With its deep roots in the fashion world, Giorgio Armani is championing new changes.
The pandemic has challenged every single aspect of our lives. Every leaf that fell, fell from a tree rooted in the ground with deep roots, but on different soil. Because the earth on which we rest our feet, no matter how much some people insist on seeing it always the same, has changed profoundly. Society, ecology, economics, our very lives have been confronted with a momentous change. The beginning of a new Era. The construction of a new world that must lick its wounds but at the same time grow, finding new paths to which
adapt. And fashion is not exempt from this discourse. Indeed, explaining it to us in a tangible way was Giorgio Armani.
King George is that tree rooted with deep roots in the land of fashion. The fashion system represents the branches that knotty, grow anchored to the tree (some strong, some fragile and thin). And finally, the leaves are the ideas and creativity of all those who work around the fashion world. The leaves sprout each year, giving the tree majesty and life. Then the season passes, the leaves fall and settle on the ground. They mix with the earth and nourish the tree, which, in an endless circle of life, will return to blossom as soon as the time is ripe.
Fashion had long since lost sight of this extraordinary circle of life. There were fewer and fewer leaves, the soil was getting sicker and sicker, and inexorably the soil was infecting the tree.
But the Armani tree decided not to be infected anymore. The George tree, anchored for decades in the land of fashion, has decided not to die.
In the midst of the pandemic, his statements were a sigh of relief for all those who were aware that the land of fashion was too sick, and they were a wake-up call for many who had instead failed to realize what the fashion system has become: a hodgepodge of old ideas, a constant birthing of useless clothes and accessories that have destroyed the creativity of artists, designers and visionaries. Fashion production has bulimically fed entire generations, churning out billions of ugly clothes that often could not even find a market. One person has a good idea, and a thousand follow it, copying it in a debasing way. A vicious cycle that affects not only the fashion retail world, but part
from small tailors all the way up to large, world-renowned brands. A designer to fight the competition must fill the stores with clothes at reduced costs by choosing cheap (often polluting) fabrics, and to cut down on tax and production costs must very often hire people off the books, or turn to companies abroad that exploit men, women and children by taking away their dignity. Not to mention the creativity that is totally zeroed out in this way. Starting from this awareness,Giorgio Armani, faced with a change that must compulsorily affect the fashion system as well, broke the levees by shouting his disappointment about what has happened in the fashion world over the past decades.
Denouncing the irresponsibility of companies and designers, he called on them to overhaul this extraordinary artistic, social and economic sector: less production, reducing collections to environmentally sustainable production, more decent work for workers and employees, more creativity for designers and the artistic sector, more fair competition. Better to spend 100€ on a well-made and environmentally friendly garment than to spend the same money on ten polluting garments that debase the creativity of designers. Everyone must do his or her part. Starting with us buyers. We can choose to change the world even when we go shopping. And if we buy Armani, at this point, even better.
“The construction of a new world that has to lick its wounds but at the same time grow, finding new ways to adapt to. And fashion is not exempt from this discourse.”
