Saint Laurent Steps Off Schedule for Its 2020 Fashion Shows

The novel coronavirus, its related lockdowns, and the cancellation of major fashion weeks in June and July has the fashion industry to intensely questioning its status quo. Saint Laurent is the latest brand to try something new: Today the Parisian house announced that it would move off schedule for the remainder of 2020. While Paris’s menswear fashion week was already canceled in June, many have assumed that fashion weeks could resume, in some form, in September. If they do, Saint Laurent won’t be there. In a release, the brand noted, “Saint Laurent will take ownership of its calendar and launch its collections following a plan conceived with an up-to-date perspective, driven by creativity.”

Speaking to WWD, artistic director Anthony Vaccarello and chief executive officer Francesca Bellettini painted a picture of physical-digital hybrid shows that would operate outside of the traditional bounds of the fashion calendar. “This season, I want to present a collection when I am ready to show it,” Vaccarello said in an interview. The pair stressed the importance of brand building and slow fashion, suggesting smaller aesthetic shifts between seasonal collections and a stronger core product offering. “It’s not a complete change season after season. Everything is intended to be mixed with previous seasons. It’s always about the attitude of the same woman or man. In the show, you can really see what’s from last season. More image pieces will always be there, as it’s not the time to be boring. It’s time for even more creativity,” the designer continued.

Saint Laurent is the first major label to officially leave the traditional fashion calendar as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. In Milan, men’s fashion week has been pushed to September, to coincide with women’s, with all the usual headliners expected to participate. Ditto for Paris Fashion Week, which put its menswear and couture weeks on pause, but is expected to make a digital-facing announcement soon. London Fashion Week, meanwhile, has gone all digital, inviting its designers to contribute content during the time earmarked for London Fashion Week: men’s in early June.

Will others follow suit and step outside the fashion week system? The idea of large brands of staging pre-collection style extravaganzas on their own timelines could seem appealing as a way to monopolize the digital news cycle and create stronger brand initiatives, however Saint Laurent stresses that in doing its own thing, it is not pulling its support of Paris Fashion Week. “Saint Laurent’s announcement that we will not hold events in 2020 according to the usual calendar does not in any way diminish the role or importance of Paris Fashion Week—which is, very simply, the best in the world,” Bellettini said to WWD. Still, the decision has the potential to set off a chain of events that changes the concept of Fashion Week forever.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge Give NHS Workers a Royal Salute in Shades of Blue

The importance of essential workers during the COVID-19 crisis can’t be understated, and around the world, people have been finding ways to celebrate their contributions. In the United Kingdom, the weekly Clap for Carers tribute honors the doctors, nurses, and caregivers of the National Health Service. Every Thursday across the country at 8 p.m., citizens take to the streets to applaud the heroes on the front lines. This week, the initiative received a royal boost when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge joined in from the steps of Anmer Hall in Norfolk. Dressed in shades of blue—Pantone 300, a bright cobalt serves as the NHS’s official color—Prince William, Kate Middleton, and their three young children George, Charlotte, and Louis cheered on the efforts of the nation’s health care professionals.

As always, Kate Middleton looked polished. Her floral ruffled dress from the High Street brand Ghost sold out moments after she was spotted wearing it. But the duchess’s fashions wouldn’t have been as impactful if her entire family didn’t get on board. Their coordinated color scheme was a subtle show of solidarity with the British people. Recorded as part of BBC Children In Need and Comic Relief’s The Big Night In, they joined celebrities like Sam Smith, Stephen Fry, and Leona Lewis in helping to to raise money for the U.K.’s most vulnerable workers. The event and the Clap for Carers initiative are a statement of unity in the face of the pandemic and the challenges it has caused. Those on the front lines face the most significant risks, but right now, it’s essential that everyone—even royals—do their bit to support, uplift, and inspire.

