Barcelona to launch mega event on fashion sustainability

Barcelona wants to be Southern Europe’s Copenhagen. The Association for Sustainable Fashion in Barcelona (Msbcn) and the accelerator Seed&Click are putting the final touches to the release of an international event on sustainable and ethical fashion that goes by the name ReBarcelona. The premiere of this event will take place the 8^th and 9^th of March, 2019.

It is an event that takes place once a year and that will dedicate its first convocation to the industry and design, and a second one to consumers. “With this event we want to keep on making people aware, educating them and making them become sensitive to the change”, explained Mónica Melero, Mscbn president, who has pointed out that change implies consumption: buying less but more expensive.

Melero has presented the event again in the framework of its fifth edition at Barcelona Ethical Fashion Fest, a meeting focused on making production systems and fashion consumption more dynamic. In this occasion, Kavita Parmar, founder and creative director of IOU Project; Carolina Blázquez, head of innovation and sustainability at Ecoalf and Elena Salcedo, coordinator of Sustainable and Ethical Fashion at Instituto Europeo di Design (IED), all participated during the opening of the event.

With ReBarceloba, the Msbcn organisation wants to continue its advocacy work in favour of a systemic change in the industry

During the round table there was highlighted the idea provided by Melero during the presentation of the first ReBarcelona: the need for a systemic change in fashion industry carried out from within the society. After an introduction that dealt with the full-on rejection of Black Friday and its invitation to unmeasured shopping, Parmar, Blázquez and Salcedo coincided on the need for consumers to change their current purchase ways, getting information about where clothes come from and to choose fixing instead of throwing.

“More than fashion brands, we want to be drivers of change”, pointed out IOU Project’s founder. “If we want a change of paradigm in the industry, we have to see a change in consumers first”, added she. According to Parmar, this transformation will not come from huge corporations but from micro companies as theirs. “We can be the Davids against Goliaths”, stated she. “People talk about the industry as an enormous being and I think… ‘death to this industry and life to a new one’”, she concluded.

From Ecoalf, Blázquez explained that as brands dedicated to sustainable fashion, their mission is doubled. On one hand, they must change the industry using determined materials, and on the other, they have the responsibility to spread out that there exists another way to do things. “In the end, it is consumers who, every time they purchase something, they either give or take power from a company”, sentenced she.

Elena Salcedo, from IED, took a step further and pointed out that perhaps in five years, people no longer talk about shopping but about accessibility. “We see these changes in other sectors already, which show that perhaps in the future, having properties will be seen as something weird”, assured the expert.