Author: IsaiahA

I’m a fashionista. At least I’m a fashionista in my head. So the Met Gala was incredibly exciting for me to spectate, and has been for the past couple of years. This year in particular, I found it quite serendipitous that the theme was Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, since all semester long we’ve been talking about religion. This year, however, I was watching the Met Gala through some particular lenses; fashion sustainability.

There were so many beautifully crafted, gilted, and designed dresses and suits on the carpet that made my inner Miranda Priestly crack a smile, and the adherence to the theme in many of the pieces and their interpretations of it gave the creative in me inspiration. Blake Lively’s dress was definitely my favorite of the night. A stunning blood red gown with a nude bodice, sporting golden embroidery that was no doubt hand stitched to piece. In an interview before the Met Gala opening, Lively raved about her fashion team working on her dress, bragging to Vogue magazine that “they’ve already worked on it for 600 hours, and it’s not done.” This admission gave me pause, because, firstly, 600 hours is a massive amount of time to be working on one gown and, secondly, how many more man hours were put in to work on every piece of fashion that graced the Met Gala carpet? Adding to that, how many resourced were used to piece together these incredible works, not to mention the event itself?

The Met Gala is a staple of the fashion industry, of the celebrity community, and of New York. It’s an institution in it’s own right. But how much of it is sustainable? With its emphasis on gaudiness, glamour, and outstanding works, does finding a sustainable model that focuses less on over consumption and more on responsible exploitation work for the Met Gala? How many designers and celebrities would be willing to forgo the luxurious lifestyle that has so become part and parcel of New York City? It is at this point that Bauman’s ruminations on despair come to mind. These systems have been so solidified that re-engineering them seems a feat to colossal to undertake. Redoing the model of the fashion industry that has made billions from what already previously stands? How many years would that take? And do we have those years available to us to slowly wean ourselves off of profiting from indiscriminate exploitation of resources? In Bauman’s words, perhaps “the best thing we can do might be to let the dominant systems fail.”

As much as we want ecological change, we hold on to the structures that exist. Trying to re-engineer them may be a fool’s errand. I try to not let myself fall into too much despair about the situation, because as Bauman put it, at some point when we’re faced with disease and imminent death we have to plan for it. I just believe that trying to revamp our faulty systems, the ones that got us here in the first place, is holding on to the dashboard of a car speeding to a crowded cross walk hoping the our light is going to change to green. At some point we have to realize the existing structures need to be done away with to make positive change happen.

So I started a small garden last week as a bit of a new spring tradition. Eight beautiful flowers. All the while I’m thinking about this idea that some people have a green thumb; this ability to garden that other people don’t have. My family has a history of livestock and planting and so I was thinking about whether I had a green thumb or not. And so I thought about whether talking to the plants and physically communicating with them contributes to someone’s green thumb because this was what I was taught to do from my dad. Then then question of green thumb hit me: Is someone’s ability to garden connected to their ability to commune with nature? Not in a shaman type of way, but in a porosity type of way. Does the opening up to the natural world allow for the thriving of plants?

It comes back to the sweetgrass population that thrives when near human populations. Just a thought.

Here they are top left to bottom right:

Garnet, Zola, Beychella, Lapis,
Diane, Jack, Azula, Goldilocks

So I feel like all of my posts will have some angle of capitalism in it, so I’m just going to embrace it.

After the discussion we had today about the four noble truths of Buddhism and the focus on the first truth, it dawned on me that the central ideology of Buddhism can be used as a telescope into why capitalism has been as ubiquitous and as insidious as it is. It all comes from the following flow chart:

Suffering <—— Attachment <—— Desire <—— Emptiness <——- Suffering <—— And so on…

If we come to the enlightenment that human beings are empty and we’re in a constant state of filling that emptiness, then I think the easiest was to fill that void (or the way in which we’re conditioned to fill it) is by material gain or material wealth. Also, if we’ve been led into this belief of duality, that you have and I do not and therefore I must have,  the “goal setting” model of success can also be the easiest way to fill that emptiness.

Advertisements pinpoint this everlasting emptiness and our desire to attach ourselves to something and barrage us with ways in which we can be better, or have more, or not feel lonely. We only need to look at Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook for examples of this. On the consumerism side of things, more money, better cars, bigger houses, more material gain gives us a feeling of success and (fleeting) satisfaction that corporations can abuse. I think this is at the core of the ecological crisis. The fact that we can abuse the human condition of emptiness and turnover a profit from it.  We can ordain trees, but at some point, someone is going to want that lumber to make houses or bridges, and at some point someone else is going to want that and so the person who cut down the tree is going to find a lucrative business out of it, unless we re-engineer humanity to find satisfaction in something outside the material realm.

Strong viewpoint. I think it’s radical. And I’m not sure people want to be that radical.

“Nothing is invented, for it’s written in nature first.

Originality consists of returning to the origin.”

–  Antoni Gaudi