Fashion world edit

I kept the September 2018 issue of Elle magazine because it was dedicated to sustainability. It’s typically the biggest issue of the year and it was Elle’s first with 100% recycled-waste paper. That was just the first indicator of what felt like a major change in stance by the publication. Not just fashion conscious but conscious fashion. I liked what I was reading and it’s true to say across the many magazines I enjoy reading (old skool, I know), sustainability – in all its forms – has risen up the agenda. Phew.

Looks like GQ, November 2020, is a keeper too. An extended editor’s letter, by Dylan Jones, is a broad-ranging missive on the state of the world and the role of brands in it. It opens with an exterior picture of Selfridges’ flagship Oxford Street, with the sign signalling their net zero strategy and a call for all of us to change the way we shop. Pretty incredible for a luxury store like that to suggest consumption isn’t king.

Jones’s editor’s letter carries on, part analysis, part prediction and part plaintiff cry for brands to understand what’s going in in the world, respect the impact of the pandemic on individuals today and the disaster climate change represents for future generations. He asks brands to make the decision to make a change, by implication to make the world a better place.

Retail is facing major challenges and as a consequence brands too. Will survival point them in the direction of more empathetic and environmentally positive behaviours? Jones points out the accelerated shift to digital, the requirement for experiential retail that is less transactional, more relational and, in pandemic times, ana experience that gives people space. A far-reaching suggestion is that we’ll all want our brands nearer to home. That flagship store on Oxford Street could be a thing of the past, with smaller stores for leading luxury brands existing in towns. We could order off the internet, but where’s the life-enhancing experience in that.

I’m glad fashion and lifestyle magazine editors are writing about these things. It’s been two years since the Elle sustainability issue I kept. I hope Dylan Jones’s call to action gets a faster uptake in thinking and behaviours.