Global Fashion Agenda to launch new film series on sustainability in fashion

Global Fashion Agenda (GFA), the non-profit organisation that encourages industry collaboration on sustainability in fashion, is launching a film series with the BBC in 2023.

Swati Bhat

The series will be produced for the GFA by BBC Storyworks Commercial Productions and will focus on social and environmental sustainability in the fashion industry. It will be hosted on a dedicated BBC.com microsite and will offer an immersive experience with in-depth coverage spanning films, articles, infographics and animations.

Its aim is to educate consumers as to the scale of the issue and the promise of solutions, while also galvanising leaders in the sector to follow the blueprint of those that have been successful.

Federica Marchionni, chief executive of the Global Fashion Agenda, said in a statement: “We are delighted to be working with BBC StoryWorks to amplify educational content on sustainability in fashion.

“Indeed, to transform the industry and become net positive, it is crucial that we keep inspiring and educating people about the ways we can produce, distribute, and consume fashion sustainably. For a world beyond the next season, we invite everyone to learn and be part of a needed and possible change.”

GFA hopes to showcase the challenges facing the fashion industry in becoming more sustainable, as well as highlighting the progress being made and is calling on members of the GFA network to share their stories for potential inclusion in the series regarding social impact, materials, stewardship, and circularity.

Simon Shelley, vice president of programme partnerships at BBC Studios, added: “We’re thrilled to be creating a series with GFA looking at how fashion can put back more into society and the environment than it takes out. Fashion can change society as well as reflect it – we hope to tell stories that reflect a pivotal moment for the industry and one that will set a trend for sustainable future.”

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The gauzy fabric isn't just for women’s lingerie and dresses. Guys are flirting with the see-through

When Kid Cudi attended the CFDA Fashion Awards last year, he wore a lace wedding gown with a matching veil and a five o’clock shadow. When Lil Nas X went to the MTV Video Music Awards in 2019, he paired a silver suit with a ruffled lace shirt. And earlier this year, when Jared Leto promoted his Marvel film “Morbius” at a Los Angeles premiere, he wore a flowing cape made of white lace.

The trend is not limited to red carpets. In recent years, lace has appeared on the men’s wear runways for Burberry, Moschino, Saint Laurent, Versace and other labels. Even mainstream stores including Walmart and Amazon now sell lace shirts and accessories for men. Once consigned to bridal wear and women’s lingerie, lace is being embraced by a new generation, particularly younger men, who are drawn to the fabric’s history and craftsmanship, and by more relaxed attitudes about gender-fluid clothing. “Maybe lace is the final frontier” in men’s wear fabrics, said Michele Majer, a textile historian, who with Emma Cormack and Ilona Kos, organized “Threads of Power,” an exhibition about lace that opened in September at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. The show, the first major one about lace in New York City in almost 40 years, charts five centuries of the gauzy material as it morphed from an aristocratic accessory flaunted by both sexes to an everyday consumable worn almost exclusively by women. Illustrated with pieces from the Textilmuseum in St. Gallen, Switzerland, “Threads of Power” documents how lace originated in 16th-century Europe in two primary styles: bobbin lace, which is made by twisting flax or silk threads around pins to create elaborate motifs; and needle lace, in which the airy, patterned fabric is built up with tiny stitches.

