Consumers are looking for products that are increasingly respectful of the environment and workers, and that are easy to trace and purchase. That is why Stockholm fashion week has been cancelled and will be transformed into something new.
The next Stockholm fashion week, scheduled for 27 to 29 August in the Swedish capital, will not take place because the event, which is normally held twice a year, must make more room for sustainable models. This was announced by the Swedish fashion council: "We want to say goodbye to the past and create tools that prepare designers for the future," said chief executive Jennie Rosen. The aim is to push brands to reduce their environmental impact, seek out new materials, continuously improve workers' quality of life, and ultimately change the standards of the fashion industry.
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Standards that are already changing. At London fashion week, for example, furs have been banned, meaning only fur-free collections walked the runway. In memory of the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh — in which more than a thousand workers who were producing garments for well-known Western brands lost their lives — the Fashion revolution week was born.
This year at Pitti Filati, the sector's key event in the city of Florence, the Moda futuribile project was presented, rethinking and repurposing fabrics to offer alternative solutions to the accumulation of unsold garments.
"Sustainability, traceability, circularity and collaborative consumption. These are the keywords running through the fashion world and that between now and 2030 will become reality," explains Enea Roveda, chief executive of the LifeGate group.
Fashion weeks are evolving to better meet consumers' needs and ward off the "imminent death" that many journalists predict for events such as the one in New York. Threatening them, as the Post editorial team explains, are a number of factors: the speed of production and the ability to shop online; the rise and growing importance of bloggers, Instagram and influencers; the crisis in the traditional press; and strong customer demand for new products. Products that will increasingly need to meet environmental and social sustainability criteria, demonstrating this through reliable certifications to aware consumers. Great things are therefore expected from Stockholm.