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Routledge International Handbooks
Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion
The clothing industry employs 25 million people globally contributing to many livelihoods and the prosperity of communities, to women’s independence, and the establishment of significant infrastructures in poorer countries. Yet the fashion industry is also a significant contributor to the degradation of natural systems, with the associated environmental footprint of clothing high in comparison with other products.
Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion recognizes the complexity of aligning fashion with sustainability. It explores fashion and sustainability at the levels of products, processes, and paradigms and takes a truly multi-disciplinary approach to critically question and suggest creative responses to issues of:
• Fashion in a post-growth society
• Fashion, diversity and equity
• Fashion, fluidity and balance across natural, social and economic systems
This handbook is a unique resource for a wide range of scholars and students in the social sciences, arts and humanities interested in sustainability and fashion.
Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion recognizes the complexity of aligning fashion with sustainability. It explores fashion and sustainability at the levels of products, processes, and paradigms and takes a truly multi-disciplinary approach to critically question and suggest creative responses to issues of:
• Fashion in a post-growth society
• Fashion, diversity and equity
• Fashion, fluidity and balance across natural, social and economic systems
This handbook is a unique resource for a wide range of scholars and students in the social sciences, arts and humanities interested in sustainability and fashion.
- GenresFashion
324 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
2 people are currently reading
95 people want to read
About the author
Kate Fletcher
13 books19 followersKate Fletcher is Professor of Sustainability, Design, Fashion at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 2, 2021
1 – Kate Fletcher, “Other Fashion Systems” pp.15-24
p.18 – Fashion is consumption – In the collective cultural consciousness, fashion is consumption, materialism, commercialization and marketing. It is buying high street and high end. It is watching, browsing, purchasing. Fashion comes to be anything that emerges from a certain consumerist machine. This is, somewhat predictably, also the view of fashion from many within the sustainability lobby, where there persists a reluctance to imagine fashion outside a commercial context that trades on novelty and status anxiety for economic return.
Consumerist fashion is locked into a cycle of self-justification, creating the very conditions by which it becomes both dominant and credible. Consumers see an ever more rapid cycle of new products introduced in stores (up to twelve seasons per year and moving towards a strategy of continuous replenishment), because retailers compete on novelty.
Consumers grow their reliance on fashion that can be made into and traded as a commodity, because the consumer society fails to value activities that cannot be marketed. In the consumer society, ideas about fashion are organized around commerce and consumerism, and most of those involved – that is, those of us who are creating fashion or wearing it – end up becoming depending on them. In the consumer culture in which we live, we communicate through the social language of position and status determined by what we buy, and we capitulate to and reinforce the commercial and ideological pressure of the market as the route through which to organize our lives. In the creed of market economics, growth is essential in order to maintain stability of the economy, and, as such, ideas of “progress” have become tied to a societal narrative of growth through buying more material goods, many of them shaped in garment form.
The fashion industry itself has evolved under this narrative. The dynamics of the sector, its business models and manufacturing approaches have been reshaped by tenets of growth, globalization and “more and cheaper.”
p.18 – Fashion is consumption – In the collective cultural consciousness, fashion is consumption, materialism, commercialization and marketing. It is buying high street and high end. It is watching, browsing, purchasing. Fashion comes to be anything that emerges from a certain consumerist machine. This is, somewhat predictably, also the view of fashion from many within the sustainability lobby, where there persists a reluctance to imagine fashion outside a commercial context that trades on novelty and status anxiety for economic return.
Consumerist fashion is locked into a cycle of self-justification, creating the very conditions by which it becomes both dominant and credible. Consumers see an ever more rapid cycle of new products introduced in stores (up to twelve seasons per year and moving towards a strategy of continuous replenishment), because retailers compete on novelty.
Consumers grow their reliance on fashion that can be made into and traded as a commodity, because the consumer society fails to value activities that cannot be marketed. In the consumer society, ideas about fashion are organized around commerce and consumerism, and most of those involved – that is, those of us who are creating fashion or wearing it – end up becoming depending on them. In the consumer culture in which we live, we communicate through the social language of position and status determined by what we buy, and we capitulate to and reinforce the commercial and ideological pressure of the market as the route through which to organize our lives. In the creed of market economics, growth is essential in order to maintain stability of the economy, and, as such, ideas of “progress” have become tied to a societal narrative of growth through buying more material goods, many of them shaped in garment form.
The fashion industry itself has evolved under this narrative. The dynamics of the sector, its business models and manufacturing approaches have been reshaped by tenets of growth, globalization and “more and cheaper.”
July 29, 2023
In this book of essays by Fletcher and Tham, sustainability and fashion are explored in all their facets: sociologically, politically, economically, scientifically; even spiritually.
Through the breadth of their knowledge and experience, Fletcher and her collaborators unravel sustainability’s current challenges and introduce the reader to a plethora of potential solutions/futures through in-depth essays, research, and projects.
This book not only pushes the reader to implement practices of sustainability into their daily routine, but also critically analyze the entire system of consumerism and consumption that has poisoned our relationship with our planet and our necessities.
Even in 2023, many of the areas explored by Fletcher and her co-authors are still ripe for further development: The Wardrobe Method, Sustainability and Gender, Fashion as a Derided Form of Design, Ethics of Biomimicry in Fashion, etc. With this in mind (and the provided list of suggested further research topics located at the end of the textbook) I think many readers like myself feel guided to the doors of what Holroyd calls ‘The Fashion Commons’: an invisible area of globalized clothing commodity and making wherein the consumer relates passively, and thus, relents to the market/rules/laws/material of any and all goods. Powerless in the world of independence through craft, and led astray through the pseudo-democratic process of consumption-as-identity.
While I did feel Part 3 was disappointing, with the coverage by fashion experts lacking in the same real-world application, call for openness, and critical analyses of the fashion industry as the other experts in Part 2; overall I was left a a sense of hope, deeper understanding, and confidence to tackle sustainability.
Through the breadth of their knowledge and experience, Fletcher and her collaborators unravel sustainability’s current challenges and introduce the reader to a plethora of potential solutions/futures through in-depth essays, research, and projects.
This book not only pushes the reader to implement practices of sustainability into their daily routine, but also critically analyze the entire system of consumerism and consumption that has poisoned our relationship with our planet and our necessities.
Even in 2023, many of the areas explored by Fletcher and her co-authors are still ripe for further development: The Wardrobe Method, Sustainability and Gender, Fashion as a Derided Form of Design, Ethics of Biomimicry in Fashion, etc. With this in mind (and the provided list of suggested further research topics located at the end of the textbook) I think many readers like myself feel guided to the doors of what Holroyd calls ‘The Fashion Commons’: an invisible area of globalized clothing commodity and making wherein the consumer relates passively, and thus, relents to the market/rules/laws/material of any and all goods. Powerless in the world of independence through craft, and led astray through the pseudo-democratic process of consumption-as-identity.
While I did feel Part 3 was disappointing, with the coverage by fashion experts lacking in the same real-world application, call for openness, and critical analyses of the fashion industry as the other experts in Part 2; overall I was left a a sense of hope, deeper understanding, and confidence to tackle sustainability.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 24, 2021
Very thorough and helpful outline of the fashion cycle.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews