Fashion is Not the Problem: The Industry Needs to Change Article #2
By Lynda Grose | Chair and associate professor of Fashion Design | California College of the Arts
My article Fashion is Not the Problem: The Industry Needs to Change began with a simple question: “How were my clothes made?” It explored the environmental and human cost of the current garment industry practices and the need for sustainable initiatives.
Here, I’d like to explore a much less frequently considered question: “How are my clothes used?”
Typically, sustainability is discussed as a problem of fiber procurement, processing, and material waste. However, when we start acknowledging fashion’s deep social and cultural importance (i.e. its use), we start to unfreeze a mode of thinking that has framed sustainability in the fashion industry for the past 25 years and open up potential for imagining completely new fashion systems and experiences.
At California College of the Arts, we have taught fashion and sustainability classes since 1999. Over this time, our understanding of sustainability has matured, expanded, and deepened beyond the impacts found in the life cycle of clothing to include extended use by the wearer and patterns of consumption. This line of inquiry is possible in an academic environment, where the business imperative of selling more units is shed and broader societal and cultural measures can be considered.
CCA graduating senior Miho Kobayashi, for example, was a finalist in both Joe’s Blackbook and CFDA/Liz Claiborne competitions in 2017. In these projects, Kobayashi re-imagines ready-to-wear apparel and creates adaptable garments to be worn three or four different ways for a fully diversified fashion experience for the wearer. She works with 100 percent cotton content linked to a take-back system provided by Evrnu — a company that has technology to dissolve post-consumer cotton garments into a viscous liquid and extrude them into a completely new fiber. Kobayashi’s concept demonstrates a fashion system where the consumer becomes not only the wearer, but also a raw material supplier. Kobayashi’s thesis collection extends into experimental pieces that are constructed to be open ended, allowing the wearer to choose a wide array of options for zipping, buttoning and draping the garment. Here, the wearer also becomes a collaborator, sharing the same creative space as the designer.
Kim Pham, a rising senior at CCA, bends her lessons from tailoring classes taught by instructor Cris Applegate to a new bespoke-for-the-masses concept using traditional Savile Row tailoring formulas. Using just a few parameters — height, chest, arm, and leg length — an easily replicable calculation makes the, usually exclusive, experience with a tailor accessible to everyday people. We all feel the joy and deep satisfaction of wearing a well-crafted product that perfectly suits our mood and our measurement. Indeed, studies show that garments that fit and feel good on an individual’s body create a feeling of confidence and well-being, leading to stronger emotional ties to the product and a tendency to keep the item for longer. This stands in stark contrast to the typical industrialized sizing and ubiquitous aesthetic of garments currently offered by the fashion industry, where the lack of product meaning ultimately feeds into the culture of disposability. What makes Pham’s concept truly unique is its ability to occupy a middle ground between ready-to-wear and one-of-a-kind designs; the wearer-centric-driven inspiration results in a product worth keeping.
These shifts in sustainable design shed the binary choice normally proposed by larger brands: to buy (a more ecologically responsible item) or not to buy (a less ecologically responsible item). This false dichotomy, presented by a system in which current brands operate, is utterly dependent upon selling more stuff.
Yet, we know full well that fashion is much more than shopping! All of us own a long-kept garment that holds a memory of a loved one or cherish something that was passed down to us. Fashion, as we know, is a deeply personal means of self-expression. Clothes express identities and speak to particular cultural moments. Fashion is a way of identifying with our chosen social groups and is an ever-changing human expression.
My own fashion and sustainability design practice has evolved across private, non-profit, and educational sectors. I aim to build bridges, facilitate conversations and translate theoretical ideas into practical expressions. All of my projects, whether conducted with large brands or as experimental projects in-studio, have a dual purpose — to further understanding of sustainability and to speed its uptake into creative practice.
My long-term scrutiny of cotton in California has profoundly informed my philosophy on fashion design and sustainability. I now emphasize the use cotton more that the details of cotton cultivation. For more than 20 years, I have taken brands on California cotton farm tours run by the Sustainable Cotton Project. Over this time, I’ve come to understand the macroeconomics that come to bear on family farmers and the land, in which success is measured in the number of fiber yielded per acre. And in the fashion industry, success is measured by the number of units sold per design. The continuous success of both family farmer and fashion industry depend on producing, yielding, and selling more. The logic and values of the industrialized farming and fashion systems are the same. These values narrow options for the farmer, for the designer and, ultimately, the wearer’s fashion experience. There’s a connection between the highly productive, yet impoverished, landscapes in rural California and the impoverished aesthetic of commoditized clothing design.
I’ve observed the long-term decline of virgin cotton cultivation in California, due to more economically competitive crops such as almonds. Globally, we can anticipate further declines for cotton in part due to droughts and floods related to the effects of climate change. Over the long term, cotton is likely to become a highly coveted fiber and the extended use and re-use of cotton a future necessity.
For my most recent research, I am collaborating with Vibeke Riisberg of Design School Kolding and Timo Rissanen of Parsons School of Design to develop garments that evolve over time. Design-to-lie-flat patterning for dress shirts explores new seaming and construction developed to accommodate not just one-time use, but extended use and reuse through temporal surface treatments such as digital printing. In this proposal, designers develop prints and colors to be layered in increasingly complex effects over time. Wearers can choose to keep the garment as is, or return to receive the service of added patterns. Both are engaged in a temporally creative and evolving relationship with each other and with the garment.
The question “How and for how long are my clothes used?” needs to be at the center of sustainability conversation and future processes. Such wearer-centric concepts, as discussed here, consider the wearer’s experience and relationship with their clothing as integral to design for sustainability. These design-led, wearer-centered ideas broaden, deepen and amplify our understanding of sustainability far beyond the dominant supply chain that impact narratives supplied by large companies. Ultimately, these concepts also broaden our understanding of what fashion can be. They suggest new business models in a new fashion system that slows the flow of materials through the industry by engaging the wearer in the cultural and societal dimensions of fashion.
As I reflect on the logical line of inquiry that sincere efforts in fashion and sustainability demand, it’s clear that the real work for fashion design educators lies in allowing the next generation of fashion designers time and space to reclaim their place as true creatives in fashion practice: to imagine and prototype new forms for an industry they want to be part of — and that the world can sustain.
Additional resources:
Miho Kobayashi website: https://www.kobami.me/
Sustainable Lifestyles, O2 (1993): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu7cWhxfPdM&feature=youtu.be