Textile Waste and the Colour Black:

a Critical Look at Sustainability or Next to Black It is Diff icult to Think of Anything in Fashion That is and Has

Been as Constant, Aside from Change

K. Williams

 

 

This is the edited booklet version of

Textile Waste and the Colour Black: a Critical Look at Sustainability

or (next to black, it is difficult to think of anything in fashion

that is and has been as constant, aside from change).

Originally a dissertation for the degree of Masters of Art Textile

Design at University of the Arts London (UAL) Chelsea College

of Arts

Published in London, 2014

www.k-williams.com

 

 

DEDICATIONS This project would not have been possible if not for: the ceaseless love, support, patience, and dedication of my partner, Leo Jimenez, our son Lennon; and our championing cornerstone: the Jimenez, Williams, Tanaka, and Boyd families; Funding from the US-UK Fulbright Commission; Valuable input and encouragement from Lorna Bircham, Sarah Risley and MA tutors; Insightful nudging and the stimulating & critical edge of Emmanuelle Dirix Inspiring mentorship from Otto von Busch; Invaluable skills shared and wisdom disseminated by Margaret Campbell; Philosophical generosity of Philip Courtenay; UAL Academic Support team; Motivation and help from my fellow course mates, especially Alex; ‘Black’; Chrissa (Brodda); Darshini; Jaime; Jessica; Mia; Rhiannon; Rosamund; Sor; Susanna; Bighearted technical support of Aimee Betts, Nick Healy, Phil, and Isabelle Tasseff-Elenkoff, the community and space at Goodenough College; TRAID (Textile Recycling and International Development) for supporting my anthropological curiosity; the strength, patience, and good humour of Boz; the warm, comforting, and incredibly supportive Josh Raffell; and the Saturday TRAID team: Rose, Brandy, Rajul, Ali, Marta, and Jordian.

 

 

INTRODUCTION

My research looks at textile waste, the various implications of consumerism,

and what limits the enactment of sustainability. I will present this research to

discuss the cultural and social setting of my studio practice involving the

retrieval, intimate handling, disassembly and manipulation of discarded

materials. One key focus of my research has involved a critical analysis of

current fashion culture and the problematic discourse around ethical fashion.

In this context, I will use the colour black to illustrate it not only as one of the

few enduring aspects of current fashion culture, but to express how the

semiotics1 or social construction and understanding of fashion can evolve

over time.

Finally, with a brief illustration of the social component of my practice, I aim

to describe what I have termed the enactment of sustainability. But the larger

question is: by transferring this research and practice to the milieu of art, what

opportunities are available to discuss sustainability and waste outside the

context of clothing? What role does the colour black play in this?

1 On BLACK

Designer Yohji Yamamoto has been called the poet of black. He has

adopted black as his signature colour since graduating from Bunka Fashion

College in 1969. Aiming “for enduring fashion rather than fashion novelty”

(English, 2011), the colour black has been central to Yamamoto’s design

aesthetic for over 40 years. Indeed, in an era when obsolescence rules, within

“[a] world that discards its past in an instant” (natalyO9725, 2011), where

instant gratification is normal and spectacle is privileged, Yamamoto is the

exception. In such a precarious and malleable environment, what endures?

My assertion is: the colour Black.

                                                                                                               1 Semiotics makes us aware that the cultural values with which we make sense of the world are a tissue of conventions that have been handed down from generation to generation by the members of the culture of which we are a part. It reminds us that there is nothing 'natural' about our values; they are social constructs that not only vary enormously in the course of time but differ radically from culture to culture. (“Semiotics for Beginners”, Chandler, Daniel, cited in Schroeder 1998, 225).

 

 

1.1 Yohji Yamamoto

Looking to feature black as the principal colour for this project, and with a

commitment to the colour black as an aesthetic and communicative tool, I

will use it to consolidate and restore value to textile waste2 and discarded

objects of fashion. With black, not only do I want to convert the intended

purpose of unwanted things, but by retrieving them as sculptural material, I

want to communicate and highlight the cultural value of black. Furthermore,

in relation to the persistent turnover in fashion culture, I aim to emphasize the

continued relevance – yes, the sustainability - of the colour black.

