Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion

Kate Fletcher, Mathilda Tham, Kate Fletcher, Mathilda Tham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134083022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

The clothing industry employs 25 million people globally contributing to many livelihoods and the prosperity of communities, to women's independence, and the establishment of significant infrastructures in poorer countries. Yet the fashion industry is also a significant contributor to the degradation of natural systems, with the associated environmental footprint of clothing high in comparison with other products. Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion recognizes the complexity of aligning fashion with sustainability. It explores fashion and sustainability at the levels of products, processes, and paradigms and takes a truly multi-disciplinary approach to critically question and suggest creative responses to issues of:
• Fashion in a post-growth society
• Fashion, diversity and equity
• Fashion, fluidity and balance across natural, social and economic systems

This handbook is a unique resource for a wide range of scholars and students in the social sciences, arts and humanities interested in sustainability and fashion.

PART I

Framing and expanding sustainability and fashion

We open this book with a view of fashion and sustainability that is both targeted and also telescopic. An alert but encompassing bird’s eye view of a field that is alive to the dynamic whole: attentive to the lie of the land, the area’s broad, underlying shaping forces, but also the small disturbances, flashes of movement, new growth. From such a vantage point above our emerging field we can discern patterns and flows of the fashion space and the intricate interplay of complex systems. We see synergies developing, both at the centre and on the periphery of the territory, stretching the field in new directions and depths and yielding new insights that shape our understanding and practice of fashion and sustainability. Here, the depth, breadth, complexity and interconnected nature of ecological, social and cultural understandings within the field are visible.

For us, such vision is vital, for, in a sector such as fashion that is powerfully shaped by commercial imperatives, this view acts as a countervailing voice and perspective. In fashion, action around ecological, social and cultural issues has predominantly operationalized sustainability from a perspective of commerce – where growth becomes the chief criterion for all programmes of improvement. The authors in this part see things differently, unfolding alternative narratives and possibilities, offering synergistic and continuous instead of divisive understandings of economic, ecological and sociocultural remits.

By looking to the fashion-sustainability ‘offing’, enabling a comprehensive view of the big perspectives, underlying patterns and, most urgently, relationships, Kate Fletcher (Chapter 1) reveals to what extent our fashion (and sustainability) awareness is shaped in a commercial guise. This repeated and common experience of fashion and sustainability as commerce can readily emerge as the defining narrative of the territory, suggesting, in subtle (or not so subtle) reinforcement of particular actions and approaches, their importance in focus and actions, and thereby shaping future action and imagination in its likeness. Yet, the status quo is not the only possible state of affairs. As revealed by her experimental exploration of the ‘craft of use’, it is but one, limited and limiting, story of fashion (and sustainability). Other parallel and powerful narratives, insights and practices exist that, if we invite and accept them, can show us ways for fashion and sustainability guided by dependencies on people and time and a deep sense of care, instead of commerce; and for these to liberate fashion into ‘reality’, that is, into a world of ecological limits, capabilities and deeper understanding of the human condition.

It was important for us that this volume should include a strong theoretical perspective on fashion, as the deeper understanding of the field and its complex motivations has – at a cost – often been lacking from the fashion and sustainability discourse. Joanne Entwistle (Chapter 2), therefore, concisely situates the sustainability imperative within an expanding fashion theory, remarking on the failure to effectively integrate perspectives from sociology with, for example, material flows. Fashion theory’s association with gender has a long lineage, and Entwistle explores gender through two branches of literature focused variously on production and consumption. She then moves beyond this ‘simplistic’ analysis for a fuller account of fashion and sustainability and, drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, and actor network theory, she proposes an exploration of fashion as nature–culture hybrid to allow us ‘the opportunity to see the continuities between our dress practices and their wider environmental impact’.

Louise St. Pierre (Chapter 3) complementarily illuminates fashion within the context of ecology. She powerfully and expressively reminds us that natural systems cannot be controlled by humans; instead, we must learn to manage ourselves within their boundaries. She outlines changes to natural systems, reflecting specifically on climate change. As a fundamental part of fostering a different relationship with the Earth, she calls for the development of an ecological literacy, the understanding of principles of ecology and natural systems in the fashion and sustainability community. For St. Pierre, these ‘visceral, tangible and unshakeable relationships with the Earth’ influence the current social imaginary of the modern West and include the ecological imagination, a precursor to deep and significant change, and only with this renewed sensibility can we make fashion futures of sustainability.

This section concludes with John Thackara (Chapter 4) treating us to a contextualization of fashion and sustainability in global political systems. He ignites our understandings of unsustainability by citing the detrimental effect of converting sustainability value into monetary values and then marketizing it, and the pervasive dualism of Western thought, which separates humankind from her surroundings. Foremost, he offers alternative ways to conceptualize and organize the world, building rich and diverse accounts of democracy in the context of sustainability, and drawing on commons as a way for ‘constellations’ of people and interested parties to cohabit successfully in ‘social-ecological systems’. He points to the Latin American notion of buen vivir to argue for a politics that lets modern humans thrive with indigenous people, society with nature, and that favours stewardship instead of extraction: ‘Buen Vivir is not just about the individual, but the individual in the context of their unique environmental situation’.

1

OTHER FASHION SYSTEMS

Kate Fletcher

Introduction

In the summer of 2013, I was lucky enough to be part of a research trip that involved sailing around the Western Isles of Scotland. It was a transformatory experience in many ways, not least because, a few days into the voyage, I developed extreme longsightedness and could no longer see to read or sew. So many were the seascapes, wildlife sightings, changing colours of a waxing and waning moon, glimpses of magical light creeping around the edges of the sky, that my optical lenses fixed in long-view mode. Close work in books, with needle and thread, on a computer – the things that dominate so many hours of so many of my days – were shuffled unceremoniously by my body’s optics into a back room. And the door closed firmly behind them. With it, my life was shown up for its relentless myopic bias, for the dominance within it of things close to eye – things I could now no longer see to do. Life then became different for me. I took the eyes’ cue (what else could I do?) and started to look long and look far, to look to the ‘offing’ – the physical place that is the distant part of the sea.

