An obvious question to be asked in any crisis: what can we do? Many fashion companies have responded by funnelling much-needed funds towards the global fight against Covid-19. In the heavily affected regions of northern Italy, the heart of the country’s fashion and textile manufacturing industries, brands such as Prada, Gucci and Giorgio Armani have donated millions of euros to support the creation of respirators and hospital wings.
Others are mobilising their sizeable workforces — there are some 600,000 garment manufacturing workers in Italy alone — to produce masks and personal protective equipment for medical professionals. This has happened at both vast corporations and at smaller, independent design companies.
In London, a trio of young designers — Phoebe English, Holly Fulton and Bethany Williams — joined forces to co-ordinate production starting in mid-March. English herself visited the Chinese city of Wuhan, where Covid-19 was first recorded, in October, as part of a lecturing tour on sustainability. The trip gave her first-hand experience of the city’s sheer size — Wuhan’s population is 11 million, two million more than London — and hence how extreme the problem could be. Then she started to feel the impact on her business.
“Things were slowing down, projects were being cancelled, our sales were slowing. And we just had these machines sitting in the studio, not being used,” English recalls.
A number of cold-call emails to Downing Street, the London mayor’s office and various health bodies offering help went unanswered, so English posted a message on her company’s Instagram account on March 17, asking: “Can we make masks for you?” Beneath, she added: “We have machinery that can be of use to make additional face masks — do you know of any organisations that are running low on stocks?”
English was flooded with responses: “Advice, conflicting ideas, tutorials, people that needed quantities in the millions, and sisters, brothers, husbands, relatives of people in the medical profession who are desperate for this key equipment,” she recalls.
The British Fashion Council followed with a post on its Instagram account calling the industry to arms, sharing the specific government and NHS requirements for mask manufacture and materials with the brands who responded. Other UK bodies also joined the effort to co-ordinate designers, including Make It British, Fashion Roundtable, UK Fashion and Textile Association (UKFT) and the Department for International Trade.
Producing masks is more difficult than printing out a pattern and sitting down in front of a sewing machine. “I haven’t actually been sewing masks yet,” says English. “The task has been to educate ourselves in the processes. Masks need to be certified, they need to be produced in sterile environments. The materials need to be treated. It’s a completely different, new vocabulary.”
English notes that the masks may soon be needed. “All the masks used within the UK are imported,” she says — secretary of state for health and social care Matt Hancock’s recent purchase of a million masks included.
“If this continues, there will be big problems with supply chains. What we’ve been trying to do is talk to as many people as possible, to set up networks here, so if there is a problem with supply chains, we can manufacture these items here. You also reduce the wait times — you don’t have to wait for things to come across Europe.”
What English, Fulton and Williams are now aiming to create is what English terms an “emergency designer network” — “so if a need arises, we have the skills”.
Other smaller designers are also pitching in. The French label Coperni, led by the designers Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, uploaded a paper pattern for a face mask to their website on March 19, which has been downloaded thousands of times. “My father is a surgeon in Toulon,” writes Vaillant, from Paris. “My brother is a surgeon in Marseille, my sister is a physiotherapist in Marseille, my sister-in-law is a radiologist in Marseille, my stepmother is a nursing assistant in Béziers. They don’t have masks any more.”
The Coperni pattern is intended for use by home sewers and the masks produced from it are not medical-grade — the conditions cannot be guaranteed to be sterile, and materials will vary according to availability. Coperni’s intention, however, is to alleviate public demand and to stop consumers buying medical-grade masks that could be better utilised in hospitals.
“Sometimes little details make big impacts,” says Vaillant. “Now big houses such as Balenciaga and Saint Laurent are producing professional masks — we obviously don’t have enough people at Coperni to produce professional masks, but the idea was to shake people and let them know about the emergency.”
A similar situation has evolved in the US, where the New York designer Christian Siriano and his staff of 10 seamstresses are now focused on creating cotton masks. In California, the company Los Angeles Apparel, founded by former American Apparel head Dov Charney, has turned over factory production to medical supplies, hoping to create 300,000 masks and 50,000 gowns each week.
Grassroots efforts from independent designers have been mirrored by larger brands. One of the latest is Prada, which on March 18 turned over production capacity at its own facilities and at its external Italian suppliers so that masks could be made for healthcare personnel. Two hundred workers are producing 10,000 masks and 10,000 medical overalls each day, all made from a non-woven propylene that is hydrophobic and breathable. Prada is managing the supply of materials and delivering the finished goods to hospitals. In all, 80,000 medical overalls and 110,000 masks will be produced by Prada between now and 6 April — the Prada plant is open for this express purpose.
A similar task has been undertaken by Gucci, which will work with its supply chain to produce 1.1m surgical masks and 55,000 overalls in the coming weeks. Part of Kering Group, Gucci’s Paris-based stablemates Balenciaga and Saint Laurent are preparing to turn over their manufacturing capacities to the production of masks, pending approval from authorities. As of Thursday, Giorgio Armani’s Italian manufacturing facilities have switched production to medical overalls, and fast-fashion behemoths H&M and Zara parent company Inditex have converted their factories to mask production — the latter has donated more than 300,000.
English thinks being “agile” is essential at this time, with designers freeing up manufacturing possibilities, and not relying on import of medical supplies from other countries — especially from regions where the need for said supplies is just as dire. And, she adds, “there are a huge number of people who want to help.”
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