I’ve just returned from Brazil, where I was attending Sao Paulo fashion Week and giving a talk about sustainability, which was the theme of this year’s premier South American fashion extravaganza. It’s not exactly news that sustainability has begun to infuse glamour industries, after the release of “green issues” for nearly every glossy magazine last year, but seeing the way environmental and social responsibility were embraced in putting on this event nevertheless brought me a surprising sense of encouragement about the whole global shift towards sustainable practices.

No doubt there’s inherent irony in the fact that I took a massively carbon-generating plane trip to get to this carbon-neutral event, but I suppose it can be offset, if not literally (though I could do that), then in the sense that networking, sharing Knowledge and developing new ideas in an international conversation — and in person, not online — is hopefully a net benefit in the long-run. There’s quite a lot going on in Sao Paulo and throughout Brazil with regard to facilitating self-sufficiency, reducing dependence on petroleum fuel, and improving conservation of Amazonian rainforests — some of the most expansive carbon sinks in the world. Additionally, Brazil is home to Curitiba, an historically well-regarded model of ecological urban planning, about which Bill McKibben wrote an excellent piece in late 2005. All this to say that the same natural progression that’s taken place in North America and Western Europe from an environmental advocacy model largely isolated from pop culture, to one that pervades and even defines mainstream trends, is also happening in the context of South American megacities.

Sao Paulo fashion Week partnered with several corporate sponsors and environmentally-minded NGOs to establish a sustainability agenda that included calculating the event’s carbon emissions and arranging to have them offset by The Green Initiative, a Brazilian non-profit that does coastal reforestation and riparian restoration as an offset service for companies and individuals looking to mitigate their CO2 impact. The Green Initiative stationed a number of volunteers throughout the fashion Week venue, next to computers displaying a simple carbon quiz for visitors to calculate the size of their own carbon footprint. At the entrance to the venue, a digital screen was ticking a rising number that represented the number of trees that would be planted to offset this year’s event (pictured here). When I left it was around 4,000.

The green plan also featured a sharp graphic campaign developed a by local agency, ag407. The campaign, to me, was one of the highlights of this effort, as it was so perfectly attuned to the spirit of the event, and managed not only to offer subtle education for environmental awareness, but also to become the stylistic backdrop that made fashion week feel current, edgy and smart. More about this campaign and a series of images from their magazine placement can be found here.

Further pushing the art/environment connection, SPFW set up an exhibition all about ecologically-sound textiles, curated by an organization called e-brigade and supplied by their affiliate, e-fabrics. The two-part project featured a museum-like display of materials ranging from Amazonian rubber to repurposed fish skin leather to fleece made of recycled PET plastic bottles, as well as an installation of mannequins suspended from the ceiling on the upper floor, each donning an outfit by one of the designers showing at this year’s fashion week, and each made of 100% sustainable material incorporated from the e-fabrics collection.

I had countless conversations about sustainability with locals in attendance at the show. It’s clear that the matter is getting it’s footing, and that the business opportunities inherent in taking a new approach towards product development and manufacturing are becoming as clear there as they are here.

Of course, this opportunity (and opportunism) has it’s flipside there as here, in terms of the potential for a marketing scheme to undermine authenticity. A few of the sponsoring companies did not have their practices aligned their claims. Additionally there was less integration than there might have been between the environmental program and the actual runway shows. Some of the designers boasted a few token gestures towards an ecological consciousness, but really only one expressed itself with wholehearted dedication towards sustainability, which was Osklen, the designer behind e-brigade.
Nevertheless, the offsetting and accompanying outreach and interactive education, combined with so much compelling visual messaging around sustainability, made this event incomparable to any other fashion week I’ve attended. And in spite of a few shortcomings, I’m ultimately heartened by the pursuit of a more responsible approach to event production, especially within the fashion industry.

-- SarahRich