Facta #2

Prologue:
Despite being one of the largest manufacturing disasters in history, the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, which
killed about 1,100 people and injured around other 2000 seemed to affect little in the fashion industry. The factory produced
products for giants like Primark, Walmart, GAP, H & M and others. (Today it is hard to find a closet of a fashion consumer
that doesn’t have at least one item from one of them.) But in the requests to sign a treaty that would improve the quality of life of
workers in that country, many of these big brands were not included.
“Each week a new collection”
Chilli Beans
text by Julia Valle / photos by Thais Mol
Summer 2013/2014
12 coats, 22 knitted sweaters, 25 T-shirts of flat fabric,
14 shirts, 7 of them white, 17 fabric pants, 2 mesh pants,
14 skirts /shorts/bermudas, 16 knitted dresses, 25 fabric dresses
and 15 party dresses
For 162 models, produced in runs varying between 35 and
140 units, 2 designers, 15 sewers, 5 designers, 1 month of
research (for materials, shapes, finishes, volumes, colors,
and trims), 3 months in production of a showcase pilot,
15-minute fashion show, five months of sales, followed by
two months of discount sale in order to reduce the season’s
inventories as much as possible, equaling nearly 50% of all
production 1 . With periods of overlapping stages, the cycle
repeats continuously.
Fashion is fast, according to the French semiotician
Roland Barthes, who recognizes the creation of designed
obsolescence in his "The Fashion System" (though not in
these terms) via the definition of specific 'durations' for
seasons, trends and collections and clear differentiation
between fashion (trend) and Fashion (style); for designers
who, in order to achieve sales targets set by companies, are
required to create collections for spring, summer, resort,
high summer, autumn, winter, and still compartmentalize
each season in 3 or 4 months; for the consumer, who
faces the inability to follow and purchase parts with each
new release, to expand their closets every six, four, three
months; and for fabric factories, continually pressured
by novelties that must be presented with more than 1
year in advance of the launches in stores. Fashion is fast,
fast enough not to be able to process a term in a foreign
language and translate it into local language, and, in the
urgency of merging, transforms, eg, peep-toes 2 into peeptools.
To think about the term 'collection' in this scenario
sounds absurd, with a number of endless objects entering
production chains and inserted into stores every three
months, one month, or even one week (as suggested in the
Chilli Beans eyewear brand campaign).
To follow the latest trend by purchasing a pair of glasses
with frames in neon colors because they fell perfectly in
that it-girl 3 , is not an investment, as much as sellers try to
convince us of that.
It is not intended here to build a guide for better costbenefit
for fashion shopping, but rather to propose a form
of qualitative analysis that benefits the development of a
more sustainable consumption market and a reflection on
the ways that this field of knowledge and commerce has
traced.
Since its origins, in the maisons from the first stylists in
France, fashion depends on a not too prolonged seasonal
extension to survive as an industry and commercial
establishment. In the sixteenth century this time came
to take decades. With the post-industrial increase in
availability of materials, the growth of available skilled
labor, and later, the reduction of the amount of fabric used
in the making of a piece (a natural change due to wars),
this life span will suffer decreases. Today, a 'trend' may last
less than a season.
But, if fashion participates in a range of contemporary
creative expressions, from the moment the creators sign
their pieces by inserting labels, whether contemporary or
not, applying the proposal of collecting of the American
curator Bruce Altschuler in "Collecting the New"(2005)
seems very sensible. For him, composing a collection
comprises both time for acquisition and analysis as
moments of exchange, transfering and destruction. His
proposal is directed to the constant development (inevitable
when it comes to what happens in the production of this
current evolutionary time) of collections of contemporary
art, to think about these ideas raises several questions such
as the valid duration for the contemporary. Thinking about
this idea for athe acquisition of products in fashion leads to
the recognition and clarification of movements that have
been started since the emergence of pret-a-porter and, that,
these days, seems to make more and more sense.
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