Fast, Fast, Slow

Fast Fast Slow explores the complexity of our personal relationships with fashion, fast fashion, and waste.

An international exploration into our relationship with clothes – we buy too many, we wear once, we wear forever, we use them as urban protection, they make us feel bad about ourselves, they make us feel incredible. Fast Fast Slow is a VIP catwalk experience inviting us to look at consumerism and waste through the lens of fashion. The performance sees characters share stories about their relationship to fashion in a non-judgemental space for us all to reflect collectively.

Accompanied by video art, choreography, cinematic lighting and an electronic sound score we enter an experience that is at once local and global, personal and political taking us to the clothes mountains of Ghana and back again to the outfit we’re sat watching in to explore the impact of fast fashion and the wide-ranging and damaging dynamics of place and power.

Fast, Fast, Slow showcases concept collections from six co-designers from East Lancashire, UK and collaborators from The Revival in Accra, Ghana, a community-led sustainable design and campaigning organisation. Commissioned by The British Textile Biennial in 2023 and originally staged in Blackburn, an area built on a now almost defunct textile industry where an online fast fashion distributor is a major employer.