Patagonia’s Documentary Desires Customers to Suppose About Shopping for Much less
Right here is an inconvenient fact. For all of the noise made by activists, journalists, politicians and even celebrities concerning the clothes business destroying the planet, consumers aren’t listening.
The knowledge is on the market if they need it. Google can produce greater than 88 million search outcomes on why vogue is dangerous for the surroundings, however the world stays in a state of cognitive dissonance, fueled by its voracious urge for food for disposable traits. International attire consumption, at the moment at 62 million tons per 12 months, is by some estimates projected to succeed in 102 million tons yearly by 2030.
One drawback, say many business observers, is that a lot of the messaging about vogue and sustainability can be too boring, too preachy and too straightforward to disregard. So is it attainable to vary the way in which we discuss it?
This week, the outside attire model Patagonia launched a unusual new movie that displays the corporate’s efforts to reset the dialog. “The Shitthropocene,” a 45-minute documentary directed by David Garrett Byars, is a trippy mock anthropological view of humanity’s consumption habits from our cave-dwelling ancestors by means of the trendsetting aristocratic court docket of Louis XIV, creepy fairgrounds, fishing waders with leaky crotches, senseless digital promoting and just about all the things in between. It is going to be proven in Patagonia shops throughout the USA in coming months.
The cheeky romp toggles between a advertising yarn for Patagonia and the way in which they make their merchandise, details about the local weather disaster, shopper psychology and relentless makes an attempt at humor that vary from outlandish satire to the knowingly juvenile. The title is a scatological wink on the phrase anthropocene, a time period used to explain the time throughout which people have had a considerable impression on our planet, a becoming clue to viewers of what lies in retailer.
“Many scientists and historians suppose we’re coming into into a brand new epoch — one the place issues are merely … effectively, crappier,” declares the opening voice-over in a thick northern English accent (often utilized in Britain to point no-nonsense, tongue-in-cheek pragmatism). YouTube commenters on the trailer level to similarities — maybe intentional, maybe unintentional — to the fictional British tv correspondent Philomena Cunk as she makes an attempt to cowl all of human historical past with sardonic humor and deadpan naïveté.
Vanilla company lingo this isn’t, although it’s on model for Patagonia. In spite of everything, the corporate was behind the audacious “Don’t Purchase This Jacket” promoting marketing campaign launched on Black Friday in 2011, encouraging folks to buy solely what they want and rethink their impact on the surroundings. In 2022, its billionaire founder, Yvon Chouinard, positioned the corporate funds right into a particular belief that ensured its earnings can be used to fight local weather change.
Patagonia Movies has beforehand produced straight-talking movies concentrating on the salmon fishing business and rising oceans, hydropower dams and America’s public lands. Different labels, together with Puma and Diesel, have invested in documentaries about their provide chains which might be usually supposed to be promoted on social media platforms. However Patagonia likes to outline itself by doing issues in a different way.
Is it of venture that pays off?
Not likely. The sheer scope of knowledge coated in 45 minutes is huge and bold, with a superb array of speaking heads eloquently dissecting why vogue retains us hungry for extra even after we know its damaging impact on the world round us. Mr. Byars can be rightly conscious of the issues of getting a model that sells merchandise sponsoring his film. It’s referred to ceaselessly by the narrator, together with in a sendup of company greenwashing in a faux advert praising Patagonia for “making fleeces from upcycled Subarus and, opposite to legal guidelines of physics, creating extra water for planet.”
However the film jumps round at a breakneck tempo from one eye-popping scene and idea to the following. It could be imitating society’s dwindling means to listen or linger on urgent issues, but it surely’s additionally the literal enactment of it.
Perhaps I’m not down with the youngsters, however numerous the gags about cave man “bits,” company muttonheads, being philoso-fecal and scientists from New Zealand who don’t put on pants felt relatively half-baked. And although the film ends on the constructive notice that people are intelligent creatures who can and will reassess what makes us really feel joyful and fulfilled — spoiler alert, look to full hearts and lives of objective relatively than a heaving closet — I felt overloaded, overstimulated and wanted to take a nap.
Real progress is tough to come back by. Makes an attempt at one thing to interact new audiences must also be applauded, particularly when most present conversations about materialism in a time of local weather breakdown seem restricted in impression.
That mentioned, perhaps subsequent time, Patagonia ought to reduce the crap.
