Kate Fletcher

Slow Fashion: An Invitation for Systems Change

Abstract In some circles, “fast” has become a proxy for a type of fashion that epitomizes ideas of unsustainability; yet high speed is not in itself a descriptor of unethical and/or environmentally damaging practices but a tool that is used to increase sales and deliver economic growth with attendant ecological and social effects. Questions about speed probe deeply into the economic systems, business models, and value sets that underpin the fashion sector today and which profoundly shape its sustainability potential. In this article, ideas and practices of the lexicographical opposite to “fast,” i.e. slow culture, are framed as an opportunity to begin to engage better with systems-level questions in the fashion sector in order to build deeper and longer-lasting change towards sustainability.

Exploring demand reduction through design, durability and 'usership' of fashion clothes

Global planetary boundaries confer limits to production and consumption of material goods. They also confer an obligation to experiment, as individuals and collectively as society, with less-materially-intensive, but no less exuberant, ways of living. This paper takes up this mantle and explores materials demand reduction through a focus on design, fashion garments and the universal, everyday activity of wearing clothes. It takes as its starting point the design of longer-lasting products, a widely favoured strategy for increasing materials efficiency and reducing materials demand in many sectors, including fashion. Drawing on scholarship in the field of design for sustainability and ethnographic research conducted in 16 locations in nine countries about already-existing practices of intensive use and maintenance of clothing, this paper critiques the effectiveness of durability strategies to reduce the amount of materials used. It argues for an update in the familiar preference within sustainability debates for the ‘techno-fix’ to explore instead resourceful use of materials as emerging from human actions and relationships with material goods. It suggests that, while facilitated by design, technology and engineering, opportunities to reduce materials demand begin in individual and collective practices, which, in turn, have dynamic implications for use of materials. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Material demand reduction’.

Fashion Education In Sustainability In Practice

This paper sets out the experiences of and critical reflections on devising and delivering a Masters level fashion education course in sustainability at London College of Fashion, UK. The course, first established in 2008, has been created from a collaborative, participatory and ecological paradigm, and draws on an approach to fashion education that is oriented towards process, action and creative participation in all aspects of the transition to sustainability: social, environmental and economic. This stands in contrast to conventional educational models that concentrate on product or outcome and the preparation of students for economic life. The paper describes the Masters courses broad disciplinary approach and its theoretical framework, drawn from design for sustainability. Through reference to student work, the paper goes on to set out some of the opportunities and challenges that working in this way has presented, including among others; the bridging of epistemological differences at an institutional level; new roles for designers who are working within a framework of sustainability; and emerging ways to visualize the process and practice of sustainability.