Designing Fashion's Future

Present Practice and Tactics for Sustainable Change

Alice Payne

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350092488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

How do fashion designers design? How does design function within the industry? How can design practices open up sustainable pathways for fashion's future? Designing Fashion's Future responds to these questions to offer a fresh understanding of design practices within the sprawling, shifting fashion system. Fashion design is typically viewed as the rarefied practice of elite professionals, or else as a single stage within the apparel value chain. Alice Payne shows how design needn't be reduced to a set of decisions by a designer or design team, but can instead be examined as a process, object, or agent that shapes fashion's material and symbolic worlds. Designing Fashion's Future draws on more than 50 interviews with industry professionals based in Australia, Asia, North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. These diverse perspectives from multinational retailers, independent and experimental contexts ground the discussion in contemporary industry practices.

CHAPTER 1

FASHION DESIGN BEYOND THE DESIGNER

Today, more than ever, design matters. Fashion design triggers the manufacture of an estimated 150 billion items of clothing annually (Kirchain 2015), and world fibre production continues to accelerate in response to growing consumption. Fashion, as both industry and cultural practice, is deeply implicated in the converging environmental and social challenges of the twenty-first century. On the surface at least, fashion designers have an important role to play, as their design decisions not only shape the look and feel of the garment but also determine the impacts it may have throughout its lifecycle, from cradle to grave (Fletcher 2008, Gwilt 2011). Yet despite this supposed latent power of ‘the designer’, in actuality, in fashion, designers are far from the only actors designing. Many people, whether named or unnamed as designers, serve to determine the material and symbolic forms of fashion. And beyond these actors, fashion’s objects and processes themselves determine what may or may not be designed. In this book, I propose a widened view of fashion design practice, drawing upon diverse examples of industry practices to examine design in a new light. Through examination of the work of fashion designers – from fast fashion product to conceptual design to independent design – this book traces the active objects, processes and agents that ‘design’ fashion. In Designing Fashion’s Future, my aim is to make sense of present design practice in order to understand the interventions that could shape future practice.

Venerated, trivialized, misunderstood: fashion design as the mercurial little sister of the design disciplines

Despite the fact that all bodies require clothes, fashion design retains a perception as being the most feminine of all the design disciplines. Fashion itself is highly gendered, whether in its modes of production – both creative and technical labour – or in its consumption. In the context of design disciplines, McRobbie (1998: 32) posits ‘fashion design has occupied a position of consistently low status’ in part due to its close connection with the feminine, a point made also by many other scholars (for example, see Kawamura 2005, Giertz-Mårtenson 2012). In the public imagination, fashion design is associated with glamour and extravagance, the so-called ‘soft innovation’ of Stoneman (2010), rather than the hard innovation of engineering or architecture. Although there is a human need for clothing, the often feminized desire for ‘fashionable clothing’ has far eclipsed need. ‘Designing clothing’ suggests a robust, no-nonsense needfulness, whereas ‘designing fashion’ sounds like mere vanity, change-for-change’s sake, an activity promoting waste and excess, and indeed, symbolic of the excesses of capitalism itself. Viewed this way, fashion design is but a naughty little sister to the more serious, masculine design disciplines. She is wayward, mercurial, impossible to contain, and her products come in 150 billion forms, produced year after year.

Just as other design disciplines have greater gravitas than fashion, similar hierarchies exist within fashion design practice. Although fashion design can refer to the creativity and visual innovation of a designer to propose new styles, as well as to the technical production processes of apparel development (Kawamura 2004: 74), avant-garde fashion design is venerated above all other forms. High-end fashion design is presented on runways and in documentaries, shared on social media and featured in hagiographic exhibitions. This lineage of fashion design begins with Charles Worth and continues with Chanel, Dior and other designers of the rarefied French haute couture system, designers now transmogrified into brands. Yet, although the high-end fashion of the present era is characterized by powerful luxury brands, the fashion design of this narrative continues to be celebrated as the work of the visionary sole designer. Within fashion scholarship, the output of avant-garde designers prompts analysis of their design practice as artistic provocation or social commentary (for example, see Vinken 2005, Geczy and Karaminas 2017). The confections of the runway also play into the popular perception of fashion design as spectacle, a kind of art-lite of interest only to the elite few.