Back on dry land and in the vicinity of an optician, I now have glasses. But the sea’s legacy is, for me, a permanent physical reminder of the need to move my metaphorical field of vision beyond that which is close at hand; to shift gauge of focus, scale, rhythm, place and timeframe. To look to distant, broad perspectives, to underlying patterns, to gathering relationships and to subtle changes in ‘weather’ – that is, to look to the fashion–sustainability offing – in order to better understand the tides, channels of navigation and conditions nearby. In this chapter, I try to do just this. I should say that I have been attempting this big view for most of the two decades of my work exploring design for sustainability in fashion and textiles as a design researcher and consultant; that is, to understand things holistically, to work from the whole down to the level of the parts and detail; but longsightedness has leant this task an uncommon edge, for it is now the clearest vision I have. Hence, like many of my fellow authors in this book, I seek to explore the interplay of fashion and sustainability in the context of the dominant societal organizing forces affecting fashion, economic growth and consumerism. I investigate how these structures and behaviours and the complex or aggregate relationships of people in society reveal some – and obscure other – sustainability routes ahead for fashion, for such structures and behavioural patterns are like a partial nautical chart, mapping some features and currents, but failing to note others. Attempting to sketch in some of the other fashion geographies and practices that draw on a broader spectrum of activity than the buying and selling of new garments, I try to show that other systems of fashion provision and expression are both real and possible. This chapter seeks to tell stories of fashion with different emphases, allegiances, beliefs and visions from those most often experienced today, and, in so doing, to chart a course for other ways of doing things. I start with two tales of garment use from the general public, drawn from the Local Wisdom project.

Multiple functions take time

This top is made out of two shirts, two men’s shirts … half of it is silk and half of it is polyester. You can totally unbutton the two halves from each other. So it means that you can wash [the two halves] separately, but it actually means that one side crinkles much more than the other, so I only have to iron half of that [laughs].

And I guess because it had a life as something else, it has this kind of memory that comes with it and whether that’s the feeling that I get from always knowing that the pockets are in this slightly awkward position and also other people’s recognition of that when they see me in it.

Figure 1.1 Multiple functions take time

Source: Local Wisdom project; photography by Paul Allister

I’ve also found that when I’ve had pieces like this which have multiple functions I don’t really find the second function until I’ve owned it for a number of years. It is not something that I necessarily interchange, weekly. It might be I wear it one way for a year or two and then I discover how the other way now works. That sort of helps the longevity of a piece that might not be immediately apparent.

Size doesn’t matter

This shirt belonged to my friend and flatmate who moved to Sydney about three years ago and he’s about 5’5“ or 5’6” maybe but we shared clothes even though he’d be small and skinny. I’m about 6’3“ … the sleeves [of the shirt] are a bit short but I wear them rolled up so you wouldn’t notice, but the rest of it fits fine. And then the jacket is my Dad’s … part of a suit that he wore. He’d be a bit smaller than me as well. I think he was around 5’ 11” or that.

Figure 1.2 Size doesn’t matter

Source: Local Wisdom project; photography by Des Moriaty

Fashion is consumption

In contrast to the view and practices of fashion evinced by these two stories, in neo-liberal market economies such as the UK (my home), the language and expression of the consumer society are so overriding in fashion that we hardly notice them. In the collective cultural consciousness, fashion is consumption, materialism, commercialization and marketing. It is buying high street and high end. It is watching, browsing, purchasing. Fashion comes to be anything that emerges from a certain consumerist machine. This is, somewhat predictably, also the view of fashion from many within the sustainability lobby, where there persists a reluctance to imagine fashion outside a commercial context that trades on novelty and status anxiety for economic return. In fact, it seems almost impossible to take this psychic leap, for the prevailing consumerist fashion style and story appear ‘natural’ to our way of thinking and behaviour: it is normal to access and engage with fashion primarily by exchanging money for product; it is expected that these same products will look dated and stylistically incongruous in six months; it is usual to discard, rather than repair.

Dig a little deeper, and we see other forces at play. It soon becomes apparent that consumerist fashion is locked into a cycle of self-justification, creating the very conditions by which it becomes both dominant and credible. Consumers see an ever more rapid cycle of new products introduced in stores (up to twelve seasons per year and moving towards a strategy of continuous replenishment; Anson, 2010: 4), because retailers compete on novelty. They buy items increasingly often, because the garments’ inferior materials and construction means they fall apart quickly and need to be replaced (see also Chapter 12). They grow their reliance on fashion that can be made into and traded as a commodity, because the consumer society fails to value activities that cannot be marketed. In the consumer society, ideas about fashion are organized around commerce and consumerism, and most of those involved – that is, those of us who are creating fashion or wearing it – end up becoming dependent on them. In the consumer culture in which we live, we communicate through the social language of position and status determined by what we buy, and we capitulate to and reinforce the commercial and ideological pressure of the market as the route through which to organize our lives (Thorpe, 2012). In the creed of market economics, growth is essential in order to maintain stability of the economy, and, as such, ideas of ‘progress’ have become tied to a soci...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Framing and expanding sustainability and fashion
• Part II Sustainability and fashion as seen from other places and disciplines
• Part III Perspectives on refining fashion from within
• Part IV Visions of sustainability from within the fashion space
• Index