Shifting Narratives in Fashion Media
This past September, I was invited to speak at the Fixing the Future Festival, hosted by Atlas of the Future at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. In my talk – that you can read below – I addressed the importance of responsible storytelling in fashion media, its impact on our culture, and the meaningful conversations and shifts of the overtone window it can create.
Words by Dörte de Jesus
Barcelona, September 17th, 2022:
“In my short talk, I would like to explore with you how fashion media can help create a better future. And for this, I’d like to briefly take you on my journey.
In 2015, I left the world of traditional fashion media, quit my work as a magazine designer and art director at ELLE magazine in Munich, and moved to London to live on a houseboat with my Australian partner. I vividly remember, it was quite a drastic change for me at the time, but it felt like an important step that I had to take. Earlier in the year, I had read Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything* and it had an enormous effect on me, bursting open my mind and heart to the gravity of the climate and ecological emergency. I was gripped by the feeling that we are approaching times of great change, where we have to ask ourselves, “What kind of world do we want to live in?”
What I had experienced at a traditional fashion publication didn’t seem relevant to me anymore. I knew I no longer wanted to be in the wheel of an industry that I had come to see as part of the problem. I wanted to question it and help create a better alternative. That was my starting point.
In London, I began to look into the back stories of fashion to gain a deeper understanding of the harm it was causing. I learned about the resources and labour that go into producing clothes, and began meeting and interviewing slow clothing designers, makers, academics and activists. In early 2016, I set up an online platform and Instagram account and started publishing my findings. Gradually, I was contacted by other fashion industry creatives who had come across my work and were also seeking change. Our creative network began to grow, and a few years later in 2019, we managed to raise enough money through crowdfunding to launch a first annual print magazine. This year, the third edition of The Lissome was published in May.
I would describe my relationship with fashion and fashion media as double-edged, characterized by joy but also by frustration and despair. I’ve always loved the playful side of clothing and how much creative expression it can allow, and adore the beauty of its craftsmanship. I believe that fashion media has a powerful capacity to make us dream, and I view it as a potent tool for storytelling.
But in our age of intense consumerism and growth-dependency, it is hard to dismiss how traditional fashion media acts as a catalyst for constantly changing trends, entices us to go shopping, and helps push fashion production, consumption, and waste into overdrive. It creates a strange bubble, a glamorous but somewhat thoughtless fantasy world, where we’re not made to think about where our clothes come from or how to relate to them meaningfully. A world of aspiration where our subconscious minds are primed to look for newness, status, and the next exciting garment fling. It preys on our insecurities and keeps the machinery of fast fashion rolling.
But couldn’t it be different?
Couldn’t we use fashion media as a tool to build relationships? To build strong and caring bonds between fashion lovers and the origins of their garments, to celebrate the ingenuity of nature and the skillfulness of fashion designers and makers?
Couldn’t we use it as a platform for empowering, expressing, and loving ourselves in all our diversity?
And couldn’t we use its storytelling powers to help transform our culture – by guiding it away from extraction, competition, and exploitation, and towards regeneration, compassion, and cooperation?
What I’ve come to learn over the years is that the climate and ecological crisis are not singular topics that can be solved through easy fixes within the existing structures. Margaret Atwood put it well when she wrote: “It’s not climate change, it’s everything change.”** I believe that we are facing a systemic crisis and a philosophical one. If we seriously intend to find solutions, we have to face the historical crimes of capitalism and colonialism, and re-align our perspective of the world and our place as human beings within it.
And that’s where I believe the role and importance of storytelling and media come in. As humans, we create meaning through stories. The stories that we tell each other shape how we perceive ourselves, our place in the world, and the values to which we aspire.
If we want to change our world, we have to change our stories: their content, viewpoints, and protagonists. And I would like to go further and say that it’s essential for our mission that we also become aware of how we tell our stories, our tone of voice, and our energetic frequency.
For The Lissome, this means that we use the world of fashion as our starting point from which we explore the wide web of life. We see the ecosystem of fashion as a rich example of interconnection that touches on the many different relationships that we engage in: our relationship with nature, with plants and animals, with our fellow human beings, and the world of material things.
Our content is far more diverse than what we usually see in fashion magazines. In our annual print editions, we choose a particular topic that we explore in a wide range of interviews, articles, and fashion stories. I will give you an example:
Our second print edition that came out in 2021 is called Rewilding, and comes in two covers that we named Inner Nature and Outer Nature, representing the regeneration, healing, and re-flourishing of our inner and outer worlds.
In the pages of the magazine, we explore the importance of slowing down and sensual pleasure for modern-day activism. We talk with biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber about how a worldview of “aliveness” could help break down our illusion of separation from the natural world. We visit the brave guardians of Hambach forest to shine a new light on a decades-old protest movement against Germany’s largest open-cast lignite mine, still operating today. And we travel through the worlds of permaculture, herbalism, folk mythology, and modern witchcraft.
But it’s not just our stories that are different, it’s also the way we tell them that is important. I believe that if we want to bring forward a new culture based on interconnection, integrity and care, it has to be given space and come alive within us, in our inner development, and in our outer words and visual language. We embody and manifest the energy that we want to see in the world.
I chose the 18th-century word “lissome” because it carries the meanings of “gentle, light, gracious, and kind” as the title and guidepost for our publication, and made a deliberate choice to tell our stories in a gentle and joyful way, by means of beauty.
What do I mean by beauty?
The Irish poet John O’Donohue described it well how in today’s culture, we have often come to mistake beauty for glamour and glitz. Instead, he called beauty “a human calling”.*** To me the fleeting moments of beauty are when I feel touched by a genuine sense of awe and deeply connected to the ultimate mystery and sacredness of life.
So let me end by saying I believe that the media, at its best, is a wonderful translator for abstract ideas that brings them to life and generates a real impetus for change. It can help make ideas tangible, and offer new visions for a world that is more equal and fair, more gentle, joyful, and loving.
And this is what we are trying to do with The Lissome.
Thank you.”
The entire Fixing the Future Festival 2022 is available on YouTube.
You can watch Dörte’s talk here (it starts at 30:05 min).
References:
*Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, 2014.
**Margaret Atwood, It’s Not Climate Change – It’s Everything Change, Medium, July 27, 2015.
***Interview with John O’Donohue, The Inner Landscape of Beauty, On Being with Krista Tippett, February 28, 2008.
