“The plants merging from sneakers or appearing to grow across coats, hoodies or denim jeans in our s/s ’23 collection highlight our relationship or detachment from nature as we stare at screens, oblivious to the landscapes around us. It’s this idea of how nature can lead technology, or technology can lead nature.”
Jonathan Anderson, creative director for Loewe
My garden in Chorlton, a suburb just south of Manchester, consists of a narrow paved corridor alongside our rented Victorian terrace, leading to a few square metres each of gravel and of earth, all shaded under the tangled bows of a mature apple tree. White paint peels off the high enclosing walls, and weeds with tiny, pretty little flowers grow abundantly from their cracks. The back wall, completely covered in ivy, is in summer flushed through with dainty purple bellflowers, attracting bees in their droves.
I grow vegetables in the uncompromising shade of the apple tree. Last year’s tomatoes were big but flavourless and have been replaced this year with a hopeful row of sugarsnap peas. Rows of green and red lettuce, rainbow chard and fiery radish (sown from last year’s saved seed heads) flank the tree, which is ringed at the base with wild rocket. Three courgettes and a cucumber plant stretch their leaves for every last shaft of sun that glitters between the apple leaves.
It’s a tiny slice of the good life. But even this small shady corner gives so much. Sit still and you are invited into a parallel universe. Red, yellow or black ladybirds hurry along spires of fresh green chives, their alien nymphs scuttling around the rim of the pot. A hundred little spiders build a vast metropolis across the ivy, between washing lines and bamboo canes, their magical silk braced against the breeze. Soft little sage green caterpillars wave their heads from flapping leaves as woodlice trundle over the earth below.
Once, while I was reading in the dappled shade, something fell to the earth out of the corner of my eye. I assumed it was an apple, until it gave a throaty trill and sprang the unmistakable spring of a frog. If I had looked up perhaps I might have seen a heron dropping it. The frog hopped around, apparently unhurt, sheltering under the high rise of a bolted chard.
“Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything.” This is how acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who makes field recordings of rare natural sounds, describes the unfolding of the natural world that we can encounter when we stay still enough to allow ourselves to perceive it. I read this quote in Jenny Odell’s fascinating book How to Do Nothing, a poetic and philosophical but also radical text about how to cope with the onslaught of the attention economy in our Extremely Online world and overcome our “species loneliness” – the pain of our alienation from the natural world.
The simple tranquillity of my little Northern garden is a far cry from the chaos of my life just a few years ago. I felt as if Odell had been snooping around inside my mind and had made a prescription just for me when she wrote, “I consider ‘doing nothing’ both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully.” While the pandemic allowed so many of us to take account of what we value in our lives, my reckoning arrived a few years earlier.
Rewind to 2016 and I was a news editor in London, overseeing up to 10 stories a day across fashion, art, culture and, increasingly, politics. Being a news editor made me absolutely rabid: I mainlined current affairs and pop culture, but also daily human-rights abuses, corporate greed and catastrophic climate events. I felt a deep humiliation if colleagues found a story before me, and I became so attuned to the news that breaking news literally broke me.
That year was an endless scroll of doom, from gun violence and police brutality to anti-trans bathroom bills and Brexit. There were horrors in Syria, garment-worker misery in Sri Lanka and Trump’s pussy-grabbing, Muslim-banning and wall-building insanity. The dam of my resilience was filling to burst and when it finally broke, my body declared a state of emergency. The day after Trump’s election victory, while I was planning the daily news, I burst into tears and couldn’t stop. I was hyperventilating on the office toilet floor when my editor told me I should probably go home.
The truth is that I didn’t really take a break then. Like a spinning top losing momentum, I lurched through a few more years before finally skittering off into the sidelines. At the time it was terrible, and terrifying, and I would have grimly laughed at the idea anything good could come of it. But looking back now it is clear that I needed to change my life, and I wasn’t going to do it without my hand being forced. Not only did I have news burnout, I had completely tied my self-worth to work. My entire worldview had collapsed into that meme where the world is on fire, and I was drowning in self-loathing.
“Feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully,” as Odell so astutely puts it, was absolutely the end result of investing wholly in an unforgiving cult of productivity, and falling prey to the hopeless fear engendered by streaming the world’s ills 24/7. Her antidote, as the book’s title suggests, is “doing nothing”. But Odell’s is an active kind of nothing. Yes, it’s about switching off your phone and taking time away from work, but the crux of her argument is about slowly, radically cultivating your attention elsewhere. “One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos,” she explains.
For Odell, this meant visiting, nearly every day, a public rose garden near her home. Slowly she became acquainted with the birds, learning their names and then how to identify them by their song. The more attention she paid, the more birdsong leapt out at her everywhere she went, making her not only conscious of her feathered neighbours, but care about them too. “Learning the names of things was my first step in perceiving not just ‘land’ or ‘greenery’, but living bodies instead,” she writes, observing that “eventually, to behold is to become beholden to”.
I didn’t have a quiet garden with an apple tree then, to recover in. But I had something. On the tiny balcony of my high-rise flat in east London I began to grow vegetables in pots. I noticed visiting bugs and learned about roots and soil and mycorrhizal fungi. It was fun and calming and brought me real joy, from harvesting and eating courgettes and tomatoes to watching bees and finding a little brown chrysalis attached to the wall.
Although in the wider news context bees are dying at an alarming rate and soils have been ravaged by industrial farming, the message from my balcony garden was clear: all is not lost. Where there is life, there is hope.
Sometimes something dramatic has to happen for us to make a break with the past. Although my experience of breakdown is unique to me, there are many parallels with how we collectively reacted to the shock of the pandemic. We can see it in the acceleration of the trend known as the Great Resignation and in statistics that show how people have re-evaluated the importance of spending time with family and in nature. I see it most in the way conversations about averting climate catastrophe shifted, after we saw how the running of the world could be fundamentally changed, given enough political will.
“The countryside enters through the streets and the weeds through the land. The weeds are the heralds with which the countryside announces its slow indefatigable invasion.
You always have to cut it down and they always grow, until for any reason they can invade the rooms, which are usually dirt floors, or throw their twig between the bricks. The field reaches the patio, and the patio enters the bed.”
A selected quote from a 1937 book by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada called X-Ray of the Pampa. Alessandra Sanguinetti, photographer
“Slowing down became much more essential to me when I actually did it. I didn’t really know how it would feel to slow down. But only then did I realise how much I needed it. Leaving England for the Austrian mountains was the gift of life, and rest that my body and soul craved. It’s led me to have more appreciation for everything I do.”
Fran Summers, model
“This is a photo of my dog Milton. One of my favourite things to do is lie on the sofa with Milton and listen to the radio; the perfect way to slow life down.”
Jamie Hawkesworth, photographer
Across many industries there have been calls not to return to the destructive ways of before. In the fashion world, none was so affecting as Gucci designer Alessandro Michele’s emotional Instagram post of “Notes from the silence” in May 2020. “I feel the urgent need to change a lot of things in the way I work,” Michele wrote, announcing that the brand would drop from five annual catwalk shows to two. “Above all, we understood we went way too far. Our reckless actions have burned the house we live in… We ravaged the sanctity of life.”
The same month, the CFDA and BFC issued a joint statement encouraging “brands, designers and retailers, who are used to fashion’s fast, unforgiving pace, to slow down”, urging designers to show less frequently and on schedule (during dedicated fashion weeks, in one city), to lower the industry’s carbon footprint. Speaking to Bloomberg in December 2020, LVMH’s Antoine Arnault conceded that there had been “a frenzy” in recent years that saw the emergence of truly extravagant destination shows. “Bringing half the fashion world to Rio for 48 hours for a cruise show was beautiful, but it was probably a bit too much,” he admitted.
And yet, as the world opens up and brands lick their financial wounds, the frenzy is building up to a fever pitch once more. Luxury brands have a reasonable claim to be more sustainable than fast fashion, as they make fewer products, of a higher quality. But it is undeniable that the culture of extravagant shows drives an ecosystem of unsustainable desire. As Michele wrote, “The fashion world has become a sort of Woodstock, open to a huge audience. We’re followed by many people who’ve never entered our stores.” The stillness of the pandemic allowed some of the industry’s leaders to recognise that making such overconsumption aspirational is undoubtedly fuelling the destruction of life on Earth.
I imagine Antoine Arnault and Alessandro Michele spent their pandemics in slightly more elegant surroundings than my high-rise flat, but it seems they too found ways to “do nothing”, to pay attention elsewhere, reflecting on what is unsustainable and desperately needs to change. For Michele, that appears to have centred on nature, leading him to the realisation that, pre-pandemic, we had lost “our sisterhood with the butterflies, the flowers, the trees and the roots. So much outrageous greed made us lose the harmony and the care, the connection and the belonging.”
For Arnault, perhaps it was having the opportunity to be active in the emergency response to the pandemic. During LVMH Climate Week in 2020, he thanked employees for their efforts during the first wave, repurposing perfume labs to make alcohol gels and ateliers to make masks. “We came out of it stronger, on a human level, because we collectively demonstrated our utility to society,” he said, adding “as a citizen and a father, I feel very responsible for the world the future generation will inherit.”
If we don’t pause, and truly look around us, we can’t see the wood for the trees. We keep doing the same things over and over again until the wood is all burnt and there are no more trees. The world’s problems can feel totally overwhelming, but if we each take it upon ourselves to stop and pay attention, we will find many precious things are still there, that we can behold and become beholden to.
I wrote this, slowly, in my garden. I must have been sitting very still, because someone else decided it was safe to venture out. I thought it was a bird shuffling in the dense ivy on the back wall. I listened and I waited, and the shuffling slowly moved across the leaves, until I saw a pale, springy leg. Two months after crash landing from above, the common frog appears to still be living in my little garden. It climbed down from the ivy into a pot of oregano, where it stayed until I closed my laptop.
“This is a photo of my friend River, from a developing body of work dealing with my interest in how gravity, among other supernatural forces, choreographs our surrender. With the world in utter disarray and visible chaos surrounding and embracing us daily, shock becomes a form of currency. Effectually, it numbs our capacity for empathy. My interest in this photo lies in the moment between take-off and landing. A moment of silence; a pause. How do we land? Do we surrender to the trajectory of destiny? And on our way there, can this surrender of power serve our thirst for control?”
Luis Alberto Rodriguez, photographer
“The most important thing is to spend time together. Slow down, enjoy every moment,
and dress up!”
Andreas Kronthaler, creative director, Vivienne Westwood
“Experiencing farming in Japan has been unique, meeting people with a lot of specific knowledge in that field, passed on for generations. It showed me a different approach to life: more calm, focused and slow. Having lived all my life in fast-moving cities, this is still something I am getting used to. Its definitely a different way to get a flavour of slowness, a methodical lifestyle. I witnessed really hard farming work, done under any circumstances of weather, from torrential rain to incredibly high temperatures. When all this is done there is a long wait on the farmers’ side, waiting for the crops to grow slowly month by month, in order to achieve the best quality of ingredients and flavours.”
Federico Radaelli, photographer
“After jumping in, endless repetitions of flowing body movements keep the head just over the water. Its resistance slows down any motion. The breath is deep and calm, and so are thoughts. In between, waves. That’s it. Time falls into oblivion, natural deceleration happens. I spend my summers in German nature. Swimming in the nearby lake detangles me from devices, people, tasks on land. Wide and ever-changing water is below my eyes,
the sky above them.”
Lou Schoof, model
“Slowing down is an essential element of my design practice. My projects explore our relationship with nature, and work towards a sustainable fashion which is inherently
slow-paced. My designs not only take inspiration from the natural world, but also utilise biodesign, using natural, often hand-grown living materials such as mosses, lichens and slime mould. Working with these living organisms requires patience. Weeks and months pass by as natural forms are allowed to grow before they are turned into finished pieces, which even then may continue to develop and change, requiring care and nurture from the wearer, and finally biodegrading. This unhurried cycle is reflected also in the creative process; much like nature, ideas also require time and patience to be nurtured and developed into their final, flourishing forms. Slowing down the design process is crucial to help maximise creativity and innovation, taking the time to experiment with new materials, understand their possibilities and grow ideas into their full potential. Reconnecting with the natural world and working towards sustainability is a slow process. Time must be invested into nurturing living pieces, and the same slowness applies to my design process.”
Piero D’Angelo, fashion designer
“Time stands still when I live in my daughters Sila Grey and Luma Rosie’s
world of magical reality.”
Celine Semaan, founder of nonprofit organization, Slow Factory