Artists come together to spread awareness on sustainable fashion

In an effort to encourage more discussions around sustainable fashion, seven artists have come together to produce a series of artworks that will talk about water consumption by the fashion industry. These artists had been invited by the organisation ReFashion Hub to design comic strips and videos that present a sarcastic take on producing a T-shirt, and the resources that it drains, with the key focus on water wastage.The participating artists are Priyanka Paul, Aditi Mali, Manasi Deshpande, Mehek Malhotra, Vinu Joseph, Param Sahib and Sonali Bhasin.

The idea behind this initiative is to ask audiences to question the source of the clothes they wear. Talking about the video he has created for the project, Vinu Joseph, a video storyteller, says, “I wanted to convey the message of carbon footprint causing severe harm to the planet and how the fast fashion industry contributes to the same, through a fun yet informative video. It’s challenging to convey something this serious in a funny comic video, without losing the essence of the subject. My objective was not to throw deep details of the situation to my audience, but to make them aware of something they might have taken for granted all this while. I had to go through many articles from different publishers to cross-check all the facts and incorporate the same in my video. One of the facts that left me in shock is that a single T-shirt and jeans that we wear needs 20,000 liters of water to produce. After being a part of this project, I’d love to explore branches of sustainability in fashion and study more about it.”

Cartoonist and illustrator Sonali Bhasin’s artwork talks about the impact that wastewater from dyeing clothes has on the environment. “The research provided by organisers as part of this collaboration really helped spark my imagination, as did the recent news of the Ulhas river turning not just turquoise, but black in some places, due to textile dye in 2020. Even more startling is that almost 20% of the world’s wastewater comes from fashion waste, and 85% of that wastewater is due to the dyeing process. So, my artwork is intended to be a comment on the kind of impact wastewater from dyeing has on our natural environment. We rarely see the impact of our consumption habits, especially when we live so far removed from nature,” she says.