INTERVIEW #118 RONALDO FRAGA
Name: Ronaldo Fraga
Occupation: Fashion designer
Based in: Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Instagram: @fragaronaldo @ronaldofragaparatodos
Hi Ronaldo Fraga, Welcome to A Sustainable Closet, how would you describe yourself and where are you based?
I'm a Brazilian designer, I live in the city of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, Brazil. In addition to my own brand, I work with projects to generate employment and income in cooperatives throughout Brazil.
Can you tell us more about your journey toward becoming a designer? Where do you seek inspiration and what are the processes behind your creations?
I am a graduate of the style course at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Parson’s School of Gesign in New York and Saint Martin’s in London. My inspirations are based on Brazilian culture and the background that haunts and dazzles me in contemporary Brazil. I started in fashion through drawing, so my creative process always starts from my sketchbook, having as research particular storytelling. In Brazil, I am recognized as a stylist who tells stories through fashion
Who do you design for?
I design above all to give courage to those who wear them through my pieces to support their desires and vision of the world. I also believe in fashion as a powerful instrument of political manifesto. It is very dangerous when something goes into fashion because it means that one day it will also go out of fashion, and in Brazil it was like that with the term sustainability, but we need to understand the issue as something broader, urgent and the clothing industry as one of the that pollute the most in the world, should get more involved with the issue. Today I work with the zero waste policy in my studio, but that is very little. I try to launch sustainable fabrics and disseminate research in this direction through my work.
What are your view on the sustainability dilemmas of the fashion industry, everything from the environmental harm, and workers' working conditions to the speed?
It is important that people understand and discuss the issue of sustainability beyond the raw material or the disposal of this itself, the humanization of processes, or the human conditions of those who produce it is as important as it is urgent. We talk a lot about the bad working conditions in China but even in Brazil, under this extreme right-wing government, conditions similar to slavery have increased a lot in the last four years. People need to know that ridiculously cheap products can bring someone's blood from somewhere in the world.
What role do you think designers can play in making the fashion industry more sustainable?
Refusing to use raw materials from companies that pollute and enslave, using fashion as a manifesto of denunciation and education of a new generation of consumers.
What are your recommendations for future fashion students who would love to have a career within the industry?
Try to have a diffuse look beyond the world of fashion. Clothes need to speak to the issues of our time even subtly at times. And it matters very little what people wear but what makes people wear what they wear.
Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?
We are experiencing perhaps the worst moment in the history of Brazil with the extreme right and the horror of the Bolsonaro government in power. An obscurantist, denialism wave and enemies of the Amazon and the indigenous cause, are in power, and most of the Brasileira fashion industry supports or supported this government of destruction. In fact, everywhere in the fashion industry, for fear of losing consumers, they supported the absolutist regimes. On October 2nd we will have elections and I hope they lose and go back to hell where they shouldn't have left. The country's reconstruction will be difficult and in some cases irreversible, such as the record deforestation of the Amazon and the extermination of indigenous groups.
