LETTER TO THE FASHION SYSTEM
We speak about the future constantly.
New materials.
New processes.
New technologies.
New collections.
Perhaps the problem is not our ability to imagine what comes next.
Perhaps it is our inability to remain with what already exists.
Fashion has learned to speak very fluently about circularity. It has built a recognizable vocabulary around it — a visual grammar, a rhetoric, a promise.
But circularity is not a language.
It is a place to inhabit.
And inhabiting it means accepting something uncomfortable: there is no single model, no stable formula, no map that works everywhere.
There are attempts.
Errors.
Contradictions.
Waiting.
There is time.
The contemporary system tends to treat time as something to compress. Fewer trials, fewer intermediate steps, fewer possibilities for error. Speed becomes efficiency.
But another understanding of time is possible.
A time that allows materials to be observed before decisions become irreversible. A time that accepts waiting. A time that continues after an object has been sold — through use, repair, adaptation, transformation.
The conflict is not between slowness and speed.
It is between two conceptions of time: one compresses it to extract immediate value; the other extends it to construct value over time.
This also means questioning our fascination with novelty.
Continuity is not a failure of imagination.
To continue can mean preserving a trace, working beside what already exists rather than replacing it, allowing the past and the future to occupy the same object.
And perhaps this is where circularity becomes interesting again.
Not as a solution.
As a question.
A question worth continuing to design.
EPISTULA AD SYSTEMA
Sul circolare / On Circulation
Letter to the Fashion System.
Notes and reflections on circulation.
Diana Eugeni Le Quesne
Vuscichè