Postcovid fashion: creative euphoria in sustainable garments

By juan losa @jotalosa.

Designers polish their sketches and big brands finalize their bets.The pandemic opens up new avenues for fashion that go through greater stylistic exuberance and growing environmental responsibility.

With the vaccine in the making, everything indicates that from now on the staff will once again wear, with greater or lesser success, their prized clothes on the street. Gone are those days of pajamas and shabby tracksuits. Behind also the thing to dress half to give the face via Zoom with the calf exposed. The progressive lag demands a certain stylistic decorum and the dictates of fashion, with one foot in art and the other in the market, emerge again to tell us, with a disdainful voice, what to wear and what not to wear. So far what we have seen has been a succession of impossible masks. For a small fee, we have been able to curse, whistle and even sneeze behind vintage prints, cinephile screen prints or patriotic motifs. Sophistication conquered our muzzles. It turned our walks into masquerades and, incidentally, allowed us to project what we are (or want to be) without having to open our mouths. Which, in certain cases, is advantageous. "All fashion brands have started to manufacture and design their own masks, they are one more element to combine with the rest of the style and they have a great visual impact due to their location on the face, just below the eyes," says Elisenda Estanyol, expert in corporate communication at the UOC. But beyond this new complement that came to stay in favor of prevention, it is worth wondering what fashion the pandemic leaves us and what future lines its makers plan to travel. The experts' response predicts a chromatic feast. According to Estanyol, "if we stick to previous crises and how they have come out of them, it is not unreasonable to think that we are heading towards a moment of creative euphoria in fashion, a commitment to volumes and color, as well as eye-catching designs and the contrast. " So if you are a classic type, know that difficult times are coming, wait there with your V-neck sweater and her herringbone coat until they look better, don't forget that fashion is cyclical and your time will come again. . For Daniel Cantó, professor of journalism and fashion at the LCI Barcelona School of Design, a new "happy twenties" is coming in the field of fashion. A time of excess that seeks to redeem the trauma of confinement. "In the end, fashion is emotional and many people want to make up for lost time, years of a certain stylistic exuberance are coming, as if all that identity that we have been creating online now finds its moment to be reinforced through clothing "explains Cantó. As you hear, months of confinement go a long way. Seclusion has allowed us to precisely engineer who we want to be, and any mutation or reinvention requires the appropriate disguise. One that is at the height of that character that, to a greater or lesser extent, we all represent in this kind of farce that is life. So take good note because extravagant and self-affirming times are coming. "This creation of new avatars will have weight in the new seasons, a vindication of the self through a free and very varied style" A sustainable wardrobe And next to the foreseeable scenario of shapes and colors predicted by experts, another trend - this one more decorous - looms as a pressing need. We are talking, of course, about sustainability. Not in vain, the excesses of the fashion market and its dizzying cycles have been, for some time now, a cause for concern about its ability to drain resources. In the words of Professor Estanyol, "this pandemic has caused many citizens to begin to question the fast fashion model". A model that supplies the market with a huge amount of fashion items at very affordable prices and of a rather low quality. "The fashion sector has realized that it is not the way, that it has to initiate a progressive reconversion towards a much more sustainable production", the professor concludes. A path, that of social and environmental responsibility, that many brands have begun to implement and whose timid effects are already beginning to be seen. According to Cantó, "most of the big brands advocate more conscious collections, provided with more durable items, not necessarily of higher quality, but with a more timeless design." A new time for fashion that will or will not be sustainable, and that will combine that greater environmental awareness with a display of volume and color that makes you laugh at the eighties.