Sustainability is Sexy: Design Intelligence; Fashion

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by Ingrid Mida

Design Intelligence; Fashion New York

Fashion acts as a mirror of society, which is what art used to be.  It seems that fashion has supplanted art in reflecting cultural values, but has largely lacked critical reflection on its practices. At the Design Intelligence; Fashion event which took place September 18 and 19 at Parsons New School of Design in New York, questions of how intelligent design could impact the issue of sustainability were considered by  a group of 100 “influential players in fashion”, including fashion designers, academics, manufacturers, trade council reps,  and media. On the first day, participants were divided into small groups of five to six people to talk through some of the issues.  On the second day, a series of lectures featuring such notable speakers such as Joel Towers, Hazel Clark, Otto  von Busch, Sarah Scaturro, Gudrun Sjoden, Rebecca Earley offered their perspectives on the issue.  This post summarizes my thoughts after the event.

At my table, the question posed to the group was: Emotions make us buy, whilst feelings make us keep. How do we create fashion that has a chance not only to connect emotionally, and create attachment, but also to retain it?

This question made me think of my work as Collection Co-ordinator of  the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection. Each garment is imbued with the memory of its wearer, in the imprints of their body, in the stains and signs of wear in the textile and in the stories sometimes noted in the records and more often untold but still embedded in the folds. Garments offered for donation to a collection typically are ones that hold a special memory to the owner. They might have hung at the back of a closet for years before they are offered for donation.

You only need to ever handle an item of couture once to know that such items demonstrate enduring quality. Think of the Hermes Kelly bag or a Chanel jacket. These are not items that get tossed in the bin after a season, because they are classics, and made to endure. Buying such a thing represents an investment and involves a ceremony of purchase. In the past, there was also a deeper level of involvement in the making of a garment. Whether it was a visit to a couture house or a local tailor, acquiring a garment was a thoughtful process that had an element of ceremony, imbuing the piece with emotion and memory.

In contemporary society, consumers are divorced from the production process. Clothes have become commodities and the purchase of a garment can be an impulsive act.  Getting something new for a single event is not uncommon, and that piece might only be worn once, after which it might be discarded and end up in a landfill. Fast fashion and the media fuel desire for the latest item and the result is long-term environmental damage from toxic production processes and post-consumer textile waste. It is estimated that over 21 billion pounds of post-consumer textile waste gets dumped into US landfills each year (Eric Stubin, Chariman Council for Textile Recycling). If some of that could be diverted for reuse and up-cycling, this could have an enormous impact.

The idea of attachment and emotional connection to a garment encourages the wearer to retain that garment and to wear it beyond a fashion cycle. Engaging in thoughtful design is part of the solution, but is only part of the story. People need to make more thoughtful purchases and consider such options such as resale or swaps and the remaking or recycling of the garment. Some companies have already implemented such practices, with labels offering recycling information and facilitating sharing among communities of wearers. Hazel Clark referenced the slow food movement which equates closer ties to the producer and sensorial engagement with the product as a possible model for sustainable fashion.

But, there is no single prescription to the problem, because our economic model is driven by consumption. Fashion has become linked to entertainment, and people want to buy more than they need in order to fit in, to create an emotional lift, and/or to satisfy aspirational motives. The fashionable image, hyped by the media, has created an insatiable cycle of desire for change.

To date, sustainability has largely been presented in the media as a fringe issue when it actually is an issue that affects us all. The question is: can we really afford cheap things? The cost of an item at the register actually represents a very small piece of the “real” cost if the costs of disposal as well as the costs of human rights violations and environmental damage were factored into the price tag.

What is needed is a fundamental shift of values so that sustainability becomes a shared paradigm. This might seem like an unattainable goal, but there is a precedent. Smoking used to be cool, but over time, government policy, education and social censure have redefined smoking behavior. For a similar thing to happen with sustainability, there must be a fundamental shift in values. Our purchases must be considered in terms of their true costs to the community and to society as a whole. Such a paradigm shift requires collaboration between designers, producers, consumers, media, educators, and government. If I drew a visual map, this would take the form of a spider web with the values of sustainability at the core, and webs linking all the players in a shared goal to encourage thoughtful participation in the acts of producing and consuming fashion.

Sustainable fashion can embrace a cool and sexy vibe, but requires thoughtful and intelligent choices on the part of both the designer and the consumer.  Sweden seems to be on the forefront of this issue by sponsoring this Design Boost event and the rest of the world should take note. Government policy can encourage and support our actions and education can help change value systems, but in the end, we each make choices and by making small steps towards better choices, we are all better off.

