ABSTRACT
In order to bring about change, sustainability values and experiences have to be real to people. Yet we know very little about people’s everyday encounters with fashion and sustainability. For instance, how does it feel to wear a garment that connects us with others? What is our understanding of engaging with nature through the clothes we wear? Just as each of these personal experiences is different, so is each person experiencing them. Yet most of our experience of fashion has no space for this heterogeneity: instead what we face is a limited set of fashion encounters, reproduced in Paris, London, New York or Tokyo. This is but one of many flashpoints that signal the profound nature of the sustainability challenge for the fashion sector. This is a challenge that requires us to transform not only fashion products and manufacturing processes but also fashion’s context, its rules and goals, business models and methods of promotion. In this chapter I explore the interconnections between real, live experiences of sustainability in fashion and what they suggest about the shape and structure of the industry that creates the fashion and clothes that we wear. My interest is in amassing a collection of ideas that improve people’s experience of fashion qualitatively without necessarily growing the industry in quantitative scale. Together these ideas offer a tentative glimpse of a new prosperity in fashion that exists outside the predominant economic and business model of growth that is so closely associated with fashion today.
