A message about the present
Dear friends, partners, fashion enthusiasts and revolutionaries.
Fashion is a constant movement, it is expression, it is individual and collective, and it is made by people for people. Just like we are in constant movement of time and life. And what I do now with my time and my professional life is to follow this flow. I am stepping down as Education Director at Fashion Revolution Brazil.
It has been an important professional course, since when I started, at the very beginning of the movement in Brazil, as a volunteer, opening the education activities and, in 2018, becoming the co-founder of Instituto Fashion Revolution Brasil. It’s been amazing 7 years of intense and tireless work, learnings, exchanges, fundamental dialogues with many people and organizations, and building a nationwide network of incredible people who hope, like we do, for a better fashion industry and a better world.
Fashion needs brave, strong and sensitive people, willing to change an entire system, which will only change if we create a real revolution. And that’s the beauty of our movement. Shall we never forget this: we need a fashion revolution. And the revolution will only happen through collectiveness, with education as its foundation. Education arouses a critical and creative vision as well as the autonomy of thinking and, therefore, it is liberating.
We have been guided by this feeling of liberation and expansion when we created the Fashion Revolution Forum, the country’s first platform exclusively designed to foster research and debates around sustainable fashion challenges and solutions, as well as to place Brazil as a generator of knowledge in the area.
Likewise, the Fashion Transparency Index, in Brazil and globally, has the potential to trigger a series of lessons for major brands and retailers, encouraging new strategies, policies and practices to help the industry, as a whole, advance. We can see it happening year after year and it feels like this is the right track.
I feel deeply proud and pleased to be part of the construction, establishment and strengthening of these projects, like all the others we have developed over the years. I am sure that they will remain strong and fundamental for the Brazilian fashion Industry.
The fight for a fashion revolution is urgent and fundamental
Shall we never slow down, may we have the (necessary) rest as a strategy to continue the fight, and we shall never forget why we started this journey and where we want to arrive. Shall we never get distracted by the shallow speech of those who come around but don’t really seek real transformation? Shall we never get used to the superficial messages of those who transform sustainability into a product? And we shall keep questioning, demanding, and building a desirable present. Our great power is to always have the present in our hands, as it is the only space of time we occupy – the present. It’s what we do right now that matters. And to realize that changes how we face the world.
The present points to an urgent ecological transition, an opportunity to imagine new civilization milestones, to deconstruct old structures of power and to recreate the forms of relationships between people and with nature to allow the planet to regenerate. Regenerating nature is regenerating ourselves. We cannot go back in time, but we can make peace with nature and coexist in harmony. This is the moment, the right time is always now. Change is needed.
I am immensely grateful to friends and partners who I have met on the way and who have helped me evolve in this path. Life is made of encounters and through them, it happens every day, always in the present. I hope we meet again soon 🙂
With love and hope,
Eloisa Artuso
Eloisa Artuso is a designer, co-founder of the Fashion Revolution Brazil Institute, Fashion Transparency Index Brazil coordinator, and Sustainable Design lecturer at Istituto Europeo di Design. With nearly 20 years of experience in fashion, her current work is based on the space where sustainability and education merge with design. Eloisa uses critical and creative thinking to generate insights and solutions to solve multi-dimensional and encourage systemic transformations in the fashion industry.