Some of the choices we can each make include:

1. Making more thoughtful purchases, looking for lasting quality and when possible, embracing designers who use sustainable practices. Some designers to consider include: Gudrun Sjoden www.gudrunsjoden.com, Preloved www.preloved.ca, and bodkinbrooklyn www.bodkinbrooklyn.com.

2. Washing clothes less often, using less detergent and hanging to dry when possible.

3. Repairing and remaking clothes. Sarah Scaturro of the Costume Institute of the Met, suggested  fashion hacking as a way to "recreate" a designer piece.

4. Recycling all clothing, footwear and textiles, either through resale or donation to charities that support recycling initiatives (such as Goodwill). Do not throw clothing items into the garbage, even if they are torn or stained. Visit www.weardonaterecycle.org for more information on recycling your clothing.

During the course of the event,  it was clear that fashion cares. One look around the room told me that embracing sustainability as a cause does not equate to frumpy and unfashionable. I think it is time to declare that sustainability is sexy.

Interview with Sass Brown: Fashion + Sustainability – Lines of Research Series

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by Mae Colburn

Sass Brown's first book, Eco Fashion, published by Laurence King Publishers in 2010.

Sass Brown likens her work to that of a fashion curator, one that looks beyond aesthetics and into the realm of ethics and ideas.  Her book, website, and blog feature designers from around the globe who unite fashion and ecology in thoughtful, innovative ways.  Brown entered this line of inquiry after years working as a designer in mainstream fashion, a background that gives her a unique perspective on the distinct qualities, and currency of ecological ideas within the fashion sector and valuable insight into the role of fashion education within the broader global information network that supports, and defines sustainable fashion today.

Mae Colburn: To begin, how do you interpret this word – sustainability?

Sass Brown: Well, sustainability has a defined meaning that you can look up in the dictionary: not depleting, not polluting, not taking away what you can’t get back.  Where it gets muddy is when you start putting it in different silos such as sustainable fashion or sustainable lifestyles – that’s where it starts to get more interpretive and where words like eco or green are much more broadly used because they have less defined meanings.

MC: I’m sure this thought process informed the title of your first book, Eco Fashion.

SB: (laughs) To some extent, yes.  I actually wanted it to be called Sustainable Fashion but my publishers fought me on that one because they felt that sustainability wasn’t a completely understood term.  Plus, my publisher is British, but [the book] was distributed in the U.S. and also translated into Italian and Spanish, so they felt eco was an easier term for people to grasp on to, and in fact it’s actually more correct than my initial title.

MC: Both your book and your website highlight the work of a wide variety of designers working in eco fashion.  How do you go about conducting your research?

SB: Well, when I first started this research years ago, one of the nicest surprises was that eco designers would give me all of the contact information for their biggest competitors, because they supported them, too.  It’s a very collaborative industry. […] People want to share because they believe in the development this area of design – and that’s dependent upon all of us understanding and knowing and sharing resources.  It’s not like the mainstream fashion industry where everybody jealously guards their contacts and knowledge.

A screen shot from Sass Brown's website.

MC: You research and write, but you also lecture and teach workshops on fashion and sustainability.  Could you elaborate on the role of information sharing within this movement, and specifically your own role in shaping this dialogue?

SB: I think information sharing is absolutely vital and that my role, or what I see as my role, is to research, share, and collaborate on that information.  Designers in the industry and students who are currently studying to graduate and move into the industry need to see concrete examples of what is being done, how it’s being done, and who is doing it.  I focus equally on fashion as I do on ecology.  I’m not interested in writing about the next beige t-shirt – whether it’s being produced ecologically, fair trade, or what.  There are enough people already doing that.  Fashion is a world of inspiration and aspiration and I think it’s incredibly valuable to inspire designers about what’s possible.  One of the best ways of doing that is showing some of the best aesthetic examples of what’s being done with sustainability, ecology, and design.

I’ve been described as a curator by several people and that’s probably more accurate than anything because I really am curating already existing content rather than developing my own; I might be rewording and rewriting and collating it in different ways, but I'm working with things that have already being done.  I think that’s actually quite a good description of what I do, especially in certain digital media like Facebook, or Twitter, or Pinterest, or StumbleUpon, or any number of other areas.  It really is about collating and collecting and disseminating.

MC: This is something I’ve thought about quite a bit – this question of how specialized knowledge about production, consumption, and so on, can be translated to a broader public in a way that seems relevant.