Paloma Elsesser on Her Boundary-Breaking Supermodel Season

Fashion may be forward-looking, but when it comes to inclusion and diversity, the runways of Europe have long been lacking. For many of the world’s biggest brands, the vision of luxury represented within their collections has remained unchanged for decades; models are still predominantly white, thin, and under the age of 20—but during the fall 2020 shows, there were significant signs of improvement. Awakened to the idea that women of all ages and sizes should be celebrated, Old World houses have begun to broaden their concept of beauty. The shift was embodied by modeling star Paloma Elsesser who, after four years of booking magazine covers and high-profile campaigns, is experiencing her first big season. “It’s a profound honor, my section of the modeling industry has largely been excluded from these sorts of opportunities,” she shared on the phone from New York. “We weren’t considered, and if we were it wasn’t for “high fashion,” so to do a show in Milan or Paris is super-new, exciting, and scary. I experienced a whole different set of emotions.”

At Fendi’s liberation-themed collection, Elsesser broke ground with her Milan Fashion Week debut, walking alongside legends like Liya Kebede and Carolyn Murphy. Her winning streak continued in Paris where she made appearances at Alexander McQueen and Lanvin. Such accomplishments would be impressive for any model, but Elsesser’s position in the industry is unique. As one of the few stars over a sample size to feature prominently within the luxury sector, she regularly books the kind of prestige work that has traditionally been reserved for her straight-size peers. In a business where eating disorders are prevalent, weight is taboo, and size often dictates a model’s trajectory, her achievements are radical, a fact she’s keenly aware of. “In every aspect of my career thus far it’s been about being focused but also being provided with opportunities and leaning into them,” she says. “I have to tap into the service element. If I have complaints about the way the runway has historically operated and I’m being provided with these opportunities [to change things] I have to take them on, despite my fear or lack of experience. I want to do this work so that one day I won’t have to complain.”

That mindset emboldened Elsesser this season. Directly booked for Fendi, she headed into Milan with the knowledge that she would be a part of something special. “They wanted the whole cast to just be models that they absolutely loved,” she explained. For casting director Piergiorgio Del Moro, Elsesser’s presence was essential. “Paloma was one of the first models we discussed as soon as the concept of the show’s casting was defined,” he says. “We knew immediately that she would be key to the casting. The entire show was about beauty and femininity and the atmosphere during the fittings was quite amazing. Each woman felt very empowered and comfortable in their looks and they brought their own confidence and beauty on the runway.”

Behind the scenes, Elsesser was pleased to find that the team was equally inclusive. “It wasn’t a situation where you go in, and the cast is diverse, but everyone on the backend looks the same,” she says. “It was amazing to be surrounded by curvy women who work for the company, whether they’re designers or in the marketing department. Women who all wear Fendi and believe in the force of change. It was truly an authentic and caring moment.” That feeling of unity and female-driven progress was exactly the vibe creative director Silvia Venturini Fendi was going for. “In a moment where we talk more about feminism than femininity, it made me want to analyze the concept of the feminine wardrobe,” she says. “It’s liberating for me to portray these clothes in a different way, on different sizes.”

That sensibility carried into the Paris collections, where Elsesser reunited with stylist Carlos Nazario, an early champion of her career, at Lanvin. “He’s been a major advocate, not just for me but for a lot of girls who are the minority within the fashion industry,” she says. Creative director Bruno Sialelli proved equally encouraging. “He just has this truth to his perspective; when we met I felt like we already knew each other.” At Alexander McQueen, immersed in Sarah Burton’s poetic femininity, Elsesser experienced an a-ha moment. “I just felt so honored and so lucky,” she says. “To be a flash in her vision and in everyone else’s vision. Sarah was so warm, involved, and meticulous, and everyone else came to it with the same level of dedication.”

The statements of Venturini Fendi and Del Moro speak to the changing perspective on size within fashion circles. The strides made by the body-positivity movement have impacted all aspects of culture, and consumers are no longer content with the tokenism of brands including larger models in ads while excluding them from the runway. It’s a shift that Elsesser’s agent, Mina White, has seen firsthand. “Having Paloma walk for Fendi, McQueen, and Lanvin this season brought the conversation around size inclusivity in luxury to the forefront and we’re extremely proud of her,” says White, who also handles stars at the center of the movement like Ashley Graham and Alessandra Garcia. “All women want to see themselves represented and should have the same access to luxury brands. IMG has been pushing this conversation forward for many years by de-bunking misconceptions around the plus-size consumer and educating brands of the opportunities presented by the plus-size market.”