Perennial and classic, black can be edgy, contemporary and chic. But while

some social, political and cultural affiliations of the colour black involve

upheaval and sometimes, indecency, the diverse use of black can be seen in

every aspect of society, and expressed in all aspects of dress. It also has

significant and multifaceted historical and cultural connotations. In terms of

                                                                                                               2 According to Jana Hawley, [textile] waste is any type of garment or household article made from manufactured textiles that the owner no longer needs and decides to discard. These articles are discarded either because they are worn out, damaged, outgrown, or have gone out of fashion. These textile products are sometimes given to charities and passed on to friends and family, but additionally are disposed of into the trash and end up in the municipal landfills. From “Textile Recycling: A Systems Perspective”, 2006. Accessed from http://krex.kstate.edu/dspace/bitstream/2097/595/1/Hawley2006Recycling.pdf

 

 

its multitudinous meanings and constant presence, the colour black is

perhaps the most enduring aspect of fashion, clothing, and dress.

Indeed, next to black, it is difficult to think of anything else in fashion that is

and has been as constant, besides of course, change.

1.2 Black Block anarchists, Tahrir Square, Egypt, 2013.

But before getting into black’s durable characteristics, it might be helpful to

trace the cultural significance and codified customs involving the colour black

(in this case, from a Western/European view). For example, darker hues and

the colour black largely dominated seventeenth century Europe. Explained

by French historian Michel Pastoreau as “a very sombre century”; he claims

that black was the colour of all domains. But during the late seventeenth

century, the Age of Enlightenment - an intellectual movement that moved

away from tradition - emerged (between the 1720s-1780s) and the popularity

of black waned (2009).

 

 

1.3 Seeberger Freres, Hulton Archive, Getty

1.4 Diego Velazquez. Juan de Pareja, 1648.

During this time, for mostly urban life and the upper classes of German,

English and French societies, Pastoreau reports:

There was an almost universal retreat from the dark, saturated shades…that dominated the

preceding century. In dress and furniture, light, luminous tones triumphed: gay colors and

“pastel” tones, principally in the range of blues, pinks, yellows, and grays. (2009)

 

 

To accompany new hopeful ideologies of the Enlightenment, the withdrawal

of black from the realms of everyday dress, the arts, mourning cloth and even

the farmyard followed suit. Despite its prominence for the preceding 400

years, Europe effectively abandoned the colour black. But by the time of the

French Revolution of the early eighteenth century (1785-1788), fundamental

aspects of society were in flux, and after roughly 60 years, black would

resume its popularity.

In service of this paper, black will perform several purposes. Not only is it

essential to demonstrate black’s long and meaningful history to illustrate its

longevity and relevance in dress. But in viewing black’s varied and

changeable past, I want to point out how ideology and cultural customs

adjust over time. In view of shifting meaning and significance, I think it would

be insightful to look deeper at how fashion culture once operated in

comparison to the way in which it has shifted into its current iteration. And so,

with my own brief examination of the colour black here, I want to emphasise

that culture is not fixed. And in highlighting this elasticity - with a particular

emphasis on cultural norms and social structures - I want to explore how such

shifts can afford opportunities for the enactment of sustainability, or what

Tony Fry calls the design of ‘sustainment’.

Indeed, with my research and practice, I aim to contribute to the burgeoning

paradigmatic shift toward experientialism and away from materialism (this will

be discussed in greater detail in chapter 6). In other words, rather than relying

on the fashion industry to bring about sustainable change, I am interested in

unconventional approaches wherein social production of values and new

semiotics (an ideological turn) could bring about innovation by demanding

and devising an ethical fashion industry. Another way to think about it:

suppose there was such a thing as a sustainable fashion system, would our

current consumerist culture / ideological structures support such a thing?

Does one influence the other?