SB: Well, I think most of the issue is that most of the specialized information comes from activistic circles and is accessed by those who are interested, as opposed to being disseminated to everyone whether they’re interested or not.  It hasn’t gotten to a level where the average person on the street is aware of Labour Behind the Label or the Clean Clothes Campaign, or any number of other advocacy bodies who police or certify the fair trade or sustainability of our industry.  Digital media and blogs are beginning to bridge the gap, whether it’s my blog or blogs like EcoSalon or Ecouterre, which aim for a more fun, cool, interesting notion of ecology as opposed to a grassroots, hardcore, tree-hugging ecology, which I think is still very foreign to a lot of people and off-putting in a lot of cases.

MC: Do you have any last thoughts about education, information sharing, and sustainability?

SB: As I said, I think that having multiple channels is really important, whether it’s the structured educational field through curriculum and classes, or personally-motivated websites and blogs, or activistic and certification bodies who really get down to the nitty-gritty of who is doing what, how, when, and where.  I think it’s really vital that there are lots of different perspectives and different voices.  That’s the only way we can reach the broad variety of people out there.  It’s never one-size-fits-all.

Sass Brown is Acting Assistant Dean for the School of Art and Design at F.I.T. and former Director of F.I.T.’s study abroad program in Florence.

Mae Colburn is an independent textile researcher based in New York City.

Interview with Laura Sansone: Fashion + Sustainability – Lines of Research Series

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by Mae Colburn

One of Sansone's two Textile Labs, which she carts to greenmarkets in and around New York City.

Laura Sansone readily acknowledges that she comes from a “crafty background.”  She received her B.A. from the Philadelphia College of Art and her M.A. From Cranbrook Academy of Fine Art (both in Fiber).  Now, at Parsons' School for Design Strategies, she teaches spinning and dying, organizes field trips to fiber farms Upstate, and takes students to greenmarkets in and around New York City as part of her mobile Textile Lab. For Sansone, “crafty” means more than technically adept or playfully skillful; it signifies a thoughtful, soulful, tactile appreciation of material productivity.

Mae Colburn: I’d like to begin by asking you about your relationship to this word, sustainability.

Laura Sansone: When I think of sustainability, I don’t just think of environmental issues.  I think of the socioeconomic aspects of sustainability, and how to enrich communities through material production.  Also, looking at who is making the work and where the materials originate.  It’s really about designing with transparency, about realizing the interconnectedness of products and systems, and finding alternatives to commercial production.  I think one way to do that is to think about things in a decentralized way, in a way that’s more local, so that communities are more in control of production and consumption.

MC: Could you describe how you arrived at this interpretation?

LS: I started becoming interested in sustainability when I moved to the Hudson Valley in 2003.  My partner and I bought an apple orchard up there, and our neighbor, a local farmer, started farming our land and selling at greenmarkets here in the City.  So I started to realize how these resources in Upstate find their way to the City, and the importance of venues like greenmarkets.  That’s when I began thinking of ways of linking the things that I do [with fiber] to farming.

I was working with Tyvec at the time, so I was already interested in no-waste production.  It’s a recyclable polyethelene material with many applications (envelopes, hazmat suits, even high fashion back in the 1960’s in sort of a playful way).  I was sending my cutoffs back to Tyveck for recycling, and asking consumers to do the same. The products folded up into envelopes so they could be sent back to be recycled.  So I was already thinking along those lines.  Once I moved [to the Hudson Valley], I decided I had to go beyond that and try to use natural materials so that everything could be composted.  That’s when I started working with organic cottons and natural dyes and that led me to investigate local materials.  That’s when I realized that there were fiber farms right up there in the Hudson Valley, and a really active fiber community.

"Paper Wear," Sansone's line of recyclable Tyvec clothing.

Years ago, everybody had a spinning wheel in their house, and a loom.  Families and villages were really self-sufficient, and while I’m not saying that that [model] is the answer to our global problems, I do find that handcrafting is a way to bring people together.  There’s this cohesive nature to it, a real social connection that transcends age, gender, race, economic status.  It’s amazing.  That’s what I find when I take the Textile Lab out to greenmarkets.  Everybody has a story about something that their mother used to knit, or all the yarn they have in their basement, or about how they’re addicted to crocheting.  It’s an activity that reminds people of their past.  It excites people.  Maybe production can happen on a smaller scale, and maybe it can be supported by communities.  You know, there’s a certain social importance to being able to produce as a culture, and I find it problematic when a culture stops being productive in a material way.

MC: It seems like every decade experiences a resurgence of craft in some form or another.  How would you characterize what we’re experiencing today?

LS: Bauhaus was all about that.  Arts and Crafts was all about that.  There are these movements in art and design that have to do with seeing an imbalance and searching for a more assertive equilibrium among producers and the way things are made.   It does happen frequently and it’s mostly this convergence, these moments in history where craft and design and art converge; right now we’re at this point where there’s a convergence.  I call it vernacular craft.  That is, more like folk crafts, where designers are really lifting folk methods and adapting them, using them in their designs.

