The project
An awareness poster on fast fashion, designed on my own for a communication design course during my first year of a master’s degree. The starting point is not « fashion pollutes » but a tension: 18-to-25-year-olds know the impact, criticise it, and buy more than ever. Researchers call this gap the dark gap. Repeating the information is pointless, the audience already knows it.
The concept, the impact label
I turn the object used to sell a garment, the tag, into the one that warns. The message: the real price isn’t on the label, turn it over. It reveals that a €9 pair of jeans hides 7,500 litres of water and, since the 2026 law, a €9 penalty. The ecological and economic cost, the one the displayed price hides.
The art direction, no green
Green has become the colour of the greenwashing the audience rejects. I took the visual code of anti-fast-fashion activism instead, black and red, with red reserved for the hidden cost revealed all at once. Headlines in Bricolage Grotesque, body text in Inter, the world of the hangtag.
The text-image relationship
The image shows a desirable pair of jeans, the text reveals its true cost. This is not redundancy, where text repeats image, but a deliberate break that creates the shock. That gap is what triggers the realisation, where simple repetition would have had no effect.
Distribution
Posters on campus and in public transport, where the audience is captive, relayed in Instagram stories in the evening. The same visual code runs from the printed poster to the stories, so the campaign stays recognisable from one medium to the next.
Sources
ADEME, the 2026 penalty law, Refashion for the durability bonus, ESSCA for the dark gap, the French National Assembly. The audience and the figures are sourced, not guessed.
