[COLLECTION4]
outrunning the wind
I have been struggling for a while now to find a way to make people aware of the environment precisely at the moment of choosing their outfits for the day or at the moment of getting dressed or undressed. I have clearly and completely overrated my abilities when starting thinking about that :) still, as I almost never give up...I had come to the conclusion that it must be an emotional trigger if we want people to relate to the environment and care for it and nurture it and mostly and foremost THINK about it.
From the universal primary four elements that connect us to the environment, I have chosen Wind as it is the one that humans feel most often and on the biggest area of their bodies. To observe the wind is to be aware of nature, to think about the flow of air that envelopes us and the environment in which we exist. The wind as an everything surrounding element represents a connecting element, a common part. The Wind is actually the overlayer for our clothing and bodies if not the designer itself when at high speed because wearing clothes is where fashion really happens. We create fashion when we wear clothes and the wind has the power of undressing us :). But the wind is a variable that can not be taken into account the way we consider gravity for example at the moment of the fashion design yet it has a lot of power in reshaping our clothes and silhouettes and its powers are random.
The following excerpt from Wild Dress by Kate Fletcher was actually my direct inspiration and I just hope it will also be for everyone who sees our mini collection:
“Today I wanted to go to the Goyt Valley. Up there it was cool, and the wind screamed from the West. The cloud base, total grey, flattened the landscape.[...] I climbed through the trees to the high ridge, edging a wall, and on to the open moorland. It was then that I felt it, the wind holding me. There is no better way to describe it. It came careening up and over the moor, leaning into me, pressing into me. And it lodged itself there.
...]The touch of the wind that day is best explained not by measures of force or speed, but by its quality– steady, a constant pressure, like a solid, a person touching you, no raggedy unevenness of blustery gusts. The air was dependable under my limbs. It had an edge, a form. I could feel it like the edge of an arm, a body, close at my back. The wind filled the underside of my mittens, pulled at the back of my coat, under my hood, the legs of my trousers ballooning forward like sails. Together, we stumbled the ridge. Each step I took, the holding reorganised itself around my body, spooning me. It knew who I was.
[...]For how else to explain that as I moved, it was there, filling in the space where I was not, a remarkable anticipatory physical presence.
[...]Three weeks later, I went back to the same area with my oldest boy. As we skirted another high ridge, the wind blew across and through us, piling in just behind the left shoulder seam and forcing its way out at the collarbone’s center right. As we reached the highest part of the ridge, exposed fully, we skitter, scutter along, our bodies moving compulsorily in the charge of air. Out of control legs, we laugh and stumble. My coat sleeves bow in the gusts, making the bones in my arms into shapes never seen before in a limb. I look at them, these crazy soft alien distortions. I like the new me.
[...]We throw ourselves down on the bilberry shrub floor, flattening ourselves into the ground. Raucous, giddy, we lift our heads, our arms. Again, my mittens fill with air. The wind is holding my hand. My coat’s wide sleeves grip onto the lip of a gust. My trousers, wide-legged, act as a kite. These are the key pieces of the season. And if you have a top layer that opens up the front, so much the better to hold and be held. Under the fastening, grasp the bottom corners, one in each hand. And then, gripping your coat tight, raise your arms high above your head.“
Common Parts is a sustainable fashion brand working with waste or discarded fabrics
