Something many of us may love is seeing the Victoria Secret Angels walk down the runway. Although fashion shows are super fun and entertaining to watch, many people may not know about the excessive money and wasted clothes spent on them.
The Saint Laurent's Spring/Summer 2020 show was illegally plunked down on the fragile California beach ecosystem. By doing this, the California beach ecosystem was mistreated and many people overlooked that. However, many luxury brands began to educate themselves on fashion sustainability and started recycling and reusing set materials.
Not only can the fashion shows themselves be a problem, but also the guests attending them. Many people who go to fashion shows often leave their empty water bottles and trash everywhere without cleaning up after themselves. Also, guests who fly from fashion capital to fashion capital tend to leave their gift bags everywhere and emit carbon emissions into the air by all the traveling they do.
Although many brands are beginning to rework their supply chains, use more sustainable materials, and reuse products, other brands continue to host wasteful fashion shows. According to a report from Zero to Report and the Carbon Trust, "The travel undertaken by buyers and brands resulted in about 241,000 tons of CO2 emissions a year. That is equivalent to the annual emissions of a small country or enough energy to light up Times Square for 58 years." This shows that CO2 emissions are unnecessarily released into the air for a week of fashion shows. Some of the major factors of a fashion show that negatively affect our environment include air travel, accommodation from hotels (lights, electricity, and water), and the emissions associated with transporting the fashion collections.
During the Victoria Secret fashion shows, all the models wear wings which are very pretty but also wasteful. The wings are not sold at the showrooms after the fashion shows and simply go to waste. Designers also spend hundreds of hours creating these beautiful wings only for them to be worn for one night. The resources used to create these wings should be used for more important matters that help our earth.
A great deal of money is also put into fashion shows. London Runway UK states, "Depending on the brand’s economic possibilities and the artistic, marketing, and communication choices made, a US-based show can cost, on average, between $10,000 and $300,000." The money is spent on the location of the shows, equipment (lighting, sound, etc), designing the set, paying the models, hair and makeup artists, designing the clothing collections, and so much more. Way too much money is spent on an event that only lasts one night and ends up in wastes afterward!
As you can see fashion shows can be very problematic in terms of the costs and the impact on our environment, but that does not mean that they cannot change. Fashion shows can be seen as beneficial if the clothing is more sustainable, the money is used to donate to charities rather than spent unnecessarily on equipment and such, the guests are given recyclable gift bags, and so much more!
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