Noon — A multi-format publishing platform creating new artefacts and connections

Realism

REALISM
(Hope Without Optimism)

The fashion industry today is awash with good intentions. It’s ‘organic’, ‘ethical’, ‘sustainable’, ‘fairtrade’ and ‘handmade’. But what good do well-intentioned swing tags do, when it remains one of the planet’s most destructive polluters, devastating natural resources, producing 10% of global carbon emissions, and filling landfill sites the world over? And if you are complicit in it – buying, wearing or desiring its output, or, moreover, working as part of the monumental machine which sells it season after season – how do you begin to address the climate crisis?

This spring, after global climate collective Extinction Rebellion staged a weeks-long protest throughout London, we met with members Clare Farrell and Sara Arnold – a designer and activist, and the founder of fashion rental company Higher Studio, respectively – to talk about the real ramifications of fast fashion, and the intersection of ambition and hypocrisy in a capitalist society. The truth is, we’re in serious trouble.

Nature

“It is worse, much worse, than you think.” So opens David Wallace-Wells’ An Uninhabitable Earth, a book published by an imprint of Penguin Random House in February of this year and met, at least as I imagine it, with a slow, deep exhalation from readers the world over.

Succession

SUCCESSION
(Chain Letters)

I have childhood-technicolour-vivid memories of my first chain letter. Copying out the words five times over was a welcome opportunity to practise my new handwriting. I cycled to the corner-shop to buy, lick and stick stamps and post my copies to friends of friends, and got so excited about the latter part that I forgot the former altogether. Waiting for responses felt like waiting for a shout into a deep, dark well to come ricocheting back to me. What I can’t remember – not one word, not an overview, nothing – is the content.