The Slow Movement; An Ethos, An Ideology
Peace and reflection come through stillness; within any given opportunity is a potential to move slowly, to savor every moment possible. The Slow Food Movement–taking place in Italy during the 1970s extending into the present– exemplifies a societal reaction to capitalistic spread through stillness, championing for quality over quantity as well as ethical and conscientious sourcing. This method, in turn, acts as a vital indicator of how to approach living a sustainable, fashionable life!
As referenced by author Stephen Schneider in Good, Clean, Fair: The Rhetoric of the Slow Food Movement, the Slow Food Movement began as the brainchild of Carlo Petrini in the Italian town of Bra, an Italian activist and community organizer. Petrini initially founded a committee known as Arcigola in response to the region’s labor struggles and mobilizations for worker’s power, a multitude of fatal reactions from polluted food and agricultural products, and most famously in retaliation against the novel installation of a McDonalds in the nation’s capital. The movement expanded into the colloquial Slow Food development, with an international Manifesto signed in 1989 and international forefronts developed (including within the United States) in the early 2000s. Terra Madre, first taking place in 2004 as a congregation in Italy, is a beautiful example of this broad-spanning collectivism, representing a gathering and connective web of small-scale gastronomic creators. As shared by Slow Food’s overarching website and digital space, the movement coined the motto: “good, clean and fair food for all” in 2006, as a monologue that empathetically joins both the mood for accessibility, equity and environmental justice. When perusing the digital space, it is clear that such a wondrous message, through seeking a connectivity between consumption and consciousness, caught like wildfire on a worldwide level. The process of extracting, creating and concocting, and consuming food, in this fashion, has connected the sustainable food movement to a shared identity.
In the same way that the Slow Food Movement broke boundaries for gastronomy, so can and have movements and practices for sustainable fashion consumption and landfill evasion. Actions like actively choosing to source sustainably and conduct care-filled research, shop second hand, and upscale or repair old clothing act as a retaliation against production escalation and the onslaught of material capitalism through fast fashion. As such, the pieces of humanity are sewn together, through respecting the processes of food extraction and clothing production as sacred circles and sites for slow appreciation.
Lillian Worley