In contrast, the fashion design practices of the mass market appear but a pallid imitation. Design in the high street is the value-adding activity employed within a product development process, or ‘the science of delivering the item the public is “just about to want”’ (Waddell 2004: 56). To provoke consumer desire, members of design and buying teams synthesize a combination of trend information and past sales data into proposals for new product. All designers of the mass-market industry (whether termed product developers, or designers, or stylists) are members of teams, and design decisions are tightly constrained by the brand, price point and target customer for whom they are designing (Aspers 2010). Mass-market forms of designing are not the subject of documentaries, but rather are examined in the fashion management literature (Masson et al. 2007, Goworek 2010) and in textbooks on fashion industry processes (Glock and Kunz 2000, Burns and Bryant 2007, Bye 2010). Creativity and inspiration are of course still at work within these forms of designing (Sinha 2002, Bye and Sohn 2010), and the scholarly research on fashion design has examined the interplay between the creative and the technical aspects of the fashion design processes in industry (Eckert and Demaid 2001, Au, Tam and Taylor 2008). However, these forms of designing are viewed as product development at best, outright knock-off at worst. This tension between high design and low design is a symptom of fashion as a cultural industry and ‘fashion’ clothing as cultural products.

From the discussion above, several binaries appear to form in relation to fashion design practices, suggesting the possibility of comparisons between, say, avant-garde fashion design practices and those of the mass market, or comparison between ‘sustainable’ fashion design practices and fast fashion design. But rather than pursue comparisons, or propose hierarchies of practices, I instead seek to flatten the concept of fashion design. A generic plaid shirt purchased from Amazon is as much ‘designed’ as a Prada jacket – albeit with a chasm of economic and cultural value lying between them. In the following section I explain the key ideas from design studies that will aid this book’s exploration into the functioning of fashion design across diverse modes of practice.

Looking past ‘the look’: design as ontological

Design, as both a verb and a noun, may refer to the full gamut of the human-made as well as to the act of making. Buchanan terms design ‘the conception and planning of the artificial’ (1995: 82), and Heskett (2005: 5) as ‘the human capacity to shape and make our environment in ways without precedent in nature, to serve our needs and give meaning to our lives’. Design can be viewed as a spectrum with art at one end and technology at the other (Clay 2009). ‘Design’ may also describe the aesthetic wit and visual gloss that adds market value to a functional object. When used as an adjective, the word ‘designer’ describes ‘designer’ furniture and ‘designer’ fashion as superior to their lower-priced, functional or generic cousins.

Although ‘designer’ as adjective represents a common hierarchy of design practices, when one considers the implications of designed objects for environmental sustainability there can be no such hierarchy. Design theorist Tony Fry (1999, 2009, 2011) explores design as the totality of the human-made, both material and immaterial, whether chairs, toothbrushes, government policy or a pop song. Design’s omniscience in mediating our daily lived reality serves to render invisible the bulk of the designed (Fry 1999, 2011). Fry claims that to design and to be immersed in human-designed environments is for all humans, ontological – or, put more simply, is core to our existence. He positions design as ‘a directional practice that brings directional objects and objectified things into being’ (Fry 2009: 30), by ‘directional’ meaning that designed objects have agency, and ‘design’ other objects and processes.