Elsesser has done her share of teaching, her visibility putting her in positions where—fairly or not—she’s had to represent an entire community. “My identity is that of a plus-size woman. Putting me on a runway isn’t a cop-out because I’m not just slightly larger than the other models, I am a size 14 woman. [Still] there needs to be a spectrum of diversity,” she says. “I can’t represent everyone or speak for everyone but that isn’t the point. I hope to speak for someone, to allow people who have never seen themselves in this context to see a representation of who they are.” Ultimately the responsibility falls to brands, who will have to evolve to remain relevant. For Elsesser, those that fail to embrace different sizes are sending a message. “What this month taught me is that if they want to do it, then they can do it,” she says. “Which was also painful to realize because the past four years when I haven’t been included, it’s been an unconscious yet conscious choice.” Still, Elsesser remains optimistic about the future and fashion’s ability to include everyone. “Gone are the days when you can have a show with one black model and claim diversity. I hope that we don’t go back on this progress. I don’t want this to be a flash in the pan,” she says. “Whether it’s me having a successful season or a whole other range of body sizes that can be represented it would be such a disservice to go backward.”

Priyanka Chopra Steps Out in This Surprising Airport Shoe

Flying is not fashion-friendly. You need a no-frills outfit and an even more practical shoe. Chic stilettos make little sense in the airport, even though stars like Rihanna have teetered towards their private plane in them. But most well-dressed celebrities have found the perfect balance of comfort and style for air travel: supermodel Kate Moss, for instance, recently deplaned in cowboy boots (they are flats, after all). But one star who’s making her own rules? Priyanka Chopra, who arrived at the Newark airport in New Jersey yesterday in a more surprising footwear choice.

Chopra, who will star in a new Amazon Prime series titled Citadel, chose a quirky shoe shape for her chic plane look: square-toe boots. Her white boots by Wandler had a thick block heel that was more comfort-oriented than a pin-thin heel. She styled them with a light blue suit by Prabal Gurung and a white tee. Her carry-on of choice was a sleek black Jimmy Choo tote bag, which was roomy enough for one’s snacks, water bottle, and a book. Chopra’s controversial shoe choice follows that of fellow risk-taker Victoria Beckham, who this winter wore peep-toe boots to JFK. The takeaway? Sneakers don’t exist in the world of trendsetters. Perhaps rules of practicality don’t apply when you have VIP status at the terminal.

The Future of Fashion Is Circular: Why the 2020s Will Be About Making New Clothes Out of Old Ones

The key word for Vogue’s January 2020 issue is values. Interpret that as you may: monetary, ethical, sentimental. Every definition relates to the big picture: that fashion needs to reassess its value system, and quickly. We have to change the way money is invested and spent; we have to shop with brands whose values reflect our own; and we have to change the way we assign value to what we buy and wear.

Let’s start by working backward, because I think that last part is actually the most important. In fashion, the inverse of value might be disposability: If your T-shirt costs less than your Starbucks latte, you probably won’t think twice about throwing it out when it rips. Value isn’t just about price, of course; you might cherish a $50 vintage dress more than a designer bag. But therein lies the difference: You value the dress because it’s rare, or because it’s by a certain designer, or simply because it has a story. It may even be more valuable now than it was 30 years ago. Your old T-shirt, on the other hand, is hardly a treasure—and who would want it, anyway? It’s stained, it’s got holes, it’s no longer bright white.

