Collina Strada: Making Sustainability Fashionable
Written by Cassidy Ratner
Our daily lives are engrained with small reminders; turn off the lights before you leave the house, don’t let the water run, recycle anything paper or plastic. We do these things with the pure intentions of helping the environment, and for some of us, to help our electric bills. However, these are individual solutions to a systematic problem, which requires a systematic solution. Fast fashion, where inexpensive clothes are quickly produced and distributed, has become detrimental to its producers and the environment alike. It has led to textile waste, pollution, contamination, and poor treatment of workers in developing areas. Designers such as Hillary Taymour with her New York based label, Collina Strada, have been able to work towards combating the expanding fast fashion crisis through sustainable design techniques.
Hillary Taymour first launched Collina Strada while she was still attending fashion school in Los Angeles. She has since been able to build it into a high end fashion brand that aims to design and manufacture clothing using environmentally efficient methods. When creating Collina Strada’s collection for the fall of 2021, Taymour was able to preserve materials through using those of previous seasons, instead of the alternative of wasted textiles and fabrics. She additionally incorporated clothing unfit to wear that she was able to restyle and rebrand. The designer’s unique and creative collection combines animals, humans, and fashion, and incentivizes customers to choose her timeless and sustainable wear.
Taymour has used her brand to take a fun, light hearted approach to the serious issue of fast fashion and its consequences. During her show in 2020, a model ran down the runway covered in paint that read, “waste not, want not”. Taymour even integrates sustainability into her collection, “Garden Hoe”, which was launched in 2020. Taymour was even able to produce roughly sixty percent of the collection using a new fabric made from rose petals instead of the traditionally used silk. She additionally used discarded clothing from Ghana for the remainder of the collection as a means of reducing waste and pollution. Taymour’s dedication to doing better for the world has inspired her to use her collection as an advertisement for environmental awareness. As the fast fashion industry continues to grow, the future lies in the hands of upcoming designers such as Taymour to use new and innovative approaches to steer consumers in the direction of choosing environmentally efficient clothing over those that will be worn once and immediately discarded.
Sources:
https://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/article/collina-strada-sustainable-fashion
https://www.gq.com/story/collina-strada-sustainable-nyfw-fall-20
https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-2021-ready-to-wear/collina-strada
https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-2021-ready-to-wear/collina-strada