Panel 4.3: Ronaldo Fraga
Figure 4.5: Ronaldo Fraga’s summer collection 2011 in the São Paulo Fashion Week, Brazil.
Figure 4.6: Ronaldo Fraga’s winter collection 2014 in the São Paulo Fashion Week, Brazil.
The thinking behind this marrying of skills is the belief that designers can support creative initiatives in the hope of aiding the development of markets for local and small productions. This has proved to promote a whole national market based on local products, which nowadays, through design, could drop their limiting touristic and folkloric connotations, even though still deeply embedding the identity of the place. The use of materials and local technique has also lent a distinction to design products. Although these practices have brought recognition to the Brazilian design sector and elsewhere, that recognition has only recently begun to penetrate academic
discussions. The evident transformation of the design scenario in Brazil clearly demands a change in design education in this country, in that although design and crafts are not the same, they can come together in an intersection that has proved to generate new capabilities for both artisan producers and designers through the construction of new and joint skills, aesthetics, social and economic opportunities, knowledge and identities.
4.4 Eight collaborations from elsewhere
We don’t want the fair trade, we want everything to be fair. This is the transformation where I put my heart on.
(Judith Condor-‐Vidal to Amadeu, 2014)
In order to further examine the implications and challenges experienced by designers working with artisan producers in their local context, eight designers and/or social entrepreneurs were interviewed. The semi-‐structured interviews had the objective of revealing the common challenges, benefits of the practice and roles performed by the designers in their collaborative approaches to local artisans. Fashion is one of the more
prominent areas that is approaching sustainability from a perspective of small-‐scale production, and this is highlighted in this chapter through the interviews. Fletcher suggests that this approach to localism can foster distinctiveness in fashion and textiles (Fletcher, 2013: 168).
The interviews provide a view of the artisans and designers working together in socio-‐ cultural contexts other than in Brazil. Thereby it gives hint of the similarities in the aspects of the practice as well as different views and particularities. Unfortunately it was not possible to interview the artisan producers working with the designers, which limits the stories of those interactions to the designers’ points of view. Nonetheless, Section 4.4.6 of this chapter, and Chapters 6 and 7, bring to the fore artisan producers from the Amazon rainforest.
4.4.1 The designers and their approaches
A brief introduction to the interviewees follows below. They all work in the area of fashion and were interviewed between 2013 and 2014:
Judith Condor-‐Vidal (2014) is a Bolivian economist, the founder of Trading for
Development, whose social enterprise brings local fair trades from developing countries such as Peru, Bolivia, Bangladesh and Ecuador to a British and European market. Her business exemplifies a mix of bottom-‐up-‐top-‐down social innovation and entrepreneurship, resulting as it did from initiatives by local artisans, who gathered together to send her boxes of samples of their work in the hope that she could sell
their products in Europe after the success of an exhibition that she organized. Nowadays, the artisan producers that supply the Trading for Development operate within the certification of the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO).
Lynda Grose (2013) is a British designer, an educator at California College of the Arts
(CCA) and an author. She has been working with numerous communities in Romania, Peru, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, America, Armenia, Ecuador and Ghana. In 1992, Grose cofounded ESPRIT’s ecollection, which became known as the first ecologically responsible fashion collection developed by a major corporation.
Anna-‐Maria Hesse (2014) is one of the owners of the Here Today Here Tomorrow
fashion design label (Panel 4.4), a studio shop in London. The brand exemplifies a small business led by social and environmental principles, as discussed in Chapter 3 (Section 3.5.2). The designers have been working with a WFTO fair trade23 cooperative
Association of Craft Producers (ACP) in Nepal, which employs mostly women whose skills are in hand-‐knitting, hand-‐weaving and block printing. The designers travel regularly to Kathmandu, where they work with the local artisan producers of a local cooperative.
23 Fair trade’s aim is to links local producers with retailers’ and consumers’ goals in a logic of a fairer global market
in which ethical principles should be part of all phases of the business, from the harvesting of raw materials to the shops and stores. This certification and others similar, such as those by the Fairtrade Foundation, the World Trade Organization (WFTO), the Rainforest Alliance, Fair Mined, the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) and Good Weavers, emphasizes businesses’ good practices – that respect human rights and dignity – and regulate production chains through social and environmental policies (Fairtrade Foundation, 2014; Black, 2012: 203). These standards vary of course according to the association (Parker, 2011: 10), but a common ground is to promote fairer
relationships and prices in the trading of local products. In addition, one of the core policies of Fairtrade is to build capacity among producers comprising, for example, the development of interpersonal, communication and business skills (Black, 2012: 203; Littrell and Dickson, 2010: 99; 1999: 4–5).