Fast fashion, the mass production of clothing made from inexpensive materials, accommodates the latest (short-lived) trends. The biggest fast fashion brands — Shein, H&M, Forever 21 — not only tend to have unethical and exploitative labour practices, but contribute to textile waste and generate pollution.
In response to hyper-consumerism in the fashion sphere, Germaine Koh, a Canadian artist and assistant visual art professor at UBC, started Slow Fashion Season alongside other UBC faculty leads and industry partners.
Since January, the ongoing season has consisted of events at UBC addressing the wasteful and destructive habits of the fashion industry, and challenges these practices with sustainable alternatives — like workshops teaching people how to mend and upcycle used clothing.
“Even if [fast fashion products] weren't also accelerating, the stuff that has already been discarded decades and years [ago] is still there.” Koh said.
“To try to arrive at a more sustainable version of fashion is [to] simply slow down all of those processes — slow down the processes of consumption, slow down the processes of production and make them more localized to the places where the clothing is actually used.”
But real change doesn’t come from a one-time event, which is why the initiative has been running workshops and activities over the past few months. From early January to the end of February, the Slow Fashion Season workshops taught “skill building and learning around ways to interact with textiles and clothing that are not just consumption," said Koh.
During the repair and sewing workshops, Koh organized a student sustainable fashion challenge to invite students and staff to design an outfit from sustainable materials. Participants were encouraged to use biodegradable materials that were locally produced, recycled or that they grew themselves.
Out of the three different student categories for entry — casual, work wear and ceremonial — Koh found the ceremonial the most interesting.
“[The ceremonial category] could range from Indigenous regalia to people's cultural costumes or just formal wear. We know there [was] a big drag club on campus, and so it could be people's drag outfits.”
These selected finalists from the challenge have their outfits showcased in the Hatch Art Gallery from March 21–27.
“It's gonna be a funny show … it's not a super huge gallery, but it's going to be just filled with mannequins.” Koh said. “The walls will have some [informative] posters about different kinds of sustainability in textiles initiatives. So maybe people that are developing new fibres … clothing lines that are based on sustainable materials.”
For Koh, it was important to have a “non-hierarchical mix” of artists, curators, art historians and students involved in Slow Fashion Season. In collaboration with the Hatch Art Gallery, Koh spotlighted Slow Fashion’s focus on student involvement, noting that a graduate art history seminar wrote the interpretive material for the exhibition and the gallery’s Director Lilly Lester and her team helped set up the exhibit.
On March 27, the last day of the Hatch exhibit, the fashion pieces will be moved over to the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) for a live fashion show where the designers and other students will model the clothes.
“It won't be a typical fashion show, in that we're not going to have just ‘model’ body types. It's going to be a variety of body types and a variety of gender expressions … to underscore the notion that fashion is not just for the model-thin people,” said Koh.
The show will feature work by professional designers working in sustainable fashion — Koh believes students getting to see their creations alongside designs by people actually working in the industry is a great learning opportunity. She thinks the “student entries are going to be [just] as inspiring as the things that are coming from the professional designer.”
“I think we can break down some of the hierarchies that we're used to, that are built into the university system. We have as much to learn from what the students are doing as from what the researchers are doing. And hopefully Slow Fashion Season becomes a kind of hub where all of that knowledge is exchanged and shared.”
As a pre-show activity, Dylan Howitt’s film The Nettle Dress will be screened at UBC’s Green College. The film follows Allan Brown as he spends seven years crafting a dress by hand from the fibre of stinging nettles gathered from the local area as he also works through the passing of his wife and father.
Koh describes how Brown builds “life” into the dress as the cloth is developed during and beyond the loss of his loved ones, pointing to the significance of the “relationship between the things that we make and the things that we actually need, rather than multiple pieces of clothing coming into and out of our lives every year.”
Knitwork is Koh’s own life-long piece which she began in 1992 and is still working on today. On her website, the piece is described as a “single continuously growing object” made by reknitting the yarn from used garments.
Koh intends to continue adding to Knitwork for as long as she can.
“The whole idea about slow fashion is: let's visualize what the possibilities are. So [Knitwork] is a kind of piece that's all about visualizing how much clothing could potentially pass through a person's life,” she said. “It is actually circular and it will biodegrade if it was put in the compost. So it ends up being a little bit more like a response to the human lifetime. It's really kind of a beautiful thought.”
For the Slow Fashion Show, Koh will definitely be wearing sustainable clothing. She has grown her own flax, harvested stinging nettles, unraveled old sweaters, repurposed old patterns and recycled public banners into clothing items.
“We're going to be encouraging everybody to wear what sustainable outfits you have, whether it just be thrifted or something that you've actually made!”
The Slow Fashion Show at MOA is from 7–8:30 p.m. on March 27, 2025. Entry is included in the cost of museum admission.
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