Is this what climate change fashion looks like?

Rick Owens’ answer to hotter temperatures? Air conditioned tracksuits

Two fashion stories appeared this week from different sides of the industry that belonged together.

One was Rick Owens sending inflated adidas pieces down the Paris menswear runway with built-in fans, essentially turning sportswear into wearable air conditioning. The other was H&M talking about adapting collections and marketing calendars for longer, hotter summers.

Different ends of fashion. Same signal. Arguably, equally dystopian.

Fashion is very good at pretending bodies are symbols. What the heat is great at, is reminding us they are, in fact, bodies.

How we choose to shape what comes next as we adapt to climate change has almost seemed fictional by cognitive dissonance. Where I currently am in the UK, homes, cities and transportation systems are not equipped for the tipping point temperatures we were warned of decades ago. For the majority, air conditioning in homes felt unthinkable even a couple of years ago, but it’s been moulded into the tightly bolted architecture British weather chat this past week.

Bringing industrial systems directly to the body feels a signal that we’ve only got ourselves to count on. A stylistic hybrid of high fashion, tech performance wear and survival gear bringing scifi to Paris.

This design angle is orbited by many things, satire is likely to be one of them.

However genuinely the issue was raised in impact reports or recycled polyester campaigns, fashion used to talk about climate change as something it had to reduce its contribution to, now it has to dress people for the conditions it has helped create.

Tricky to tell right now if the idea of resignation and surrender will drive relief or action for the industry.

Wearable air conditioning more than internet hype

Rick Owens and adidas making a kind of inflated, fan-cooled tracksuit is very easy to meme.

It looks dystopian because it is dystopian. It is also, in a very Rick Owens way, completely honest.

Paris was hot. Fashion week was hot. Guests were holding umbrellas, shows were being moved earlier, venues were being judged by whether they had functioning air conditioning. The most desirable thing in the room was shade.

Against that backdrop, wearable air conditioning did not feel like a gimmick in isolation. It felt like a luxury product telling a perfect truth in real time.

It isn’t a small shift, nor should this take us by surprise. Fashion has spent decades making people uncomfortable in the name of image. Heat makes that harder to romanticise, as I’m sure many of us experienced in the record breaking european temperatures.

It’s a great social commentary, and it couldn’t have landed at a better time to make an impact.

Retailers prioritising ‘summer dressing’ over its root cause

Potentially the most concerning element of this announcement from H&M, is that climate change isn’t seemingly stopping them from the mass push on consumption and production - the thing that got us into this mess - but to ensure people can continue to do so despite the heat.

“If August is 35 degrees (Celsius), or September even is 35 degrees, you still want to update your wardrobe.” states H&M CEO Daniel Erver.

Its a harrowing statement.

If September is 35 degrees year after year, and all we want to do is keep pumping our crowded wardrobes with fossil-fuel derived fast fashion to replace what we wore last ‘season’, then we’ve truly failed ourselves.

The fact the leaders of these systems view us as so automated, at the helm of their product drops, should genuinely insult us all.

To paraphrase Alec Leach, ‘the world is on fire, but we’re still buying polyester’. Those of us working in sustainability communications need to step up against this.

The fashion calendar is starting to melt with climate change

There’s a more commercially revealing angle to this H&M story.

When a mass-market retailer starts talking about longer summers and shifting marketing calendars, we are no longer in niche climate innovation territory. We are in the operating system of fashion.

Seasonality has always been a fiction, but it was a useful structure for how the industry ran. Arguably, with fast and ultra-fast fashion retailers landing hundreds of styles daily, we’ve become immune to seasonality, despite taxonomies.

Spring/summer. Autumn/winter. Back to school. Races season. Festive party. Resort. Transitional dressing, which is fashion’s way of admitting the weather has never behaved as neatly as the calendar. But climate change is making the fiction harder to maintain.

If consumers are shopping by weather more than by season, what happens to buying cycles planned months in advance? And if brands respond by simply selling more summer product for longer, have we adapted to climate change or just found another reason to keep the machine running?

It requires tight forecasting - trend, weather, merchandising in synergy. We cannot let retailers use the impacts of climate change as a means to justify waste.

A hotter world will absolutely change what people need from clothes. It will also give fashion another commercial opportunity to turn instability into demand.

The risk of climate-responsive fast fashion

H&M are showing just how quickly adaptation becomes retail strategy.

A longer summer means a different material mix. A hotter September means new marketing logic. Weather volatility means more responsive buying, different stock planning and likely more attempts to shorten the distance between climate signal and product.

There is a responsible version of that.

Better forecasting. Less overstock. Regenerative systems and products. Clothes designed for the conditions people are actually living in.

There is also a very dangerous version.

Even more micro-seasons, ready-to-launch weather-triggered drops, ‘heatwave essentials’.

You can feel the urgency of it - the widgets that flash from flames to lighting bolts - because the weather changes quicker than your decisions.

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Fashion is expert at absorbing a condition. It aestheticises it, merchandises it, and then convinces people the answer is a new wardrobe.

Fashion is both exposed to climate disruption and deeply implicated in it.

It relies on agricultural systems, water, energy, transport, labour, petrochemical fibres, global logistics and endless production cycles. It is vulnerable to heat, floods, drought, crop failure, factory disruption and changing consumer behaviour. It also helps produce the emissions and material waste driving the conditions it now needs to adapt to.

Adaptation cannot become another shopping category

Climate-responsive fashion cannot just mean making hotter-weather clothes for consumers in wealthy cities. It has to mean looking at the full heat map of the industry.

In line with clothing adaptation, we need a narrative adaptation anchored by the people within the fashion industry who are affected by climate change:

• The garment worker in an overheating factory.

• The dyer working around water stress.

• The warehouse worker picking orders in a heatwave.

• The cotton farmer dealing with drought.

• The retail worker in a store without adequate cooling.

If fashion is going to talk about heat, it needs to talk about whose bodies are absorbing it.

And how is it going to look?

Summer campaign ads have always sold on pleasure senses. Bare skin, linen, swimwear, holidays, sandals, ease, heat as fantasy.

That version of summer is still real, but it is paralleled by the type of heat we’ve all been talking about in Europe. The heat which makes public transport unbearable, sleep next to impossible, work dangerous, cities hostile, and your wardrobe feel like a negotiation with your nervous system.

For future-facing brands, this should change how we talk about materials too. We need to address the longevity of new products and materials in the context of changeable (unbearable) temperature fluctuations.

Communications are probably going to need to address how things behave in heat, deal with moisture, breathability, how it ages under UV exposure. The material conversation has to become a more embodied, more lived condition.

What fashion owes the hotter future

(Aside from the obvious…)

Fashion has already proved it can turn almost anything into an occasion to buy. The industry needs to adapt to heat without letting heat become another harrowingly ironic engine of overproduction.

That means asking harder questions than ‘what do people want to buy when it is hot?’.

From a technical perspective, we need to ask how materials are mitigating the cause itself? Does it absorb the carbon it’s fighting the effects of?

From a longevity perspective, we need to ask can it work across changing conditions? Can it reduce the need for multiple near-identical seasonal wardrobes?

Can resale, repair and rental handle climate-responsive clothing in ways that extend use rather than accelerate novelty? Can brands design for hotter lives without exploiting the anxiety of living through them?

Climate adaptation that increases consumption cannot be an option.