I fell in love with fashion at a young age but we’ve had a tumultuous relationship over the years. This article explores this relationship, dips into my personal life and professional background and articulates the responses I’m developing. I had the pleasure and privilege to grow up in a Christian family with ethical values and an open minded, progressive outlook. My father was a pioneer of fairtrade and ethical business and our house was full of indigenous crafts and visitors from around the world. As a young child, I loved the exotic dolls and mangos brought back in my Dad’s suitcase but rebelled against going to church and what I viewed as hippy, alternative culture. I fell in love with fashion of the French variety. Embodied by a glamorous grandma, this meant tantrums about ugly school shoes and secret purchases of high heels, jewel coloured, swirling, shiny skirts and fluffy mohair jumpers. I knew this was morally ‘wrong’ but followed my heart by making clothing and studying fashion design in the early 90’s.
As often happens, the virtue instilled in me from childhood returned towards the end of my degree. I designed one of the first sustainable student collections sponsored by pioneering textile companies developing organic alternatives. I wrote a dissertation called “Fashion and the Environment’ with a conclusion that ‘Green Fashion’ was unfortunately a momentary trend not taken seriously by the industry. I presciently stated it would take time for this to happen. Fast forward almost thirty years and the change the industry needs is still not happening, in fact the situation is exponentially worse. We evolved to ‘Sustainable Fashion’ in the 2000’s and to ‘Regenerative Fashion’ today but with little discernible effect on consumption volumes.
The Earth Logic pamphlet, written in 2019 by Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham, was a clarion call to fashion industry practitioners to find ways to guide fashion away from the current growth logic paradigm. Using a systems approach they champion a diverse, care-centred response to encourage the creation of multiple centres of fashion activity using plural ways of knowing, co-creation and grounded imagination. Disappointingly, no policy changes, voluntary improvements or industry dialogue have had a measurable effect in reducing total consumption in the years since the paper was published.
I am not the only person wondering what is causing this and what we can do about it. In answer to the growing concern of her own her own conscience, Sandra Niessen, anthropologist and fashion activist, wrote a seminal paper in 2020, titled ‘Fashion it’s Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability’. As an academic sitting outside the industry, she was able to write a blistering attack as she introduced the concept that non-western ‘Other’ traditions are the sacrifice zones of western fashion. Niessen suggests that indigenous clothing cultures, alongside geographical landscapes, have been destroyed by the advance of globalisation and the ubiquitous availability of cheap, homogeneous, western clothing. When I first read this, it lifted scales from my eyes. Everything about fashion is ‘othering’ and making those not ‘in fashion’ outsiders. Niessen argues that only by recognising and correcting systemic ethnic bias and eliminating sacrifice zones can the fashion industry achieve sustainability. As the late David Graeber points out, it is worth remembering that a multitude of cultures, societal organisation, interpersonal ways of being, skills, arts and crafts have existed for 250,000 years. Western modernity, imperialism and colonisation have obliterated so much culture, skill and knowledge of immense value in such a short time.
The fashion industry appears to be trying to change but it seems the relentless onward motion of modernity and economic pressures of capitalism are preventing this. Circular systems, regulation, legislation, renting, recycling, none of this is working. I could break this down in detail but trust me when I say that in 2023, the state of play is much worse and evidenced through the ever increasing production of fast fashion and its resultant waste. The uncomfortable fact remains that despite a huge volume of ‘sustainable’ initiatives, garment sales volumes continue to increase year on year.
Inspired by the work of Jason Hickel and the Degrowth movement, the activist group, Fashion Act Now (of which I am a member) co-created the term Defashion to describe the dismantling of the fashion system, something we feel needs to happen urgently. We would like to replace it with a pluriverse of local, culturally relevant systems that respect values other than money. Defashion describes a paradigmatic shift where indigenous and non-fashion dress systems are cherished and where communities come together to create local clothing culture and the Big Fashion Industry is removed. Defashion is degrowth through process and care and bringing this into being is key to the work of fashion activists like myself, Sandra Niessen and many others.
As a society, we must learn to dress respectfully and empathetically, celebrating our personalities, our cultures and our connections to nature. It doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy clothing but we must acknowledge the symbolism and the ecological consequences of our choices. No-body appears to be listening to the urgent call of the earth. One of the key questions of our time is how to spread care-centred, ecological messages more widely, putting nature at the heart of decision making and bringing a new culture into being.
Philosopher David Abram talks of a perception shift of humans away from nature, that the written word has removed our connection to the natural world. Nora Bateson, filmmaker and educator, speaks of the perception shift needed to bring us back. She argues we cannot change ourselves and society until we have a shift in mindset and de-centre humanity. Contrary to assertions, this cannot be changed by design and people must come to it themselves. De-centring requires mentally placing ourselves at the heart of our environments and as Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti states in Hospicing Modernity, we must become in-tune with all living beings around us.
I identify as a Designer, although I haven’t worked in design for many years. I used to constantly observe the environment around me from an extractive perspective; mentally criticising people, places and clothing to create a continuous iterative cycle of hoped-for product improvement. In the distant past, I worked for big brands like Adidas. A designer of sportswear must problem solve and gather technical data through wear testing to enable decision making that creates a better performing product for consumption. As a fashion Educator, I observed many an unkind, unsaid critique of others’ garment choices, communicated via a raised eyebrow, a smug reference of belonging to a club; a continual mental dialogue that takes us away from being in the moment and seeing what really matters. Recently I noticed a change in myself. I am much less critical, less judgemental, and more objective about products, places and people. I like to think I don’t care what people wear or how they look when it used to feel important. How did I get to this shift? Could it be more time spent in nature or an involvement in land, food and regenerative agriculture? Is it an extensive education in regenerative economics and ecological thinking? Has it emerged from a greater understanding of our economic system and the role of western modernity as a dominant destructive force? Or is it through an education involving spiritual and ecological journeys, learning from indigenous ways of being and our terrible history of colonisation? Most likely it’s all of this combined.
I have come to the view that a transformative, earth-centric mindset is what people must nourish rather than attempting to fix a broken industry. If we want Fashion to slow and degrow then we must all play our parts. We have to learn to let go. We all wear clothing and the plurality of our backgrounds and cultures will mean that all our reactions around the globe will be and should be different. My agency is to stop buying new, to disengage with what is considered ‘fashionable’ and to develop textiles locally from the land. I love clothing and the personal expression it brings but fashion is a mirror on society and we must recognise what it is reflecting. We cannot wait for governments or corporations to change the situation. I invite everyone to examine their wardrobes and their own perspectives, to develop unique ways forward and tentatively build a new clothing culture. This may seem difficult or even impossible but what is fashionable starts in the mind, something that is within all our power.
Further info:
Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books.
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Allen Lane, 2021.
Fletcher, K. and Tham, M. (2019), Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan, London: J.J. Charitable Trust, https://earthlogic.info
Hickel, Jason. Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. Penguin Books, 2022.
Niessen, S. (2020). Fashion, its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability. Fashion Theory, 24 (6), 859–877. Available from https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2020.1800984
Niessen, Sandra. ‘Defining Defashion: A Manifesto for Degrowth’. International Journal of Fashion Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, Oct. 2022, pp. 439–44. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1386/infs_00082_7.
https://batesoninstitute.org/nora-bateson/
