This strong performance denounces fast fashion, well beyond Black Friday

Today is Black Friday. Or maybe yesterday, we don’t know. We’ve received dozens of brand notifications: price drops. Click and collect tomorrow. Distinct feelings. It means nothing. Maybe it was yesterday.

By the way, what is Black Friday, where did it come from and why?

Black Friday was perhaps still completely foreign to us in France before 2013. Transplanting had even more difficulty due to the Bataclan bombings that took place on November 13, 2015, a Friday, fatally associating the expression “Friday noir” with this national trauma. However, the brands persist and sign up to offer ever more attractive offers, to try to install in France this promotional period coming from the United States where it follows Thanksgiving. What was supposed to last only 24 hours continues throughout the weekend until Monday (nicknamed Cyber ​​​​Monday), or even always starts a little earlier (so much so that it is even referred to as Cyber ​​​​Week or Black Week).

However, offering a short period of strong promotion can have the effect of provoking the act of buying, which is rather impulsive, due to lack of time to think. It is a similar marketing technique that regulates sales, private sales and other “Privilege Days”, etc. What does the expression matter as long as we have the intoxication of excessive consumption.

Black Friday, the pretext for this performance that denounces the ravages of fast-fashion

However, in a moment of ecological emergency, a growing part of the general public, but also of brands (which then proudly do not flaunt promotions or reductions and thus indulge in a “Green Friday”) want to denounce this clubbing. At the crossroads of these awarenesses, Le Bruit qui court (a collective of artists, activists and artivists who want to put art at the heart of their commitment to social and ecological justice) held a performance on the esplanade of the Forum des Halles shopping center in the heart of Paris, the fashion capital of the world, on November 24, 2022, the day before Black Friday.

From noon, a dozen anonymous members of the collective began to pile the clothes, first black, then colored, on the ground, forming a large square about 20 meters by 20 meters. These garments came from the Le Relais collection terminals, then sent for recycling by French men and women. After about thirty minutes of literally a ton of clothes getting together in a deliberately messy way, mistreating and stomping on them, the collective then got into the dance. And this, in a form of back and forth on both sides of the square thus formed, like a wave of incessant trends that makes us want to buy, throw away and start again and again. At the end of the performance, the colorful clothes formed the words “Stop Fast Fashion” against a backdrop of black clothes.

Fast fashion wreaks havoc every day and everywhere, not just on Black Friday

If this performance occurred on the eve of Black Friday, a day of flash promotion to better encourage hyperconsumption, its questioning goes far beyond this day of flash promotion that encourages us to hyperconsumption. At a time when we are certainly thinking about the gifts we could give to our loved ones for Christmas or Hanukkah, we should therefore question our shopping habits, especially with regards to fashion, a particularly polluting sector. .

Around this performance, there was also the En Mode Climat collective (coalition of private sector actors for more responsible fashion), as well as a delegation of Ghanaians working on the reuse of clothes shipped to Ghana (where they mainly end up forming an open landfill there, since the quantities are high). Also present were the NGO The Or Foundation and second-hand clothing sellers from Kantamento Market (in Accra, Ghana) to raise awareness of this globalized problem, which continues well beyond Black Friday.

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Front page photo credit: YouTube screenshot.