2 On FASHION, CULTURE, AND SUSTAINABILITY

Why does Fashion utter clothing so abundantly? Why does it interpose, between the object

and its user, such a luxury of words (not to mention images), such a network of meaning? The

reason is, of course an economic one. Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form

consumers who don't calculate; if clothing's producers and consumers had the same

 

 

consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its

dilapidation; Fashion, like all fashions, depends on a disparity of two consciousnesses, each

foreign to the other.

Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, 1983

The apparel industry, the second largest market in the world, produces 80

billion garments every year (Siegel, 2014). Besides that, it feeds the fastest

growing waste stream category: textiles and clothing. Each of us generates

about 32 kilos of fashion waste every year,3 which contributes to the 2.5

million tonnes of textiles consumed annually. The unprecedented and

cavalier use and disposal of these abundant consumer goods is the direct

result of fast fashion, technological advancement, globalization, and cheap

labour, amongst other factors.4

 2.1 Clothes pile, Pakistan

To be clear, a sustainable fashion industry does not exist. Further vexing this

situation is a profound disconnection between the sites of production,

consumption and disposal of clothing, the result of which finds 1.4 million

tons (WRAP, 2012) of textile waste in United Kingdom landfills. Fuelling this

situation is the social construction and acceptance of such first-world

consumerist conventions, which underscores these detachments, resulting in

                                                                                                               3 From the Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/textiles.htm 4 Aditya Chakrabortty says, [fashion] is one of the great conjuring tricks of capitalism. And the result is to paint out the producer, the subcontinental woman in her unsafe factory. It means that disasters such as Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, which killed 1,133 people and injured 2,500, are treated as anomalies – rather than part of a system in which manufacture is outsourced to subcontractors who operate under a regulatory regime that can best be described as turning a blind eye. And it ignores the end product: the 350,000 tonnes of clothing go into landfill in Britain alone. (2014)

 

 

tremendous gaps in knowledge. Glossing over these gaps is fashion media.

French theorist Guy Debord explained this particular multi-layered worldview

as being the result of a phenomenon he termed as the spectacle. He wrote:

The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail

presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived

has become mere representation (1983).

In other words, what we understand as reality is actually a collection of

image-based, representational experiences that we accept and expect. With

this view, one shaped from a capitalism-driven and consumerist perspective,

human rights, the environment and waste is of minor consideration.5

Further still, says Debord, “The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere

visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that

has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective“

(1983). This ‘objective’ lens is the mainstream ideological view; as in, the way

most of us understand, experience, and operate in the world. What Antonio

Gramsci called ‘common sense’, it is the ‘mobilization of generalities,

unexamined assumptions and unquestioned beliefs in circulation in any given

society.’ Different from ‘good sense’ or the product of empirically grounded

knowledge and learning from critically reflective experience (Gramsci cited in

Fry, 2011), it seems that our commonsensical vision is the barrier to linking

the critical disconnections I will now explain. Simply put, our current

ideological view is not at all concerned with bridging the gap between

production, consumption, and waste.

Taking seriously this disconnection, Design Strategist Cameron Tonkenwise

puts forth the following challenge:

The task of design, especially designing sustainability, or more accurately undesigning

unsustainabil ity, is incredibly difficult and necessarily ontological – it involves the redesign

not just of our built environment, but of our ways of thinking and being.

                                                                                                               5 These issues will be discussed further in chapter 3.

 

 

Now, if we take seriously Tonkenwise’s prompt, would it be possible to

redesign “our ways of thinking and being”? What exactly would this

‘necessarily ontological’ project involve?

3 IDENTITY+FASHION+CONSUMERISM=WASTE

Everything belongs to design, everything springs from it, whether it says so or not: the body

is designed, sexuality is designed, political, social, human relations are designed, just as are

needs and aspirations.

Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 1981

During the nineteenth century, American economist and sociologist Thorstein

Veblen wrote that identity (a desired image) could be sought out and to a

certain extent, it could be achieved through consumer goods. Building from

Veblen, sociologist Colin Campbell (2002) suggests that consumption itself

can provide the meaning and identity that modern humans crave, and that it

is largely through this activity that individuals discover who they are, as well as

succeed in combating their sense of ontological6 insecurity. But for Tony Fry

(2011), it is critical to examine the ways in which this ontological positioning

contributes to ‘world-forming’; in that specific ontological practices have

inscribed particular modes of being. Fry’s point is that certain modes of being

bring about specific kinds of societies. Using Fry’s argument that certain

kinds of ‘being’ (in this case, Veblen and Campbell’s consumer-being) design

certain kinds of societies, what kind of society, what kind of world and

importantly, what kind of ideology has been formed?

Nearly a century after Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, Barbara

Kruger visualized our current consumerist culture with her infamous artwork “I

Shop Therefore I Am”. Highlighting the persistent subjective connection

between identity and consumerism, Kruger’s work maintains: we are what we

buy.

                                                                                                               6 Dealing with the nature of being. Oxford Dictionaries. Available at http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/ontology?q=ontological#ontology__6

 

 

3.1 Barbara Kruger, “I Shop Therefore I Am”, 1987

For Veblen, this form of identity construction – centred on consumer goods

and concerned with reputability and decency - also assigns value to our

capacity to waste time and goods. And since those with less economic

mobility aspire to the patterns of consumption of the economically mobile,

socially accepted values, ideas and standards about consumerism and waste

are further perpetuated. Implicit in this project of identity, class, value,

reputation, and waste-ability are work and labour. Not that work brings

fulfilment in a consumer-centred culture; material items do. Work is simply

the means to get the goods, to get at fulfilment (Leach, 1993). Furthermore,

contemporary consumer culture values quantity before quality, therefore,

more goods for the least money is best. A perfect example of this

phenomenon is fast fashion. A business model initiated by Zara-Inditex in the

late 1990s (Dopico and Crofton, 2007), over time, this new standard

 

 

3.2 Queue outside H & M in Singapore. The caption reads: “It’s not a queue for a cancer cure, it’s just H&M.”

quickened the pace of production output. Traditionally, fashion labels

produced two main collections a year; but in the current fashion market,

companies are expected to offer up to 18 collections a year (Ethical Fashion

Forum, 2010). This new system, now at critical mass, has created various

pressures. One of them being that clothing is disposed of more often and at

a higher rate than ever before. What are the drivers of such a system? And

can this system of output, expectation, and consumption be sustained?

4 ON DISTANCE and REALNESS

…seeing a real garment even under privileged conditions of presentation, cannot exhaust

its reality, still less its structure; we never see more than part of a garment, a personal and

circumstantial usage, a particular way of wearing it; in order to analyze the real garment in

systematic terms, i.e., in terms sufficiently formal to account for all analogous garments, we

should no doubt have to work our way back to the actions which governed its manufacture.

Roland Barthes, from The Fashion System, 1983

 

 

4.1 Realm of the Real Garment: Sewing factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh 2010

Looking again to Debord’s notion of the spectacle (for example, fashion

advertising and other forms of visual communication), we can see how social

values - cultivated through media and enacted in cultural practice - have

shaped us to not consider aspects involved in the production and other

fundamental aspects of our clothing. Because we never encounter what

literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes explains as the ‘real garment’

(referenced above), we are distanced from the various processes, people and

places connected with the production of clothing.

4.2 Realm of Representation: Lanvin for H & M, 2010

 

 

Instead, what we are familiar with is the garment in the realm of

representation. That is to say, little attention is given to the existential arena

wherein matters of production such as the livelihood of garment workers or

environmental implications could be deliberated.

4.3 Shoppers scuffle during launch of Viktor & Rolf for H & M

To consider such gloomy matters would be to offset capitalism, a system that

denies its own complexities. Indeed, capitalism and fashion thrive on the

disjunction between consumption and production. For such miserable and

dismal concerns, perhaps it might be fruitful to view the way in which Julia

Kristeva examines ‘the real’7 in relationship to the abject.8

                                                                                                               7 ‘The real’ here is drawing from psychoanalytical language used by Jacques Lacan. ‘The real’, according to Lacan erupts whenever we are made to acknowledge the materiality of existence. ‘The real’ is perceived as traumatic as it threatens our sense of “reality”. From Dino Felluga (2011), “Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject” 8 Abject is viewed as: The cast off; the taboo; the unclean; filth The excrescence: mucus, blood (especially menstrual), nails, urine, excrement The uncanny; the corpse The monstrous mother; the alien A psychoanalytic and aesthetic theory expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. From Ian McCormick’s BlogSpot: “A Monster Observatory”.