Both methods are excruciatingly slow, labor-intensive and expensive. Kingdoms passed sumptuary laws to keep lace off the riffraff. (They wore it anyway.) And while some highborn women picked up lacemaking as a hobby, it was mostly made by women or girls working for scraps in cottages or convents, beyond the protection of artisanal guilds. With the French Revolution came a repudiation of frippery. Men’s wear became fitted and monochromatic, and remains that way more than 200 years later, while lace returned to women’s fashion and became more democratic with the improvement of machine-made textiles. Lace by its very nature is paradoxical. It covers and reveals at the same time, managing to be both chaste (like wedding veils) and provocative (like underwear). This peekaboo quality amps up the eroticism, and yet lace is also the stuff of grandmotherly hankies and doilies. This is why lace became “kind of taboo for men,” Ms. Majer said. So what accounts for its newfound unisex popularity? Claire Wilcox, the senior curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, sees lace as the latest effort by some men to reclaim their inner peacocks. In mid-18th century Britain, wealthy dandies known as Macaronis returned from Grand Tour sojourns in Italy wearing flamboyant outfits that were the sartorial equivalent of the silky, flowing pasta they dug into. In the late 19th-century, Oscar Wilde personified an aesthetic rebellion against the stovepipe rigidity of Victorian men’s wear. In the 1970s, glam rockers wore colorful, flouncy clothing to defy postwar propriety. “I think this literal loosening of the fabrics was associated with the loosening of the morals,” Ms. Wilcox said. Lace also fits into a broader shift toward gender-fluid fashion, with younger consumers blurring the lines between what was traditionally considered male and female. “Everything is softer, more fluid, more decorative,” Ms. Wilcox said. In “Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear,” an exhibition at the V&A, which Ms. Wilcox organized with Rosalind McKever and runs through Nov. 6, there is a pink satin men’s ensemble with a lace jabot, or neck frill, designed by Harris Reed, who was recently named the creative director at Nina Ricci. The garment evokes 18th-century British aristocracy by way of the New York Dolls. “It’s a new form of dandyism and lace very delightfully has got a part to play in this,” Ms. Wilcox said.

Whereas past generations might have worn lace for shock value, young men today are simply indulging in free expression, said Mathew Gnagy, a textile maker and historian who heads the costume center at Colonial Williamsburg, the living-history museum in Virginia. Mr. Gnagy points to the ease with which Harry Styles turned up at the 2019 Met Gala in a sheer black blouse by Gucci that was frilled with lace. “It’s not about masculine or feminine,” Mr. Gnagy said. “Anybody with any presenting gender can wear that outfit. That’s the essence of what unisex ought to be.” Mr. Gnagy was less complimentary about the clothes he sees on runways that simply translate conventional men’s wear into machine lace. “When lace is handmade, it has unique properties that allow seams to be eliminated, making garments look like they organically grew into a particular shape,” he said. “I would love to see designers going a little bit further.” One of those designers may be Kasuni Rathnasuriya, who has been working with lacemakers in her native Sri Lanka to produce women’s clothing for her label, Kúr, since 2012. At the urging of some clients, she offered men’s wear for the first time this year, including $250 cotton shirts with panels of handmade bobbin lace. “I was surprised by the fact that people accepted it,” she said. “I didn’t receive a single negative comment about it.” Other designers are drawn to the stories that lace can tell, whether it’s the pattern that has evolved across centuries and continents, or the history of its makers and owners. For Emily Bode, 33, the designer behind the handcrafted men’s wear label Bode, lace evokes 1950s America, “when people had more frequent formal dining in their houses” and other social rituals, she said. “It is a material that has so much depth to it.” Since founding her label six years ago with an emphasis on upcycling, Ms. Bode said she has noticed more “sentimentality” around dressing that extends to emotional fabrics like lace. “I don’t think it’s completely mainstream yet, but I think people are really thoughtful about what they buy.”

Tristan Detwiler, the founder of Stan, a Los Angeles surfer-inspired label, wearing a jacket, shirt and shorts made from antique lace.

Antique lace also speaks to Tristan Detwiler, 25, the Southern California founder of Stan, a surf-inspired label that also uses vintage fabrics. His first formative encounter with lace involved a table runner that belonged to a friend’s grandmother, and he’s been incorporating it into his men’s wear ever since. An 18th-century lace tablecloth from England, for example, was crafted into a $5,000 shawl-collared blazer, with the original scalloped hem used as edging and the inverted cherubs falling in perfect symmetry at the shoulders. The fabric is a little yellow, but details like that, according to his website, “are reminders of its history.” “Even the grungy skaters and surfers want style,” he said. While most lace today is made by machine, the art of making lace by hand has not been entirely lost.

Six years ago, three lace artisans in New York City founded the Brooklyn Lace Guild to teach traditional lacemaking to a new generation. Elena Kanagy-Loux, 36, a textile artist and historian who has 400,000 followers on TikTok, traveled to Slovenia in the 2010s to learn the craft. Devon Thein, another founder, learned 50 years ago from a Danish sea captain’s wife in New Jersey.

