The race to curb climate change tends to ratchet up between each conversation with Kit Willow. Since last season, the U.N. has just made the frightening declaration that we are no longer in the era of global warming, but global boiling, as the northern hemisphere suffers through a catastrophic heat wave.
Willow’s grace in the face of such existential imperatives is admirable. She doesn’t proselytize from a told-you-so pulpit, nor is she feeling defeated, but carries on lighting an alternate way for fashion. “I’m thinking about how to pivot, be part of the solution,” she says. Her north star in the face of anxiety-inducing headlines is circularity, exemplified for resort in bedsheets recut and Indigo-dyed via her upcycling workshop Future From Waste Lab to make desirable, tiered prairie skirts and dresses. “Circularity is the only way forward, it’s not just a sustainable approach,” she added, and underlined the notion with sweetly decorative tassels cut into rounds that read very Stevie Nicks, this season’s muse.
That freewheeling ’70s energy permeated a suite of winning billowing dresses in whisper-light silk. The circular drape created cape-like looped sleeves from square and rectangle cuts, a no-waste way of pattern-making. In shades of sky blue, lichen, and sea foam, they would look great on a dance-floor. Willow took hers for a spin recently in Ibiza, because you can still care about what’s happening, and have carefree moments.
For daily life in between there are her best-selling crushed-linen shirt dresses, under which Kitx’s other direct-to-consumer best-sellers, lingerie pieces, can be layered. Knitted with solar power from recycled materials, the harness-like bras are sell-outs because of versatility, Willow supposes. They work over bodysuits and T-shirts, and under blazers. In this way Willow is reclaiming desire, which is often sidelined to slow down rampant consumption. “The more we grow, the more demand there is for waste material,” she explains. That’s a positive way to not stop thinking about a shared tomorrow. Contrary to what Nicks sings, it’s already here.