T-shirts are among several “high-frequency basics” that tend to have a single, very short life; underwear, athletic clothes, and shoes fall into the category too. They’re items you wear through quickly, can’t be resold, and are too dingy to be donated, so they inevitably end up in the trash. An estimated 50 million tons of clothing is discarded every year, and most of it will not biodegrade in a landfill. (Synthetic materials like polyester or nylon can also leach chemicals into the earth, and if they’re incinerated, they may become carcinogenic.) The amount of time, energy, and resources that go into those trashed items is usually disproportionate to their quick turnaround; a single cotton T-shirt may require up to 700 gallons of water and may travel across several countries during production. But even if it’s stained or damaged at the end of its life, it could likely be recycled into something else, like housing insulation or even another T-shirt.

Making that clear to consumers will be key to making fashion more sustainable in the future. We’re phasing out single-use plastic and paper bags from our lives, and we should think about our clothes the same way. What will happen to this T-shirt, handbag, or sneaker when I’m done with it? In the long term, it should ultimately change the way we shop, because we’ll only buy things with legitimate value and a feasible end use.

“We need to get used to looking at things and understanding that nothing actually goes ‘away’ [when we throw it out]—there is no ‘away,’” explains Stacy Flynn, the CEO of Evrnu. She came to that realization nearly a decade ago on a sourcing trip in China, where she found herself in a factory town so polluted she couldn’t see her colleague standing next to her through the smog. “I realized how impactful and damaging our industry is to the environment, and began adding up all the millions of yards of fabric I’d made over the course of my career…. I was contributing to the problem,” she says. She launched Evrnu in 2015 and recently unveiled a groundbreaking technology that breaks cotton waste down into a liquid, then remakes it into stronger, higher-performing fibers. A recent Adidas x Stella McCartney collaboration included a hoodie made from Evrnu’s regenerated cotton. “Cotton and polyester make up 90% of all clothing, and both fibers require tremendous amounts of resources,” Flynn says. “Consumers throw away about 80% of their textiles directly in the garbage. We knew if there was a way to take that waste, break it down into a polymer, and build it back up to a new fiber, that would be the lynchpin of reducing our industry’s impact.”

For all of the benefits of natural and organic cotton, hemp, linen, rayon, and so on, it’s almost always better to use what already exists. A key point in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s A New Textiles Economy is that fashion must phase out nonrenewable resources and move toward renewable, regenerative inputs. It’s only recently that regenerated fibers have been commercially available, though; Evrnu’s regenerated cotton is still in its prototype stage. Flynn said it will be commercialized next year and in the market by 2021. Next, her team is working on breaking down and rebuilding polyester, followed by recoverable stretch (e.g., athletic gear), then bio-based and engineered fibers (like rayon and Tencel).

“As I start to future-cast for 2025, I think this will be the new normal,” she says. “All of the products we create today will have value in the future and will naturally come back into the system. I can see a world in which consumers don’t even own the things they wear—it will be almost like a lease, where they keep it as long as they want, then return it to the owner, and it’s either regenerated or leased out again. And there’s value in the product when it comes back into the system. I think that’s the biggest catchphrase—that the product has value when it’s being designed. If there is value in the product I’m wearing today, and it will be recreated as a high-quality product tomorrow, that has an incredibly powerful business effect,” she continues. “I actually think it’s one of the greatest design challenges of our century—how we take things from one form to another, with no loss of value.”

It’s a philosophy Chloe Songer and Stuart Ahlum share for their new sneaker company, Thousand Fell. They’re tackling a similarly immense problem: 99% of all footwear ends up in a landfill, for the same reasons as those cotton T-shirts. Shoes get worn down, they get dirty, they smell, they lose their support. And in addition to their single-use nature, most sneakers are made of at least a dozen plastic parts. In a landfill, they could take up to 1,000 years to break down, eventually degrading into tiny plastic particles that make their way into the soil and ocean (and eventually our bodies). Thousand Fell’s solution is to offer vegan sneakers on a closed-loop model: Wear them out, send them back, and they’ll be recycled into other sneakers—and you’ll get a credit for a new pair.

