Close your eyes and imagine everything that can be green, eco, bio. Done? Well, you will find all this and maybe even something more at ‘Fa la cosa giusta!‘, the Italian fair of critical consumption and sustainable lifestyles that will take place at FieraMilanoCity from 23 to 25 March in Milan. A whole philosophy of life put in a hangar, spread over 32,000 square meters and represented by hundreds of exhibitors. The event, organized by the publisher ‘Terre di Mezzo’, is celebrating fifteen years, an important birthday that the organizers wanted to celebrate with free entry for everyone. No excuse therefore for the fans but also for the curious who will really be spoiled for choice.
As always, the program is rich in traditional thematic areas, such as eco-fashion and crafts, the sectors that interest us most. In addition to the many sustainable brands of clothing and footwear among exhibitors, this year will also renew the offer of workshops and meetings to learn how to create fashion accessories, as well as notebooks with artisanal and reuse techniques. In the workshop of ‘Riciclando.it’ you can, for example, create very useful purses with recycled material, while ‘Artedì’ will learn how to make small accessories reusing unusual objects. The artisans of the cooperative ‘Parallelo’ will instead teach to make a custom bag with silkscreen printing or a crafted notebook bound with the Japanese technique and linographic print on paper (both workshops are on reservation at info@officinacasona.com).
Remaining in the field of ‘fashion and aesthetics’, after last year’s success, the experts of ‘La Saponaria’ propose new workshops to create natural cosmetics: from the softening hyaluronic acid cream to the solid beer shampoo. Even the less experienced can try their hand at the workshop dedicated to the self-production of “cosmetics for no good”, in which 10 products will be made in one hour: face and body creams, scrubs, hair masks, shampoos, body and liquid hand soap.
Not only fashion and beauty anyway: among the novelties of 2018 a whole pavilion dedicated to the training of children and a big window on national cuisine, in conjunction with the project of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry that has proclaimed this as the year of Italian food. There will be no lack of creative workshops, in which you could be in the kitchen, but not even the cultural events, where there will be discussions about the future, sustainable of course. Books and art exhibitions will be presented, there will be theatrical and musical workshops, meetings about female well-being and psychological health.
The animalist association LAV, present for the first time at ‘Fa la cosa giusta!’, will bring to the fair a path of virtual reality to raise awareness on the conditions in intensive farms and ‘Dalla parte degli animali’, an exhibition that tells 40 years of battles and activities carried out to improve the relationship between human beings and other species: from the campaigns against furs, to those for circus without animals, up to the fight against hunting, with the current campaign #bastasparare (#stopshooting).
In short, ‘Fa la cosa giusta!’ is the demonstration of the variety and complementarity of the sustainable universe, a world that begins to become familiar to many, stripping away from that chic and elitist mask that for too long has hidden its true face. The social one. And supportive.
A change that seems to have been reclaimed on several levels. Not just from the media, but also from politics. Many Italian regions have decided to support the initiative.
And we of eco-à-porter, of course, we’ll be there!
Novella Di Paolo
