and many businesses showed concern about competition coming from Asia as the Chinese factories have slowly started reopening.
The lockdown has left thousands of workers at home (130,000 only in the Tuscany region) and their future remains in a way uncertain. Yet there are a series of videos posted on the YouTube channel of French designer Marine Serre that indirectly pay homage to the workers behind her garments.
The videos are posted under the "Regeneration" moniker and they show how different discarded fabrics and materials - denim, towels, checked plaids, silk scarves, leather deadstock, bedsheets and crochet tablecloths - upcycled to make Serre's designs (the videos are perfect to celebrate the annual Earth Day on April 22).
Some videos were published at the end of last year, others yesterday, but from all of them you can easily guess that recycling and upcycling are extremely time-consuming and labour intensive (you have to source the materials, but you must also try and transform them into something completely different). Besides, the videos show how the vision a designer may have would never happen if it weren't for these skilled workers.
The process showing the jacquard towels being recycled is maybe more interesting than the denim as you can see the pieces being deconstructed and reconstructed by the artisans (we are already used to see denim being upcycled and recycled, so that's maybe less new, yet equally interesting).
In some cases, we are also shown how the pieces are finished with Serre's trademark crescent moon logo made with a UV technique that gives the items an embossed effect.
The floral-cloqué towel designs and the white upcycled cotton-crochet top were showcased on the S/S 20 runway, that was entitled "Marée Noire", meaning "black tide", but also "oil spill", a collection that represented the consequences of an apocalypse in which only a few people survived (a very scary theme and, sadly, a prescient collection).
Upcycling has become part of Serre's ethos and on her S/S 20 and A/W 20 runways we have seen quite a few pieces integrating towels, tableclothes and rugs.
At times the results were a little bit too reminiscent of Martin Margiela's upcycled Artisanal designs, while at others they seemed to be a bit too avant-garde for everyday wear, yet the possibilities of radically transforming an existing material into something else are always exciting.
Most of these pieces are recycled in France, Portugal or Italy, in small workshops with artisans mainly using needle and thread or in factories with high-tech equipment.
Seeing these videos with the noises of the machines and the voices in the background makes you think about the many factories that are currently closed or that have been reconverted to manufacture face masks and PPE.
The videos leave us with a few dilemmas: will we see more garments being made with recycled and upcycled materials in future, after the Coronavirus pandemic will be over? And what will happen to the workers in these factories and in ateliers all over the world?
Hopefully health will be put before profit and they will go back to work as soon as possible, but in perfectly safe conditions (reopening too early would be obvsiouly risky, while keeping these factories closed means losing money and, for the owners of the factories, laying off the workforce). But, while watching these videos, let's also wonder if, once the industry restarts, it will be able to refocus on the real people that matter the most in this business - the workers behind the collections - as opposed to all the peripheral figures, including the influencers, gravitating around it, that in more recent years have stolen the scene.
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