The Contemporary Austin is countering fast fashion habits with a Slow Fashion Maker Market on Saturday, May 3. From noon to 5 pm on the Jones Center Roof Deck, this carefully curated shopping experience will connect Austinites with local designers producing sustainable fashions.

The market is co-presented with Slow Fashion Festival, which was founded in Austin in 2022. The collaborative markt ties in with a fashion exhibition that opened at the gallery in January. Called Host: Tenant of Culture , the exhibition features innovative designs of Amsterdam-based artist Hendrickje Schimmel. She deconstructs manufactured clothes and remakes them, examining how the ideals present in making and marketing clothes manifest in the product itself.

Admission to the market is $10 for adults and $5 for students, educators, and military personnel. Museum members and minors will get in for free. Plus, anyone with a ticket will also get to explore the museum.

Designers featured in the market will all be based in Texas. A press release promises more than a dozen vendors including:

• Prior Waste, a brand that creates something new, urban, and modern from damaged clothing.
• Soul Studio, which uses floral waste to create zero-waste dye.
• Luvintage, a vintage seller that pops up at markets around town.
• Cosmic Chaos, a jewelry brand offering one-of-one beaded designs.
• Bloodbath Studio, an adventurous high fashion production house with avant garde designs.

Other vendors will offer upcycled purses, reused denim, and more. The designers will also be on hand to represent their craft and get to know visitors.

Americans everywhere — and people all over the world — are dependent on some level on fast fashion, a general term for low-quality clothes manufactured en masse.

Austin isn't immune to the convenience and affordability of picking something up at the mall or online, but there is a healthy undercurrent of opposition in the city's notable love for upcycled designs and vintage clothing. A City-Wide Vintage Sale has been connecting locals with vintage and flea market sellers since 1977, and it'd be hard to find a weekend without an arts and vintage market going on somewhere.

With the amount of DIY attitude baked into these events, it can feel like casual, grungy, and Boho options are all that's available outside of fast fashion in Austin. However, events like the Slow Fashion Festival, annual fashion shows by Austin Creative Reuse, and the semi-annual Le Garage boutique sale are helping locals identify sustainable options for when they want a bit more polish.