 

 

5 FASHION NOVELTY -> ABJECTION -> VALUE

To each ego its object, to each superego its abject.

Julia Kristeva

Besides the territories associated with production and consumption, there is

the jurisdiction of the afterlife of wearable things, not a popular topic of

discussion. When it comes to the post-consumer realm, as the saying goes:

out-of-sight, out-of-mind 9 . Barring another form of retail shopping (e.g.

charity shops, boot sales, eBay, etc.), what happens to clothing after it has

been discarded or donated is uncommon knowledge.10

I observed this collective ignorance while interviewing people in New York

City for a documentary I produced in 2011. In fact, many people assume that

homeless and/or other people in need will (somehow) receive it; while other

interviewees incorrectly believe that clothing is biodegradable.11

If the dynamic and active lifecycle of clothing happens primarily during the

time when it is worn - serving the various purposes of each individual wearer -

could the stage when clothing is considered waste be seen as the realm of

the dead or the realm of the abject?

Viewing the abject as an eruption of ‘the real’ in our lives, Kristeva asserts

that such a response is associated with our rejection of death’s insistent

materiality (McCormick, 2013). From this theoretical basis, I contend that

clothing detritus belongs to the realm of the dead, the site of abjection.

                                                                                                               9 Out of sight, out of mind is a saying to emphasize that when something or someone cannot be seen , it is easy to forget it or them. From http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/out-of-sight-out-of-mind. 10 An interesting project looking more closely at this global disconnection is Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Trash|Track. http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/index.php?id=1 11 Although the majority of clothing is not biodegradable, Jana Hawley advises that it is nearly 100% recyclable (2006).

 

 

5.1 Textile landfill near Damascus, Syria

One day a week, I work as a sorter in the warehouse of Textile Recycling and

International Development (TRAID). Through this first-hand ‘anthropological’

experience, all of my senses are crudely aware of how hankered after, indeed

how intensely intimate, and well-loved clothing had once been to its previous

wearers. In this warehouse and others like it around the world, neglected and

discarded things approaching their ‘death’ - these abjections of our

consumerist society - are considered offensive, if not taboo.

Cast away, the hope is these objects will not be seen again. And they are

handled much like the way in which western societies deal with death.

Wearing a dust mask, protective glasses and latex gloves, I stand on a long

platform with other sorters, where a machine spews mounds of discarded

clothing and textile onto a conveyor belt. In this constant motion, I am

expected to recognize and capture value, evaluate quality, and finally,

categorize body-less corpses and lifeless things that once served a purpose.

 

 

5.2 TRAID textiles sorting warehouse, Wembley, London, 2014

Resulting from my discerning labour, these wasted objects may be re-sold in

TRAID’s London-based charity shops; they might be reclaimed for TRAID’s

various creative outreach projects; some of the waste will be rejected for

retail but can be sold wholesale to overseas vendors; while other refuse will

be sold and shredded into car seat stuffing, wiping cloths, or insulation. The

worst of it is tossed into a ‘skip’. It will end up in the landfill.

Not only for TRAID’s objective “to stop clothes from being thrown away” and

keeping them in the realm of use, I have my own agenda for reclamation.

Conceptually, Marshall MacLuhan (1970) explains it best. He wrote about the

act of retrieval and how this act transforms the cliché into the archetype:

The archetype is a retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved cliché

– an old cliché retrieved by a new cliché. Since a cliché is a unit extension of man, an

archetype is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment…The cliché is

incompatible with other clichés, but the archetype is extremely cohesive; other archetypes’

residues adhere to it. When we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype, we

unconsciously retrieve others, and the retrieval recurs in infinite regress.

