Recently, an envoy of First Nations women traveled from Australia to California to share millennia-old cultural burning practices that manage excess tinder and ecosystem health. Indigenous firefighters from all over the world came to learn. As a country highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change—2019 was its warmest year on record, 2022 one of its wettest—Australia’s extreme weather swings portend the global experience if we don’t limit warming to 1.5 degrees.
Kit Willow knows this, and with her latest KITX collection she deployed fire as a potent motif, and as a warning. Orange and white flames curled around hems and licked the edges of torsos on silk and linen midi dresses. Surreally blurred imprints of blue flames— where fires burn hottest—countered the prettiness of her signature filmy silk dresses with their handkerchief hems and trailing loops in lieu of sleeves.
Galvanized by a change to a more progressive government in Australia, Willow’s message for spring 2023 is that something beautiful can turn on us, if we don’t look after it. “We have extreme weather events that are impacting everything,” she said, and not just “the food we eat. We forget the fashion that we wear is also from the earth.” While a common complaint about sustainable fashion is that it’s not affordable, Willow points out that clothes made from new materials will eventually be the most costly. “Virgin materials are going to be a major luxury and they will be so expensive. We’ll have no choice other than working with waste,” she said, noting that it’s often free and always abundant. “There’s enough material that exists on the earth today that we actually never need to make virgin material again.”
Since launching the upcycling workshop Future From Waste Lab in Melbourne, she’s aiming to grow the portion of her collections that she makes from discarded material from patchwork denim and bias-cut silk to lingerie to corsetry. Returning to her design roots as a maker of underthings, Willow held off revisiting corsets until a sustainable mesh, knitted out of upcycled marine litter in a solar-powered Italian factory, became available. This season, she’s cleverly built one into a cotton shirt dress, hidden at the back so that the shirt billows, giving day-night versatility. Timelessness was a guiding principle this season, on show in a series of easy shirting-inspired dresses knotted at the waist, and staples like t-shirts.
For the latter she’s begun working with local label Citizen Wolf, who’ll make all her t-shirts going forward. They only make-to-measure to minimize returns, nail fit, and eliminate unwanted stock. “I love joining forces because we need to work together,” Willow said. One tee is printed with a single incendiary flame, reading ‘Danger > 1.5’. Globally we all have a steadily rising climate in common.
