Climate change is the great issue of our time—not least of all because the president of the United States continues to cast official doubt on the topic from the Oval Office. Trump aside, the problems associated with global warming are so large scale, and the prognostications so dire, it can seem an insurmountable challenge to address.
Maggie Marilyn, the New Zealand designer committed to transparency in production, admits she’s had moments of existential crisis in the last year. “I’ve asked myself what the point is,” she said at a Pre-Fall appointment, rattling off troubling subjects like brand equity-damaging seasonal 70 percent–off sales, the mountains of plastic required for shipping, and the sheer fact of the pollution that clothing manufacturing produces.
But don’t count her out. Marilyn is doubling down on her sustainable practices in 2019. The wool she’s using for her new tailoring is grown, dyed, spun, woven, and made into garments in her native NZ; and for certain pieces, she’s using rose petal silk, a plant-based alternative to traditional silk, the production of which kills the silkworms that make it. Not only that, she’s begun researching the circular economy and hopes to eventually establish some sort of send-back policy, in which label cast-offs would be shredded and rewoven into new materials for future Maggie Marilyn designs. When she replaced traditional plastic packaging with compostable cassava root–based packaging last year, designers from all over the world and across the price spectrum reached out for her supplier’s information, which she happily gave. That’s a sort of circular economy in its own way, she pointed out.
Clothing-wise, Marilyn is pushing herself, too. She’s swapped the bright stripes and plentiful ruffles of former collections for a pretty palette of pastel solids with hits of navy and red, and knotting details that added interesting volumes to shoulders and sleeves. #OldCeline is an obvious reference point, but it’s not overly literal. The collection feels like it’s growing up. Marilyn herself is about to have a birthday; she’s turning 24.