In the case of the abject (the object retrieved from the realm of the dead),

new meaning, new value is assigned, operating in different ways. I am not

interested in dismissing or erasing the abject qualities of my findings; instead

 

 

I am focused on transformative re-signification. From this existential

standpoint and building from critical concepts put forth by Debord, Barthes,

Veblen and others, my own practice is concerned with re-evaluating our

disconnected worldview, and our ways of being and doing, self-reflectively

and with a view to have a wider impact.

One aspect of my research process speaks to the way in which socially

engaged activities might serve as catalysts to stimulate critical thinking.

Through the practical activity of mending (engaging with a real problem to

be resolved) and involving the tools and applications of clothes making, my

emphasis is to help participants gain an understanding about what previously

seemed mystical. In this way, the overall aim of my social practice is to

encourage confidence in the handling of everyday intimate objects, namely

clothes.

5.3 Sweater repair. Sewing & Mending: An Interactive Workshop, London 2014

Once this practical understanding happens in the mind of the participant, the

gaps between of the levels of engagement with clothing decreases. And for

Debord, “To effectively destroy the society of the spectacle (an ideological

illusion), what is needed is [wo]men putting a practical force into action”

(1983). With these kinds of interventions, I want to challenge the participant

to reconsider social and cultural values and systems. In particular, the values

and systems shaping the ways in which we engage with clothing.

 

 

5.4 Sewing & Mending: An Interactive Workshop, London 2014

Building on these ideas in the studio, I am interested in cultivating an

inverted or reverse process of knowledge about discarded textiles.12 I am

investigating the various means by which deconstruction and manipulation

processes can facilitate the transformation of garments and other textile

waste. My motivation in this research is to gain material knowledge, and

finally to realize the possibilities of these materials. No longer considered

desirable or wearable objects, I want to know: what is required to render the

object back to its material state? Once returned to the realm of possibilities,

what can the material do and what are its limitations? Besides their obvious

material use, what other possibilities could be realized through the retrieval

of textiles and clothing detritus?

                                                                                                               12 I acquire these materials (and my own wardrobe) from various sources. 1) I organize clothing donation and swap events at my residential accommodations; 2) Others come from the “Karma Shelf”, a corner of my accommodations’ laundry room. It is a location where members of the residence can place unwanted items or take items they need; 3) I work at TRAID’s textiles sorting facility in Wembley. TRAID (Textile Recycling for Aid and International Development) is a charity “working to stop clothes from being thrown away.” TRAID’s warehouse where I work sorts through its textile banks that are placed in various London municipalities. My job is to retrieve, evaluate, and categorize items to be sold in TRAID’s charity shops; 4) I also find items through encounters on the street, and in or near trash receptacles.

 

 

5.5 Disassembly process, 2013.

Perhaps Yamamoto was not speaking on objects being salvaged from textile

wastelands when he asserted that dirty, stained, withered, broken things are

beautiful. But I certainly can recognize the potential of their abject qualities.

Similarly for Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui, acknowledging and expressing the

latent significance of aluminum bottle caps. With these humble materials,

Anatsui and his team transform the abject, making desirable sculptural forms.

But unlike Christian Boltanski, who also uses wasted clothing in his practice

and aims to comment on the presence and absence of people, and memory,

I am concerned more with McLuhan’s notion of retrieving clichés and

presenting them as archetypes. Indeed, with Anatsui’s tapestry-like

 

 

5.6 El Anatsui, “Black Block”

works constructed from the wasted liquor bottles, we are faced with issues

concerning consumption, consumerism, global trade, colonialism, history and

local cultural dynamics. For me, Anatsui’s work demonstrates how clichés

retrieved and composed can be transformed into archetypal material for

consideration, reflection and dialogue.

