What We Carry

As a regular to the art museum Tate Modern in London, the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson returns with an exhibition titled The Real Life this year. Using captivating installations that combine complex geometry and lighting effects to broaden the sense of visitors, the artist’s works have shed light on social issues like climate change to invite visitors to reflect on our relationship with the environment. Last year, Eliasson and geologist Minik Rosing installed Ice Watch, which is a group of twenty-four blocks of ice brought from Greenland to London, right in front of Tate Modern. Visitors could interact with these chunks of melting ice; such interaction pressed visitors to contemplate on the acute problem of climate change.

The Amazon forest fires that have lasted for months this year are also a wake-up call to look at how ill our planet has become. The fashion brand Prada has recently announced it will stop using animal fur from next year. Soon after that, the brand launched the new Re-Nylon project, hoping to improve the balance between fashion and the environment. In the 80s, the brand introduced a bag series made from nylon that was used for army tent. The nylon bags quickly became an iconic product line by the brand. With a big contrast to the more traditional and heavily crafted bag designs, this reinterpretation of nylon instantly changed people’s usual perception of the material as being cheap.

To bring the brand onto a track towards a sustainable future, Prada has introduced the regenerated nylon ECONYL®, which are made from 100% recycled ocean trash, fabrics from discarded carpets, fishing net and other used materials. The regenerated yarn can be reused indefinitely, without compromising on the quality. The new triangular product logo has been adapted from the recycle logo, also to represent the novelty of the material. As part of the brand’s environmental conservation initiatives, Prada aims at fully applying the regenerated yarn to all their nylon products by 2021. Sustainable fashion is the answer to the pursuit of quality trendy items without adding burden to our environment.

To let the public understand more about the concepts and production process behind the Re-Nylon project, Prada has teamed up with National Geographic to create a short documentary series titled What We Carry to show consumers the process Prada is taking to reduce the use of plastic in its bags. The episodes take the audience across the world to different facilities and factories including the carpet recycling facility in Phoenix Arizona and the abandoned “ghost fishing net” below the surface of the ocean in Mahana Bay, off the coast of New Zealand. By revealing the impacts human bring to the environment, the series aims at pointing out “what we carry” would inevitably create a certain amount of burden on the environment. Therefore, we need to take a small step each time to bring genuine change to the world.