Is sustainability taking second place to social media in London Fashion Week?
In 2024, Fashion Week is entertainment. Full stop. Way back in what feels like the annals of history, the twice annual festivals of style were a distinctly functional part of the fashion ecosystem – a chance for buyers and editors to engage with coming seasons, acting as arbiters of taste and trend.
But the walls have been torn down. And now we all get to peek behind the curtain. In the era of always-on content, there’s often more cameras on the front row than the runway, more TikToks from behind the DJ booths of after parties than the actual clothes.
Fashion Week is a performance. A spectacle carefully curated to keep designers in the news cycle. And everyone can get a piece – even ‘regular people at home’ on social media.
In this world, brand building, and brand universe curation always comes first. In this world, SHEIN has its own runway shows, while Pretty Little Thing and Molly Mae make it on the official schedule. In this world, sustainability is always an afterthought.
But that doesn’t mean sustainability can’t also be part of the carnival of entertainment.
Local brand Collina Strada has been a highlight of New York Fashion Week for several seasons and their SS25 presentation, “Touch Grass”, was no exception. Guests sat in a grassy plot of land in between typical apartment blocks watched as models pushed lawn mowers, tossed mud, and cartwheeled down the runway. A spectacle, certainly. But also an invitation to dive deeper into the brand’s world, one driven by the message that “sustainability is a journey”. Ironically, while designed for virality, “Touch Grass” acted as a meme-ified provocation to log off and reconsider our relationship with Mother Earth.
We can pontificate about marketing sustainability all we want, but it’s the brands, publications, and influential voices that really live it that can make an impact. There’s a distinct opportunity to play the system at its own game, turning sustainable messaging into a form of scroll stopping entertainment that forces people to reconsider and reevaluate the systems we often take for granted.
