Guest speaker: "Fashion and Sustainability", Lions Club Como Host
Daniele Orlandi was the guest speaker at "Moda e Sostenibilità" ("Fashion and Sustainability"), a talk promoted by the Como Host Lions Club and held at the Sala Bianca of Teatro Sociale di Como on 8 June 2015. Orlandi issued a press release covering the evening, written by Andrea Giongo, summarising the talk's core argument: "Sustainability isn't in fashion, but fashion has to become sustainable."
About the talk
The press release lays out, in fairly blunt terms, the environmental cost the talk addressed: water-reserve depletion, groundwater pollution from toxic waste and dyes, and inhumane labour conditions in parts of the supply chain — a chain, the release points out, that ends with something everyone wears. On the consumer side, it names the compulsive shopping and the industry's roughly one million tonnes of yearly waste fuelled by fast fashion, alongside the health effects of unregulated dermatological exposure and inconsistent labelling laws.
Rather than focusing only at problems, Orlandi's talk framed responsibility as an opportunity rather than a burden — for companies and for the country alike, achieved through fibre diversity, lower water use, local sourcing and alternative energy. The slides shown that evening backed this up with named, real-world examples rather than abstractions: a weaving processing developed by Canepa Evolution (a Como-based textile research centre) cited as cutting pollutants by 80% and water and energy use by 40% or Associazione Tessile e Salute's traceability certification as a concrete answer to the labelling problem raised earlier. The talk underlined also on a design-first approach as according to Kate Fletcher estimate 80% of the problems discussed could already be solved during the design stage. The closed with a positive perspective showing examples of the beauty that fashion also brought during history (with examples by masters such as Vionnet, Balenciaga or Dior ) while citing some quotes by Italian philosopher Stefano Zecchi such as "Beauty, which is by essence value—difference within uniformity—represents the most radical form of antagonism to nihilism."
Source
Press release, "Conferenza 'Moda e sostenibilità'" — issued by Daniele Orlandi, text by Andrea Giongo, 8 June 2015. Event organiser: Lions Club Como Host (e-clubhouse.org/sites/como_host — the club's own event record is in the members’ archive).