XR Protest at LV Show
By Jack Couser
It has been over a month since the Extinction Rebellion (XR) protest at Louis Vuitton’s Spring/Summer ‘22 fashion show, and not much has come of it. The atmosphere was dramatic. The music, haunting. Models emerged from backstage into a beautiful hall of crystal chandeliers housing rows of the fashion publication world; a charming scene, quickly disrupted by our rebels, holding banners, who stood up and without word, walked:
“OVERCONSUMPTION = EXTINCTION” … “NO FASHION ON A DEAD PLANET” … “FASHION CHANGE NOT CLIMATE CHANGE” … “CLIMATE IS A FASHION VICTIM” … the last three of these banners proclaimed messages that were hardly publicized as much, or at all for that matter. In fact, it’s really hard to find even a note of these other protestors at the same show. A quick Google search of “Louis Vuitton Extinction Rebellion,” only yields pictures of the banner on overconsumption. ER’s message got through, yet there is hardly any coverage on how this happened at all, begging the question: what was the aim of the protest anyway?
Zero-waste designer Lars Rosen questions whether it is really going to change the minds of anyone who supports luxury fashion. Though he agrees with the sentiment, Rosen comments that “luxury fashion being sustainable is BS, it just creates an echo chamber” (@larshenry_), which is observably true.
Luxury fashion is created to serve and exist exclusively to the highest earners in the market who can actually afford to consume it regularly. This exclusivity graces production practices that reach near-perfect, made to measure clothes and intricate accessories and (miscellaneous) items, but proves to be extremely wasteful. Season after season new clothes are designed, created, shown, sold, resold, burned, and destroyed on repeat across the industry, and in many instances this cycle is preserved in order to protect the “brand.” It’s horrible, but far from breaking news.
Where does the XR rebellion demonstration fit into this? It may have been an effort to change minds, but does the burden of the change they want fall to the producer or the consumer? It’s hard to tell.
In front of all the guests and media in attendance at the show, XR might have been trying to send their message to those at Louis Vuitton, or their parent company LVMH, or the fashion industry as a whole, or just as well to the people sitting all around them. Throwing the burden of environmentally conscious design onto the consumer, though, is just not fair.
We already know that beyond protests or demonstrations, there needs to be environmentally conscious designers and production processes circulating the industry so that the consumer isn’t forced into a box when choosing what to buy. We already know that luxury fashion is unsustainable, and the industry has long been targeted and protested against for general actions that have poorly impacted the environment, yet minds still haven’t changed.
Brand environmentalism needs to be enforced if there’s any hope of attaining actual, tangible change. But until then, XR’s message and action were too vague to have any real effect, so it’s time to get specific. The next wave of protests need to call-out specific actions, not just provide blanket statements that could apply to the whole industry. Until the issue of specificity changes, protests are going to maintain their constant inefficacy.
Courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and BBC