Première Vision focuses on responsibility and innovation

This year Kopenhagen Fur together with Saga Furs was given the opportunity to present fur as a material at the Smart Creation Area. The Smart Creation area showcases different materials and services that centers around the theme ’Unlocking the potential of sustainable fashion’. The theme of our area was real fur versus faux fur and simply laying out the facts about the many sustainable attributes of fur.

Here, visitors from all over the world came to learn more about the sustainable options to the more polluting materials in the fashion industry. What was most interesting to those who came to visit was the fact that fur is a natural material that is biodegradable – especially with the growing concern surrounding the massive plastic problem, to which fashion contributes negatively because of the micro plastic that derives from textiles made from plastic.

The subject of natural materials went beyond the Smart Creation area. Moderated by Vogue Business’ Maghan McDowell the innovation talk ‘The Future of Raw Materials’ engaged some of today’s frontrunners regarding innovative materials and responsible thinking for a talk about finding our way back to raw and natural materials.

On the subject of where the industry is going and what needs to be done to move towards a more responsible fashion industry, Edward Crutchley says:

“I would also say we should look at traditional textiles and how they can be used and what their involvement and impact is. For example, I was in Namibia before this summer, visiting Swakara farmers and they live on farms that receive 3 mm of water a year. Nothing else can be grown there, but it’s a skin that isn’t well known and it should be, because it is incredible. As well as looking at technological advances, there’s a lot of benefit in what we already have.”

Agreed on by the debaters is that when talking responsibility, whether it is environmentally or socially, what we must do is know where the materials come from and how they are made.