Ontological design, in Fry’s (1999, 2009) and Willis’s (2006) terming, means that people design, and are themselves in turn designed by their designing. Design, then, is comprised of three interlinked components, namely:

1. the design object – the material or immaterial outcome of designing;

2. the design process – the system, organization, conduct and activity of designing;

3. the design agency – the designer, design instruction in any medium or mode of expression and the designed object itself as it acts on its world. (Fry 1999, Willis 2006: 8)

These elements act in a hermeneutic circle, in which one cannot understand the whole unless one can understand each part, and vice versa. In this sense, the designed ‘designs’ back upon the designer, in essence designing her or him, and laying down ways in which future designed objects and environments in turn ‘design’ consequences. Design’s consequences are often unanticipated and unplanned by human actors. In Fry’s view, the unacknowledged ability of design to go on designing has led humankind to the current state of what he calls ‘defuturing’ (2009: 6), the unsustainable ways of being that threaten the future of humanity and the living world. Equally, only the recasting and redirecting of the very nature of design can lead to futuring – i.e. making time, rather than destroying time.

Philosophically, Fry’s work follows the metaphysics of Martin Heidegger, who examined the nature of being as it relates to the human-constructed world and to the objects that populate it. Heidegger ([1949] 2007: 263) refers to ‘the thinging of the thing’, effectively assigning the ‘thing’ agency. Fry’s related proposition of ‘design designs’ (2009: 30) has parallels with other versions of object-oriented ontology, such as Jane Bennett’s (2010: 17) ‘thing-power’, namely ‘the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness’. Relatedly, on the agency of things, Daniel Miller (2008: 287) describes material culture as a ‘concern as much with how things made people as with how people made things’. The most pertinent relationship, however, is found in the actor-network theory (ANT) positioning of non-human entities as actors, or ‘actants’ (Latour 1996). Within the fashion context, Entwistle (2016) proposes ANT and specifically Latour’s work in developing analyses of the fashion system that examine the role fashion’s non-human actors may play in a fashion actor-network. In partial response to Entwistle’s proposal, I suggest analyses of fashion’s design practices and design objects as a meaningful starting point towards this goal, through the lens of ontological design.

Ontological design is thus significant in this book for two reasons. First, a view of design as the totality of the human-made opens up the space for a widened view of fashion design practices wherever they appear – beyond the high-end ateliers, beyond the fast fashion product development processes, and beyond the designer. Second, Fry’s philosophy becomes a way to conceive of both the material and immaterial elements of fashion as ‘designed’. This aids in uncovering the ways in which design and the actors who design (who may or may not be termed ‘designers’) work within and through the apparatus of fashion systems. Designing fashion is therefore far more than designing clothes. Rather, fashion’s processes, objects and agents delineate and ‘design’ industry outcomes, and in turn shape fashion systems. This central premise guides the analysis of fashion design practices presented through this book.

Present-day unsustainability

Although examination of fashion design practice in this way will hopefully offer a worthy contribution to fashion studies, I have a deeper and far more pressing reason for writing this book. In Designing Fashion’s Future, my task is to explore present design practice in order to locate the interventions that will shape future practice. Above I’ve explained the way I will analyse present practice, so now I will turn to why framing a future, sustainable practice is so pressing. ‘Sustainability’ is a word now-banal in its familiarity, shop-worn and tired. Yet it remains frequently invoked as a response to the ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber 1974) ¹ collectively faced by humanity. The earth system, in which all other human-made and natural systems are nested, is undergoing radical transformation from human activity. The present geological epoch is known as the Anthropocene, an era marked by human activity as a central driver of the earth system akin to a geological force (Steffen et al. 2018). The scale of the human-made ecological crisis currently underway is evidenced through the empirical data gathered across scientific disciplines including oceanographers, biologists, and earth and climate scientists (e.g. see Rockström et al. 2009, IPCC 2018, Díaz et al. 2019). These are problems of unsustainability, and particularly the unsustainability of industrial societies.

