Essay submitted for CSS Summer Residency
Isabella Bolaños
Fashion is a powerhouse; it affects the economy, history, society, and art. Fashion represents each human individually- from just one glance you learn a lot about someone, since what they wear tells you a lot about them, like who they are or who they want to be.
As much as we love fashion, the textile industry is greatly affecting the environment, filling landfills with a great number of clothes and spreading toxic chemicals. We, humans, compare to fashion in more ways than one; like clothes we fade and decay, waiting for our time to run up.
Fashion is an “ecosystem”. It needs various types of people and resources to support it. Just like I mentioned before, fashion is a powerhouse, needing the retailers, media, bloggers, photographers, models, editors, etc. It needs people who are enthusiastic to take care of it, make it evolve, and improve.
Fashion sustainability is a movement working towards environmental integrity. By following sustainable brands, people decrease waste through the supply chain. My interest in fashion comes from wanting to see the industry evolve and showing people the effect art has on our lives.
In my work, sustainability is always in my thought process by recycling objects and turning them into fashion. In one of my works, “Reflection”, I used old CDs (polycarbonate plastic) and made them into a dress that represents how art reflects and affects people and time.
The vision of my work is to make fashion out of objects that turn something simple into
something unique, that inspires others to see a vision out of nothing. Fashion is deemed to be conforming and improving but fashion hasn’t changed much over time; the new challenge is to adapt to new concepts and the technology we have in our hands in this day and age.
Isabella Bolaños is a senior at St. Augustine Preparatory School. She plans on majoring in
Fashion Communication or Visual Communication Design. In her free time, she enjoys working with school clubs like TEDxYouth@CSA, NICAEF, and Alma Sonríe. She’s part of CSA’s Student Board and helped found The CSA Times. She’s participated in Parsons Summer Intensive, The Luxembourg Art Prize, and won the CCS Fashion Summer Residency.