If you feel suspicious or unclear about the fashion world’s relationship to “sustainability,” you’re not alone. Designers and shoppers alike are already skeptical of a term that arguably emerged in the mainstream only last year. What is the term really selling?
For smart designers, the climate crisis presents an opportunity to think more responsibly, more creatively, more shrewdly about how they use fabrics and how much stuff they produce. Savvy designers will use the “buy less” mandate to also make less things, and with more impact—more rigorous, more purposeful, more intentional. This is, of course, a challenge: How can you say more with less?
Hillary Taymour has run her brand, Collina Strada, since 2009, but has experienced what seems like an awakening of consciousness and creativity over the past few seasons. She’ll tell you off the bat that hers is not a sustainable brand—that’s a really difficult thing to do, as Noah’s Brendon Babenzien will also readily admit. “We’re taking as many steps [as we can] for a small business, without jeopardizing our design integrity,” she said in an interview at her studio late last week, just a few days before her Sunday night show. “We’ve always made things locally, but it’s easy to do because I’m a small-level scale. The most we ever make is 500 pieces of something, so I can manage it a lot easier.”
This season, Taymour is undertaking a new upcycled fabric project that shows the challenges—and benefits!—of environmentally conscious design. She has partnered with The OR, an organization that works to find ways to repurpose used clothing—15 million items of secondhand clothing arrive in Ghana weekly, Taymour explained, with 40% of those pieces becoming waste that sits open on the ground. “They’re trying to make a factory where they can start shredding the clothes and making down puffer jackets,” Taymour said of their efforts, and for this collection, the organization brought several T-shirts back from Ghana for Taymour, who is using them to make dresses for the Fall 2020 collection. About sixty of the shirts were tidily folded in stacks and tucked above the wall storage units in Taymour’s Chinatown studio—when you’re out of the materials to upcycle with, the modest piles underscored, you’ve met the limits of your initiative.
Of course, it helps that Taymour, who is in her early thirties, isn’t dreaming of world domination. “Collina will always be like this,” she said, her Pomeranian, Powwow, lazing in her lap. Taymour has a bit of a stony, acidic Daria Morgendorffer-grows-up vibe, and the voice to match. “I really want it to stay as community-based and fun and high-energy and not let it get too commercial.” Four young women were putting the collection together around us, in a pleasantly disorganized and almost-cramped studio: two were customizing Hoka sneakers with blue paint; another was perfecting a crinoline skirt under a green, earthy print ball skirt; a fourth was tapping on a laptop. A few minutes later two of her models wandered in—one, a handsome friend who told us about his new role in a throuple; the other, the mother of the brand’s stylist—and pulled clothes on with the simple pleasure of playing dress-up.
Taymour imagines she’ll “end up somewhere a little bit more commercial to help” with the bottom line at some point (most likely in a creative director role at a bigger brand), but “I’m really happy with the level of business we’re doing now. You couldn’t really ask for better store placements.” She was recently picked up by Ssense, but most of her stores are in London—the clothes have a perfect gallery-desk-to-nightclub attitude that meshes well with the young designer scene there.
In fact, it’s notable that Taymour’s clothes have gotten better as her efforts to design more responsibly have ramped up. The Fall 2020 season she showed on Sunday was particularly loose, fun, and extremely wearable, combining the chaotic hues and partyish energy of Jean-Paul Gaultier with the homespun look and anti-corporate consciousness of Vivienne Westwood. (Her clothes are well-made but aren’t works of great tailoring perfection, which she acknowledges, somewhat flirtatiously, as an asset.) And in the grain of Westwood and Gaultier, she thinks of her pieces not so much as precious collectibles but as things that you’ll just actually want to wear forever. “I just make really crazy pieces,” she said. “And if you like the vibe, you’re going to keep it for a very long time.”
As Sunday’s show demonstrated, Taymour has a great eye for prints—a rose bedspread is a standout in the Fall 2020, and her acidic, far-out printed trousers are a standout men’s offering. She has a sense of humor, sending her models down the runway with crystal-embellished hoes and turning a pair of Hokas into a tiny lawn, complete with a picket fence. “How can we make it weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder?” she said she asks her team while designing. “And then when it’s too weird, we go back one step.” Her clothes don’t feel too heavy, even if what she has to say can be. She seems constantly to think of the impact of every element of what she does: the plant and vegetable-filled set for the show was donated in its entirety to Nolita’s Elizabeth Street Garden afterwards.
Taymour said that part of what makes the conversation about the fashion industry and environment so tricky is the lack of information and the lack of “regulation. Legislation. Any type of rules. I just feel like, it’s all lies, and anyone can say, ‘Oh, this is sustainable, because I use less water.’ H&M can say, ‘This is sustainable.’ ‘This is made in a fair wage factory.’ But who’s tracking that for them? Who’s saying that they can put that on a garment? No one. Literally no one is saying that. People make shoes in Morocco, they package them in Italy, and they have a ‘Made In Italy’ sticker on them. There are no fucking rules. You can do whatever you want and get away with it.”
“There’s so much product being made,” she continued. “There’s no FDA for clothes, but there should be, especially if you’re claiming things like that.”
With that in mind, she said creating opportunities to share information about designing more responsibly is a priority for her. “There’s not a community [to say], this is how we can do better. That information typically isn’t free,” she said. “I know that nothing is free in this world, but I should be able to have a roundtable discussion about [how to do this] in New York,” imagining a forum where she and other designers can exchange ideas about how to use deadstock fabrics and source materials like her rose “sylk,” made from rose petals broken down to a cellulose and then woven like traditional silk. “I’ll share how we’re doing better so we can all be the most ‘better’ we can be. Because it’s for the world. It’s not for us.”
