Hollywood celebrity Kim Kardashian turned heads earlier this year in May when she appeared at Met Gala, the annual celebrity event that raises funds for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York, wearing a historic gown custom-made for Marilyn Monroe. It was the dress that Marilyn wore at Madison Square Garden in 1962, when she famously sang Happy Birthday to American president John F Kennedy.
Two months later, and the world is still divided about Kim’s decision to wear the dress, allegedly damaging the iconic creation by designer Jean Louis. Kim, however, stood by her decision. Irrespective of which side you are on, what did catch our attention that night was how beautiful that dress looked on the red carpet.
In a world that is driven by fast fashion, is slow fashion—that reimagines a garment way beyond its perceived shelf life—the next big thing? We speak to designers to find out how this version of slow fashion is fast becoming a much-pursued trend.
Refresh & restyle
“I started my endeavour with recycling and slow fashion with my brocades and silks, because however good the silk might be, the fabric tends to fall apart after a while. A lot of my old customers come back to me with an old garment. I often end up lining many garments to cover small tears, but sometimes I patch new fabric onto it and create a brand new garment that’s beautiful,” begins Delhi-based designer Sonam Dubal who is known for his love for patchwork stoles and shawls, often made from the scraps of brocade from his workshop.
“One of my clients once brought back a sari blouse in brocade that we had made and it was falling apart and so, I decided to combine it with eri silk and made it into an evening jacket and used bits of the original garment in the cuff and the collar,” he adds.
Revalue & resell
Slow fashion as a trend can translate into a more direct way of avoiding wastage—reselling! And that’s exactly what Mumbai-and Delhi-based brand Saritoria does. The pre-loved fashion platform, which launched in 2020, aims at, ‘redefining luxury couture with pre-loved pieces that tell a story.’ “It provides consumers easy access to garments from all the biggest South Asian designers at a value otherwise inaccessible to them. The platform allows anyone to list items, either directly or via concierge—we’ve had people reach out to us from all over India and internationally asking us to help them get outfits onto the site,” explains co-founder Shehlina Soomro, who runs the platform with Pernia Qureshi.
Refreshed, refurbished, reimagined, resold, reinvented—call it what you may—product does have a value, and maybe the value is even more than the original? As Sonam says, “We come from a culture that values reused things. The value of a garment becomes higher because it was owned by a loved one before we had access to it. I guess slow fashion is natural to us, after all?”
With inputs from Priyamvada Rana