MC: Could you describe the Textile Lab in a bit more detail?  You’ve got a cart…

LS: Yes, a cart, and there’s a shelf that comes out in the back and a stove that sits on top.  Inside, we have all of our equipment to make dyes: pots, a scale, and a blender to make paste.

MC: What do you do about electricity?

LS: When we bring it to the park, farmer Joe (the farmer who farms on my property) brings a generator for us and sometimes we can plug it in at an outlet in the park, so we find a way.

I have another lab that I received funding for from City Atlas, a project with City University of New York and  Artist as Citizen, a smaller one.  I spent a good deal of last spring, summer and even fall taking the smaller lab to neighborhood greenmarkets all over the City.  That one has gas burners.

The Textile Lab dyepot with sunflowers (above) and stick spinning with local wool (below).

MC: There’s something I really love about your Textile Lab idea, especially in the context of education.  You’re teaching students these techniques, then taking students with you to greenmarkets around the city where they teach these techniques to the public.  It’s almost viral.

LS: This stuff happens online all the time; there are even social networking sites specifically on handcrafting, like Ravelry.  But there’s a social component to going out and making it happen in an organic context like New York City, especially a place like Union Square where people are constantly coming and going.  People stop and talk to you, trade stories, share knowledge.  We bring the Lab out to the Union Square greenmarket and students just lure people in.  Once we had a hearing impaired group come up to the Lab.  So there I was trying to explain what we were doing, pointing to things, flailing around, and then all of a sudden one of my students walks up and starts signing.  She knew Sign.  I was so happy.  We had another woman come over, she was from Algeria and she didn’t speak a lot of English, but we gave her a drop spindle.  It was a top whirl spindle, and she was trying to spin with it, but we could tell she wasn’t that happy with what we’d handed her.  Then we realized she was actually used to using a bottom whirl spindle, the kind that you spin near the ground.  We also had a guy from Tibet come up and show the students how to spin on a stick, just a stick, probably like he’d been taught as a boy.  Children also come over, especially at Union Square because they have all sorts of educational programs.  It’s wonderful, a really nice inclusive moment for everyone.

MC: What would you like to see markets like this become five, ten years down the line?

LS: In my world, I would love to see the market become more than just a greenmarket.  To become more like a real marketplace, selling fabric, and handmade shoes, handmade kitchenware, a place of real material commerce in the sense of material goods (not just consumable produce).  The market is becoming that way to a certain degree.  Something really natural happens there where there’s this sort of bartering that occurs, and I think that’s so important.  Like, “I have this, you have that, let’s trade” (the farmer does that with us, he gives us food and farms our land, he brings us bread from a guy at the market who he trades with).  You have to produce in order to engage in that sort of economy, but again, a productive culture is a strong culture so it goes hand in hand.

Laura Sansone is an artist, designer, and adjunct professor at Parsons the New School for Design's School for Design Strategies.

Mae Colburn is an independent textile researcher based in New York City.

Interview with Hazel Clark: Fashion + Sustainability—Lines of Research Series

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by Mae Colburn

Hazel Clark derives her perspective on fashion education and sustainability from years of experience as an art and design scholar, educator, and administrator.  Her work is informed by a sustained belief in collaborative inquiry and an enduring curiosity about the changing role of fashion through time and space.  Old Clothes, New Looks (2005) combines the work of anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and art and fashion historians, and The Fabric of Cultures (2009) features an equally diverse roster of scholars (Clark co-edited both titles).  It is this bringing-together of disciplines that also defines Parsons’ M.A. Fashion Studies program, which launched on Clark’s initiative in 2010 and now serves as a vital meeting point for thinkers, and re-thinkers, across the expanding field of fashion.

Mae Colburn: What does sustainability mean to you, especially within the context of slow fashion, which you describe in “Slow + Fashion – an Oxymoron or a Promise for the Future…?” (2008)?

Hazel Clark: To me, sustainability is about trying to establish new parameters of thinking about dressing without excessive waste.  We’ve still got to have clothes, and I feel they are a very interesting part of our identity, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve got to have the excessive waste surrounding them that we’ve become so used to.

When I wrote [the article you referred to] in Fashion Theory, it was very much instigated by a one-day symposium that I’d attended in Milan organized by Ezio Manzini, who was then at the Politecnico in Milan.  It was a bringing together of people from the slow food movement and design, which I felt provided a very useful way of thinking about clothing.  It’s very obvious to think about how we can make changes within old models, but it’s the models themselves that need examining, and using parameters or concepts from one area and bringing them to another can be very helpful. It was just a good way of rethinking longevity, and systems, and communities, and the local.  Agency as well – thinking about how individuals have agency over the way they dress.

