Craft of Use: Post-Growth Fashion

by Kate Fletcher

This book explores the craft of use, the cultivated, ordinary and ingenious ideas and practices that promote satisfying and resourceful use of garments, presenting them as an alternative, dynamic, experiential frame with which to articulate and foster sustainability in the fashion sector.

Here Kate Fletcher provides a broad imagining of sustainability in fashion that gives attention to tending and wearing garments, and favours their use as much as their creation. She offers a diversified view of fashion beyond the market and the market's purpose and reveals fashion provision and expression in a world not dependent on continuous consumption.

Framing design and use as a single whole, the book uncovers a more contingent and time-dependent role for design in sustainability, recognising that garments, while sold as a product, are lived as a process. Drawing from stories and portrait photography that document the ways in which members of the public from across three continents use their clothes, and the work of seven international design teams seeking to amplify these use practices, "Craft of Use" presents a changed social narrative for fashion, borne out of ideas of satisfaction and interdependence, of action, knowledge and human agency, that glimpses fashion post-growth."

Genres: Fashion, Nonfiction, Sustainability

304 pages, Hardcover

First published April 13, 2016

About the author

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

Reviews

[Zuzana Trtolová · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most influential books in my life. So many principles on use of clothing that I 'm using already, but never believed to find them written down in a book like this. Clothing is not just a piece of textile that we put on every day and will throw away eventually. It can be a tool of change of much larger scale than most of us imagine. It can be the bearer of memories, way to connect to your loved ones, it is an living organism. Recommended reading for those who love fashion, but 'love' in more "long-term relationship" way :)

[Mik · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important and timely project! I enjoyed the photoessays more than the academic essays but the whole book was wonderful.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for every single person involved in the fashion industry

[Trenchologist · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm passionate about ecological concerns; mindfulness, conspicuous consumption, reuse recycle. This book piqued my fancy because it covers sustainability in the fashion industry -- largely ignored -- and how individuals embrace their own methods once garments come into their sole ownership.

Thoughtful, with great citations (the bibliography would make a great reading list), sometimes poetic prose. Pop culturally one could think it mimics HONY's approach to documenting people's stories, in brief. It's that, but much more than that.

Ways to build sustainability in use -- the craft of use -- are introduced, explored, recommended. It's interesting and compelling. Who designs clothing? and then sells it? and what are their goals for end use? Largely: short life span, following trends, and affordability over materialist concerns (materialism being a positive, for taking into account and honoring craftsmanship and quality and passing that from maker to consumer in mindful ways). So if/then, how to change the paradigm of fast fashion and easily disposable goods chasing trends and sell-sell-sell?

The numerous, myriad personalities and their various clothing stories are quirky, vulnerable, delightful, and are worth browsing on their own.

[S · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 kinda boring

[Mills College Library]

746.92 F613 2016