Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion

Routledge International Handbooks

by Kate Fletcher (Editor), Mathilda Tham (Editor)

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.

Genres: Fashion

324 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Kate Fletcher is Professor of Sustainability, Design, Fashion at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK.

Reviews

[sabryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thorough and helpful outline of the fashion cycle.