With fast fashion brands making 30 or even 50 collections per year, the traditional fashion seasons appear to have become obsolete. What’s more, the popularity of fast fashion has made luxury labels and designer brands accelerate their production as well. The average fashion company now presents not just two or four collections per year, but also a cruise collection (between spring and summer), prefall collection (between autumn and winter), midseason or even prepre collection (at any other, apparently random time of year). The slow fashion movement has been fierce criticasters of this trend, claiming that the current pace of fashion creates overconsumption and throwawayism (and hence, the ever growing landfill space).
As slow fashion has become ever more mainstream, its tenets have come to include not just timeless design and high quality products but also a concern with transseasonal items. For instance, slow fashion designers have produced multifunctional clothes that can be used in several seasons. Think of a summer skirt that can be elongated to serve as an autumn dress. Or a cotton, waterproof coat that is suitable on rainy days in spring and summer as well as autumn.
Transseasonal design also relates to the timing of new collections. For Dutch designer Elsien Gringhuis, the pressure to present four or more new collections per year puts at stake her sense of creativity and her ambition to deliver high quality outfits. Because fashion stores expect at least two new collections per year, Gringhuis delivers two collections consisting of fewer items. In a similar vein, slow fashion pioneer Rianne de Witte designs one collection each year, which is presented in spring and fall.
Some designers oppose the idea of seasonal collections as such. For example, in 2012, young designer Sanne Jansen decided to make no more than twenty items per year, which remain available in her online store for several seasons. Each month, two new items hit the stores – one for men and one for women. Each item will be made until all fabric is used up, which has the positive environmental side-effect of preventing unused materials from being discarded.