Both women said the pandemic was a boon to lacemaking, not just because crafting was huge, but because lacemaking, it turned out, could be taught on Zoom. The guild holds demonstrations with bobbins, needles and shuttles at the Bard exhibition on weekends through December.

The guild’s motto, Ms. Kanagy-Loux noted, is, “Lace is for everyone.”

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Pimped up or burned out? These are the four big denim trends for SS24 according to Denim Dudes

Amidst all the denim blue at Kingpins, it was a colourful affair on the top floor of the denim fair’s home SugarCity on Thursday afternoon, October 20. There, trend watchers Amy Leverton and Shannon Reddy of Denim Dudes presented the denim trends for SS24, with a colourful PowerPoint full of images for inspiration.

Swati Bhat

Examples of trend silhouettes were displayed on the ground floor of the fair. Image: FashionUnited

Reddy and Leverton grouped the trends into four broader 'trend stories': 'XS', 'Burned out', 'The last tourist' and 'Ethos'. All four stories, according to Leverton and Reddy, are in their own way a response to the turbulent times we live in, ranging from escapism to rebellion and from depression to hope. Those tendencies were translated on site into colour schemes, washes, stitching and silhouettes.

XS

If you say 'XS' out loud in English, the native language of both the American Reddy and the British Leverton, you get 'excess'. In a year and a half, that excess will typify the style of Gen Z in particular, the generation of young adults who are now approximately between fourteen and 25 years old. But that excess is given a clear direction: it is cast in the form of noughties silhouettes and very personal creative excesses.

For denim, that includes the return of the Canadian tuxedo, the top-to-toe denim suit worn by Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears at the American Music Awards in 2001. Reddy and Leverton also predicted the return of low-cut jeans. And of course, XS was not spelled that way by accident: the title references the tiny shorts that will also make a reappearance.

At the same time, in 2024, wearers are putting their own spin on it, with inventive ways to personalise denim. For example, garments are worn backwards or upside down, cut into pieces, or decorated with paint and rhinestones.

Minishorts by Diesel SS23. Image: Catwalkpictures

Burned out

As a trend story, 'Burned Out' is seemingly diametrically opposed to the glitter and glamour of the previous one. It is a reaction to the same circumstances, but darker and rawer, and based on a more pessimistic view of the future. As an example, Reddy and Leverton displayed Rick Owens' recent show in Paris, where the backdrop consisted of the high white walls of the Palais de Tokyo and three burning globes along the catwalk. The world is on fire, Owens seemed to have said with the smoking orbs.

Burned Out is also a reaction to celebrity culture and the spectacular images of social media, and contrasts it with realism. The popularity of the Be Real app, on which users share an unpolished image of their lives every day, also testifies to this penchant for realism. The characters in this trend story - summer or not - are dressed in more subdued colours, predominantly in black and grey. The silhouettes are looser and a lot more casual. In response to the ecological crisis, a lot of denim is also reused in new garments.

Ethos

The last story is the most commercial, according to Leverton and Reddy. 'Ethos' builds on last year's theme 'Softly', but according to the two has a more spiritual touch. This story focuses on connecting with nature, at a time when man is largely alienated from it. This connection is sometimes very practical: materials and dyes, for example, are made from only natural fibres and ingredients.

Denim pants and jackets are loose or even oversized and offer the wearer comfort and room to move. As far as materials are concerned, there is as little processing as possible: there is a lot of use of ‘raw’ denim, unwashed and untorn - the artificial is kept outside the door. However, techniques can be used to make denim look as if it has been bleached outside by the sun. The loose silhouettes and soft look, according to Reddy and Leverton, make these denim trends appealing to a large audience.

The last tourist

For the third story, Reddy and Leverton begin with a striking critique of today's tourism industry, and the way in which tourists - especially on all-inclusive travel - withdraw from the locals of the place they visit. Related to this is the phenomenon of cultural appropriation in fashion, in which specifically Western brands adopt techniques and motifs from other clothing cultures and take advantage of them without giving anything in return.

In contrast, Leverton and Reddy set a story based on admiration and respect for different cultures and on mutual curiosity and cooperation. From this they distil a denim trend in which materials, prints and techniques from all over the world come together, from quilting to boro and patchwork. In addition, there is also a vibrant colour palette including popping blue, pink and yellow.

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