6 TOWARD OTHER WAYS OF THINKING BEING AND DOING

Looking critically at the notion of sustainability in relationship to fashion, I

have thus far discussed the problems. And we know them well. But it should

not be taken for granted that the industry at large has made efforts to move

toward sustainability. Indeed, we have seen a shift of sorts: from inventive

design approaches; ethical sourcing; fair trade cooperatives; energy saving

techniques to reimagine factory setups; the re-vamping of retail operations;

not to mention remarkable technological developments; but not without the

problems of green washing; ever-increasing consumerism; the growth of the

textile waste stream; an array of environmental issues; and an astonishing rise

in garment factory deaths. Marketed as eco-, sustainable-, green-, slow-, and

 

 

ethical design, it is currently the hot topic (and secret party pooper) of

fashion. With current ‘solutions’ based on market-oriented growth and the

continued flourishing of consumerism (which in turn, endures the troubling

aspects of fashion business), how will this trendy approach to sustainability

propose different outcomes?

Certainly, the efforts of pioneers working to institutionalize change within

academia, design, and research must be acknowledged. But I must go back

to my original argument: it is at the ideological level where the enactment of

sustainability must be directed. I am not so convinced about how

sustainability is being marketed (essentially the message is: consume

sustainability here!). Nor do I buy into (better) material-based approaches to

design but doing business-as-usual-model. At the same time, I have

witnessed and experienced burgeoning alternative value systems. I have seen

it manifesting in the forms of sharing and swapping economies (Barclays’ bike

scheme, Netflix, Wikipedia); collective consumption (zip car or airbnb), and

de-materialized approaches to living (for example Caroline Woolard’s Our

Goods13 and Trade School projects) and different ways of collective being. It

is worth noting that in such economies, soft values such as: integrity and

transparency are prominent.

6.1 Our Goods logo, 2010

                                                                                                               13 www.ourgoods.org is a barter network for the creative community; www.tradeschool.org is a self-organized school that runs on barter.

 

 

Not only through my personal experience and some of the abovementioned

examples, but for author and trend caster James Wallman, there is a shift

happening from materialism toward experientialism. In a landscape being

shaped by social media, where our cultural capital and status rely more on

what we’re doing and where we’ve been rather than what we have or what we

buy, for Wallman, experientialism is the key cultural trend of the 21st century.

He states: “Instead of looking for status, happiness, identity, and meaning in

material things in the future we’ll be finding those things in experiences

instead.” Whether by choice, policy or environmental necessity - as seen in

Beijing in early 2014, when 36 companies were forced to suspend production,

and another 75 cut output to curb emissions to make the air more breathable

(Wall Street Journal, China Realtime, 2014) – we are confronting what Tony

Fry calls an unavoidable choice: support the status quo (as I laid out above) or

choose a path of change.

CONCLUSION

For me, the dilemmas associated with fast fashion, waste, identity,

consumerism, and capitalism cannot be tackled without a significant shift in

ideology. As a systemic consideration, obviously it is something that must

happen over time. Indeed, there are no hard and fast or quick and dirty

solutions. In line with Yamamoto’s thinking, I believe “artists [and designers

have the potential to] make people think, [and] make people doubt what’s

going on.” The optimistic side of this is that many artists and designers have

aligned their practices with political or philosophical aims, environmental or

social justice-oriented ethos, out of necessity, or a combination of sorts (for

example, the mutual support networks established by Woolard and her

collaborators). Such practitioners have started projects to support different

ways of being and doing and the turn toward ‘experientialism’.

Can the cultivation of these practices, ones that propose new values and

alternative economies impact a cultural shift as we saw happen with the

colour black in the eighteenth century? Looking one final time to the colour

black and its history of changed meanings and cultural significance, perhaps

fashion too might take a turn.

 

 

Reflecting on his extensive study of the colour black, I think French historian Pastoreau’s explanation about the meaning of colour could also be applied to the way in which fashion, consumerism, and waste might be considered. [Fashion] is defined first of all as a social phenomenon. It is the society that “makes” [fashion], that gives it its definitions and meanings, that constructs its codes and values, that organizes its customs and determines its stakes. (2009) If we look at fashion (and its various social implications) as such, we come back to ideology. And with this, I conclude that a sustainable fashion system might be possible. But only one that is produced socially.