Made in Italy is not simply a label of a successful set of design, art, and creativity melted together, but a claim for shared responsibility in the direction of the safeguard of the environment, as the most respectful practice to take care of human life. A leading Italian specialist in sustainability focuses on a very singular issue in fashion and beyond.
By Roberta Redaelli
In 2003 Unesco decided to recognize as a World Heritage Site not only the monuments built until then but also the human ability to create objects and experiences, the intangible heritage, often at risk of extinction. It is not just about culture: «The laboratory is a social space. The workshops, past and present, have always created links between people», writes Richard Sennet in the essay The Craftsman (Yale University Press), emphasizing the most vital aspect of the places where creativity is born and is shared, that is the workshops. In this perspective, Made in Italy, the highest expression of beauty and creativity, becomes a vector of social change-oriented to responsible consumption.
Ceramic bowls (Wix pic)
At the same time, the consumer becomes a coadjutor in this turn that sees the passage from the object as an end in itself to the shared responsibility for safeguarding the environment and human dignity. A new concept of luxury is redesigned that becomes ethical, because its value is the result of a renewed green sensibility concretely woven into the various phases: from the conception, to the production, to the commercialization, and above all to the end-of-life of the product, in a logic of eco-design.
The vocation to the beauty of “handmade”, in its inescapable imperfection, gives the creations, custodians of their own identity, a magical allure of uniqueness in an eye of circularity. It is a real narrative suspended between the love for the roots and the beauty of live culture that, recovering ancient crafts in the promotion of the territory, is proposed as an antithesis to globalization and standardization of mass production. The return to craftsmanship and quality is important not only in relation to the raw materials used, but above all because it means putting people at the center, generating a series of facts and attitudes that contribute to changing society making it more and more sustainable also on the economic level, in a continuous interweaving between manual skills and competence. Craft creation has always been intrinsically green, because it focuses on quality over quantity, recovery, and maintenance, on production on request, and for specific customer needs. From a simple object of daily use acquires, therefore, an experiential value of uniqueness and originality declined according to the sensitivity and needs of each individual customer, becoming self-expression in contrast to the false idea of democracy conveyed by fast fashion. Each product, in fact, is designed and made to be loved over time beyond the passing trends. A new creative sensibility, therefore, is the synthesis between ethics and aesthetics in the definition of new paradigms more fluid and inclusive.
A ring designer (Wix pic)
The term craftsman today is not limited to defining a profession but embodies an attitude determined by a renewed approach to everyday life. The rediscovery of handmade and made-to-measure products is central to the conscious buying propensity of consumers-authors who seek uniqueness, attention to detail, and ethical transparency. Traceable products are preferred, because only knowing of origin, a key element for evaluating sustainability, helps to tell the story of the value chain.
The return to craftsmanship and quality is important not only in relation to the raw materials used, but above all because it means putting people at the center, generating a series of facts and attitudes that contribute to changing society making it more and more sustainable also on the economic level, in a continuous interweaving between manual skills and competence.
In fact, from a careful reading it is clear that the narrative of Beauty - an intangible and evolving element - is the result of the enhancement of the cultural heritage of a country and the sharing of knowledge, vertical between generations and horizontal between different people. The knowledge of places is thus combined with the discovery of quality manufacturing, creating a bridge between territory, know-how, and innovation. In an increasingly globalized world, craftsmanship, understood as the art of making, embodies the will of contemporary generations to escape standardization, focusing on the skills, abilities and uniqueness that today more than ever are returning to trend.
Responsibility and fashion, a high relevant issue (Wix pic)
The challenge is, therefore, to hand down ancient crafts and make them contemporary through a cultural proposal that renews the idea of productivity and links to the contemporary. And this in consideration above all of the data on the impact of the fashion sector in Europe and in the world published by the European Commission:
- 1.5 million people employed by the fashion industry in Europe;
- the fashion sector is the fourth most polluting sector in Europe;
- on average in Europe each consumer discards 11.3 kg of clothing per year;
- more than half of the sustainability messages from companies analyzed in Europe were found to be false or misleading.
This aspect, which is mainly linked to environmental pollution, is echoed by the serious social problem of protecting workers in a model based on the overproduction of low-quality clothing and induced over-consumption.
In a liquid society characterized by a crisis not only economic but also political, social, cultural and value, in which value is most often confused with profit, the figure of the craftsman, able to give concreteness to questions and to reflect on their qualities, is the optimal solution in which the know-how is combined with the intangible heritage of values, memory, identity, history and culture.
© Rekh Magazine
Roberta Redaelli
Roberta Redaelli, Italian Sustainability Consultant, Content Creator, Translator and Web Content Editor. Educated at the Catholic University, she graduated in Foreign Languages and Literature with a specialization in Economics and Technique of business Communication (2020), then took the Master “Fashion and Sustainability: Understanding Luxury Fashion in a Changing World” by London Collage of Fashion and Kering (2021) and the Master “Fashion Values: Economy” by London College of Fashion (2021). As a continuation of her academic research started with the Master’s thesis entitled "Sustainability and communication as values in the luxury market", on 24 January 2021 she founded Made In Como, couture showcase of sustainability Made in Como. Not only a novelty in the social world, but also an important part of a wider editorial project, which aims to tell the excellence of Como in a sustainable way.
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