MC: In the introduction to Old Clothes New Looks, you and Alexandra Palmer write that “consumer agency and taste are the final determinations of sales, costs and, ultimately, the fashionability of dress,” which is interesting because we often think of designers are the ones fashioning a more sustainable system.  Could you describe that tension?

HC: I think that consumers should have agency because they’re putting out the dollars to buy things and I think there is a tension for designers now, certainly with what one might call the do-it-yourself movement (if, indeed, it is a movement), and this recognition that began a number of decades ago that fashion is not just a one-line dictatorial process where the designer is the auteur and has the agency.  It’s a myth that designers have total agency; it’s a seductive myth, but it’s a myth nevertheless.  Very few designers have complete agency because they work as part of a team.  The production of clothing is teamwork, even though in many cases members of the team (pattern cutters, seamstresses, etc.) remain anonymous. The problem often is that the user doesn’t have the sense of agency, or that sense of confidence to dress themselves.  It would be wonderful to think of fashion more as self-styling, more about giving people the means to be comfortable in what they wear, to be confident in what they wear, to know their bodies.  I don’t think people are completely dictated to by fashion; fashion is so diverse and so multifaceted that one doesn’t have to be, but I think that building a sense of confidence to create an interesting personality with clothes should be considered a part of fashion.

There are interesting examples.  One company I really like is Junky Styling, in London.  They have a service called ‘Wardrobe Surgery,’ where people actually take clothes [from their own wardrobes] and work with the two women who run the company to restyle them.   I actually mentioned [Junky Style] once at a conference and I remember somebody saying, ‘oh, but it’s terribly expensive’ – but it’s all relative, and I think that’s the other point about how much one is actually paying for clothes and where the profits are being divided.  We’ve got to think about the value factor here.  […]  It’s only been in the last hundred and fifty years that people have had more than three or four things in their wardrobes.  That’s why I particularly like the work of British scholar Kate Fletcher, because she’s talking about these different modes or models one might have for different types of clothing so that you can think strategically about your wardrobe.

MC: I wanted to ask you about scholarship in particular.  Do you see this moment as an opportunity for a new methodology surrounding dress, one that represents perhaps a more holistic perspective and includes history and theory but also, for example, subjective narratives like oral histories?

HC: I think oral histories are important.  There’s been some recent scholarship looking at wardrobes, particularly in the U.K., and scholars like Daniel Miller and his student Sophie Woodward, who are coming from a more material culture or anthropological background, are thinking more carefully about relationships when it comes to clothing.  I think one of the issues [with fashion] is that it’s so predicated on the visual, on the image (in fashion magazines and now the internet), and I think we’ve got to consider more the sensorial relationships, the materiality of clothing, and also the capacity that clothes have to sustain us, make us feel as well as look good.  […] I just co-taught a two-week course, ‘Fashion and Everyday Life,’ a couple of weeks ago with my colleague from the U.K, Cheryl Buckley, a design historian at Northumbria University.  It was a graduate class where we had M.A. Fashion Studies students and M.A. History of Decorative Arts and Design students working collaboratively and we encouraged them to, for example, look at their family histories and bring in personal photographs – to talk about their experience of fashion and clothing within the context of the everyday.

Thinking about the sorts of qualities and relationships we have with our clothing goes hand in hand with acknowledging continuities and sustainability.  It really brings us down to a more involved, intimate level and the recognition of the individual experience, and this is being recognized in scholarship.  Sophie Woodward, for example, is not just talking with women about their wardrobes; she’s talking with women in their wardrobes (that is, in the presence of their clothes).  One of the first books that Daniel Miller produced about consumption, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1987) – there were a couple of articles in that book where he talked about the problem of dealing with the artifact, and in this country, fashion historian Valerie Steele has used the work of Jules Prown, a leading scholar of material culture [along those same lines].  We still need ways of thinking about and dealing with the artifact, but I do think it demands scholarly discourses that are more collaborative.  This is what we’re trying to do in Parsons’ M.A. in Fashion Studies.  We called it Fashion Studies because we’re drawing from a variety of disciplines.  Fashion exists outside of fashion design and I think teaching this will lead to more collaborative work by faculty, and also by students.  It’s a bit of an open space at the moment, but I think there’s a lot of potential there.

Hazel Clark is Research Chair of Fashion, and former Dean of the School of Art and Design History and Theory, Parsons the New School for Design.

Mae Colburn is an independent textile researcher based in New York City.