Songer and Ahlum had deep industry experience prior to launching Thousand Fell. Songer worked in business development for Alexander Wang and in merchandising at Gap, and Ahlum ran another men’s sneaker brand. For Thousand Fell, they zeroed in on white, low-top sneakers in particular because they’ve become such a foundational item in our wardrobes. (Think: Adidas Stan Smiths, Vans slip-ons, Greats Royales.) We wear them to work, on the weekend, and even out at night, and because they’re nicely priced, we don’t hesitate to buy them often. “People are replacing their white sneakers every four to six months,” Ahlum says. “They don’t know what to do with them [when they’re dirty], so they throw them in the trash chute. There isn’t a secondary market for those kinds of basic sneakers, so it falls on the brand to recycle them and have an end-of-life solution.”

Designing the sneakers for recyclability was a two-year process, and the final results feel like leather, but aren’t. (Songer pointed out that leather is commonly mistaken as natural or biodegradable, and it isn’t; most leather is treated with chromium or plastic.) The uppers are made of post-consumer plastic that’s coated with quartz for durability, and the rest is a mixture of recycled and natural rubber, aloe vera, and food waste native to Brazil, like sugar cane, coconut, palm tree leaves, and corn. The duo also insist the sneakers are built to last for eight months, not three; they aren’t encouraging you to send your sneakers back prematurely. “It shouldn’t be on the user to drastically change their behavior,” Ahlum says. “There are always going to be products people wear through quickly. There just needs to be a turnkey solution so you can continue wearing what you love every day.”

Eleanor Turner is bringing years of ready-to-wear design experience (most recently at Argent, Tory Burch, and J.Crew) and a passion for creative problem-solving to the Big Favorite, a new line of circular “first layer garments” (i.e., T-shirts, underwear, and leggings) launching in spring 2020. It’s a reprisal of a workwear brand of the same name her grandfather founded in the 1940s: “I always dreamed of reviving the brand by rethinking the idea of American legacy in a meaningful, modern way,” Turner explains. “I believe our new legacy [will be] a brand-led ecosystem where everyone can participate in doing better for themselves and the planet. One garbage truck of textiles is sent to the landfill every second, and most fashion brands stop short when thinking about the planet. I spent a decade in fashion creating what will eventually end up as trash, and used to throw out boxes of plastic hangers and samples. When I started realizing the implications of those choices, I saw them everywhere—in chemical dyes, in polyester or plastic fibers, in polybags, in shipping.” Alternatively, the Big Favorite’s model is similar to Thousand Fell’s: Order a few organic cotton basics, wear them out, and send them back to be responsibly recycled into new garments.

“Future generations will have to deal with a scarcity of resources and the consequences of consumerism in a way that we never have,” Turner continues. “Both pre- and post-consumer textiles will become an incredibly valuable commodity, and the Big Favorite is here to prove that we can build successful businesses that do better for both consumers and the planet.”

If I had to make one prediction for 2020 and the years to follow, it would be that we’ll see more closed-loop companies like Thousand Fell and the Big Favorite (and more designers linking up with Evrnu). A more sustainable fashion industry depends on using what exists, eliminating the problem of clothing in landfills, and reframing the way we value our garments. It seems entirely feasible to me that one day, all of my “high frequency” items—for me, that’s T-shirts, cashmere sweaters, camisoles, flat sandals, leather boots, and jeans—will exist on a closed loop. When they’re worn out, I’ll send them to be recycled or upcycled, with nothing wasted in the process. Everything else in my closet would be an item I really love, something I’ve purchased with the intention of keeping for a long time, be it a classic blazer or vivid floral skirt. Longevity means different things to different people, and even if I fall out of love with something, it will be high-quality enough to resell on the RealReal or Vestiaire Collective. Again, nothing wasted.

What won’t make sense in the next decade? Spending $300 on a designer T-shirt or indulging in a cheap fast-fashion thrill. Neither has resale potential—that T-shirt will suffer the same fate as a $10 Hanes tee, with pit stains, holes, and faded colors—so they’re destined for the garbage or a pile of unwanted donations in East Africa or India. Plus, the idea of owning something cheap that you only wear a few times feels pretty horrible in light of the climate crisis; once you know precisely what goes into a garment—the good and the bad—it’s impossible to shop so carelessly again.