Looming above and compounding all these issues is climate change. Warnings from the scientific community have become increasingly urgent, and, at 1 degree of warming the effects of climate change are being felt, with heat records toppling and more extreme weather events including droughts occurring globally. Humanity’s use of fossil fuels, which has enabled unprecedented wealth, well-being and human development, is collapsing the interconnected web of life upon which we rely. In 2018, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) determined that in the next twelve years, the world must reduce carbon emissions by 40 per cent to avoid reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming (IPCC 2018). Achieving this ambition will simultaneously require transformation of global energy systems away from fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) and a massive decline in deforestation. Transforming this energy infrastructure will require a mobilization of policy, industry and investment that would be akin to the war efforts of the 1940s in the scale and speed of industrial transformation necessary (Stiglitz 2019). All industries will be affected. The alternative, that actions are insufficient, means the world may pass 2 degrees of global warming by mid-century or sooner (IPCC 2018), potentially triggering runaway warming of 4 or even 5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by century’s end (Steffen et al. 2018).

The bankruptcy of ‘sustainability’

When considering humanity’s future, then, in the Anthropocene, the word sustainability becomes even more ambiguous. In the Anthropocene, the relationship between the human-made and the so-called natural world is contested as never before. In a world shaped by humans, the central premise of ‘sustainability’ comes undone – what is to be sustained, and how, by whom, and for whom, or what? The epoch in which humans evolved, the Holocene, has irrevocably passed, so sustaining that world appears as no longer an option. Perhaps humanity should become good gardeners of a post-natural world, as post-environmentalists like Stuart Brand (2009) or Mark Lynas (2011) may argue? In this narrative, human progress can continue unabated, as technological innovations decouple economic growth from environmental impact.²

Implicit in the narrative above of human progress and its dark side is a particular cultural and political perspective at work, one in which I am complicit (and likely you too, if reading this book). The social injustices, inequality and the ecological unsustainability of the present moment are not discrete issues, but rather intertwined and stemming from a mode of being established in the West³ and now extending to citizens throughout the Global North⁴, a mode of being that venerates the self-actualization of the individual above all else, which has in turn led to great wealth for some, advancement and well-being for many, and destruction and intergenerational injustice for many others. This mode of being has been described by decoloniality scholars Mignolo and Walsh (2018) as modernity/coloniality, the colonial matrix of power that underpins the dominant world order. It manifests in many ways – in the construction of the human as separate to nature, in hierarchies of race and gender, and in the workings of neoliberal capitalism.

For despite the decades of ‘sustainable development’ narratives that rightly aim to address the gross inequalities of the world, unsustainability has only proliferated. Blühdorn (2017) argues that the ‘weak’ mainstream view of sustainability has dominated and, in fact, the established notion of sustainability has ‘consistently evaded all normative issues and insisted that environmental issues can more effectively be addressed by the means of science, technology, the market and professional management’. The market has proved eminently unsuitable as a mechanism to handle issues such as climate change or biodiversity loss. Rather, over the past decades, the actions seeking sustainability have served largely to ‘sustain the unsustainable’ (Fry 2009, Blühdorn 2017). For all of these reasons, in After Sustainability, John Foster (2014) frames climate change and ecological collapse not as a problem that can be solved, but as a world-scale tragedy.

Given all of the above, what may ‘sustainable change’ actually look like in practice? Turning back to fashion design, as the subject of this book, ‘sustainable fashion’ is something much spoken of in industry and community – whether in reference to a circular economy or to ethical production or sustainable consumption. Yet the degree to which these propositions may be considered ‘sustainable’ is and will remain contested, as they are often ensnared in the same modes of knowing and being that have led to present-day unsustainability. For fashion happens within the larger structures of economies and societies, and at a macro-level, these larger structures are facing existential threats from within and without. The sustainable change required may be no less than a radical revisioning of humanity’s positioning within the liv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents 
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Foreword
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Fashion Design Beyond the Designer
• 2 Fashion Systems Thinking
• 3 Designers, Named and Nameless
• 4 Fashion’s Designerly Narratives
• 5 Designing in Fast Fashion
• 6 Design for Sustainability as Strategies and Tactics
• 7 Weightless Fashion
• 8 Taming Fashion by Design
• 9 Rewilding Fashion by Design
• 10 Conclusion
• Afterword
• Notes
• References
• Fashion Systems Thinking: A Glossary of Terms
• Index
• Study Participants
• Acknowledgements
• Imprint