Ubuntu for All : Committed Light-Bearing Creatives Must Rise Together
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Li Edelkoort Considers How Humanity Moves Forward
When Lidewij - known as Li - Edelkoort launched her career as a trend forecaster 45 years ago, people considered her job to employ a certain degree of “witchcraft”, she told The Guardian in a January 2020 interview. “Men would be giggling at the end of the room. But I have gained respect,” she says, “because I have been right so many times.”
Before Victoria’s Secret became a boys club, it was a girls club — the world’s largest lingerie brand conceived by women and largely run by women. When our jet touched down, there was a long period of years when seven women and one guy got off the plane. And no, he was not the president. Of course we all reported to Les Wexner in those years, but we had his ear and his confidence that we knew what we were doing. And we did.
One of the great privileges of my years at VS as fashion director and head of product development was my near monthly private lunches with Li Edelkoort, absolutely considered to be the most cerebral, mind-expanding, rooted in keen observations and intuition trend forecaster in the fashion industry.
I never giggled when Li spoke,and we got along famously. She said I reminded her of Lauren Bacall.
Anti-Fashion Manifesto
In March 2015, Edelkoort, through her Paris-based agency Trend Union, published her 10-point Anti Fashion manifesto, arguing why she believed the fashion industry “is going to implode.” Dezeen detailed the key points and conferred with the Netherlands-born trendmeister at Design Indaba in Cape Town. Never at a loss for words, Li emphasized her strong conviction that fashion had become “a ridiculous and pathetic parody of what it has been.”
"Now that several garments are offered cheaper than a sandwich we all know and feel that something is profoundly and devastatingly wrong," she writes.
"But worst of all is the symbolism of it all," Edelkoort continues. "Prices profess that these clothes are to be thrown away, discarded as a condom and forgotten before being loved and savoured, teaching young consumers that fashion has no value. The culture of fashion is thus destroyed."
Welcome to Ubuntu
Fast-forward five years to the spring of 2020, and Li Edelkoort was again at Design Indaba in South Africa — home to the concept of ‘ubuntu’ — the philosophical foundation of my own artisan jewelry business GlamTribal.
Dezeen published her considered viewpoint that the coronavirus epidemic will lead to “a global recession of a magnitude that has not been experienced before" but will eventually allow humanity to reset its values. “This is not a financial crisis but a disruption crisis. People stop moving around, stop going out, stop spending, stop going on holiday, stop going to cultural events, even to church,” Edelkort told Marcus Fairs, founder and editor-in-chief of Dezeen. Fairs is the first digital journalist to be awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
The expression “went viral” is one we apologize for using now. The words once celebrated have new meaning. Li Edelkoort’s predictions around our post-COVID-19 world became the most viewed article on Dezeen. She followed it on April 15, with her new “manifesto of hope’ for a post-pandemic world, also shared on Dezeen and Business of Fashion.
Edelkoort’s virtual interview from South Africa was the first major discussion to lead off the Virtual Design Festival, another of many design conferences cancelled due to the pandemic. Calum Lindsay discusses a wide range of topics in the 40-minute interview.
Communicating with each other about the way forward, learning to live in this new post-COVID-19 world, it’s important for us to see hope and possibilities of renewal and cultivating rebirth.
It’s no secret that the fashion and design industry has known full-well that change must come. Just as Bill Gates gave his 2014 TED Talk about the certainty of a future global pandemic and how to prepare for it, the fashion industry has known that it’s been driving drunk for years.
However, it’s not as if we all woke up one morning with a giant COVID-19 hangover. Many prominent fashion industry voices — Stella McCartney, to name one — have been leaders in demanding and forcing change. London has been a hotbed of activism around climate change, sustainability and workers rights for several years.
Certain realities about our new life are clear: we will consume less; we will be more mindful; and we will not return to ‘normal’ because “normal’ threatens to make not only animals and flowers extinct. “Normal” now threatens the lives of millions of people worldwide, and we do not consider it conquered for one moment. The majority of intelligent, thoughtful people do not want to return to “normal”.
Ubuntu for All
AOC posted another Amish-inspired fashion story this week.
Looking at the imagery, all I could see was Greta Thunberg’s penetrating eyes — and those of her young friends — glaring at us.
It’s so critical that we honor positive efforts around the world, and especially among young people to get us going on a new path.
When Gucci rebuilt Noah’s Ark for it’s Gucci Cruise 2019 Campaign, released in Fall 2018, Alessandro Michele was making a major statement about moving forward on sustainability. Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena transform” dead-stock textiles” into intricately handcrafted skirts and dresses at Chopova Lowena.
In April the Financial Times featured Upcycle chic — five brands to know. Archivist Studio, founded by Eugenie Haitsma and Johannes Offerhaus in 2019, takes discarded luxury hotel white bed sheets with minor tears and turns them into white shirts.
1/Off Paris takes vintage and secondhand items and reconfigures them. Dutch co-founders Xuan-Thu Nguyen, who has her own couture label, and Renée van Wijngaarden, who worked at luxury consignment store Vestiaire Collective, literally sew two different jackets together in a new creation.
Last July the New York Times covered 16 Black Chefs Changing Food in America. Kiki Bokungu Louya left Detroit to become a chef, but returned to pursue a greater goal: At Folk and Farmer's Hand in Corktown, social justice, local agriculture and food justice are her priorities. The article reminds me that there’s a flour shortage in Brooklyn. Not photographed above, Allison Arevalo started making and selling pasta from the stoop of her brownstone, after she couldn’t find any at local stores or online.
Brian Bradshaw is devoted to the hiking life and walked around in worn-down, budget boots, developing a painful medical condition ‘plantar fasciitis’. Bradshaw learned his lesson about investing in artisan-grade, well made boots, and then went one step further. Bradshaw’s online business Boot Bomb was born.
When GardeningMentor.com founder Kevin Rodrigues contacted me from Mumbai in late March, he succeeded where 95% of people — mostly guys — fail. Kevin didn’t sweet talk me with some stupid joke. He didn’t drive me crazy with followups. This astute young man exhibited patience, and when I finally took a look at his gardening site — yes it does sell things, too — I was delighted to support his desire to grow his own food and earn some income.
This is ‘Ubuntu’, and I reserve it exclusively for high-quality projects that help our world.
Kevin has other very marketable skills but like Ron Finley, the Guerrilla Gardener in South Central LA, he wants to spread the word about the importance of healthy food, organic soil and living in concert with nature. Thinking I was being helpful, I dashed off a separate email about Ron Finley’s work to Rodrigues and received the warm reply, that Kevin already had that base covered on Gardening Mentor. Why am I not surprised!
Light-Bearing Creatives Must Rise
These are sad and troubling days in our ravaged, weary world. And I do believe that we are in for a very rough ride. The weakest and poorest among us will be hit the hardest, and we must help each other.
Some of us are light-bearers and we must rise together — not with all the answers — as most of us don’t have them. But some humans have cultivated our sixth sense about what is possible and how to survive in difficult situations. We do not know where our world is going, but the creators and people with visions around new values in our beleaguered world must rise — together. ~ Anne
