Week 1: Response to Sophie Woodward – Hanna Rinderknecht-Mahaffy

I found Woodward’s approach to sustainability very interesting. She argues that ethnography studies of peoples cultural, social, and personal fashion choices can be a good tool to create more sustainable fashion. As part of her argument, she discusses how most people who buy jeans do not think about buying “ethical” denim, however because of peoples’ personal attachments to their jeans, they often are used for many years in a much more sustainable way. Woodard argues that, “This suggests that a more instructive way of understanding sustainable fashion practices emerges from a focus upon what people do with clothes they already own. The ineffectiveness of policy initiatives to provide more ‘information’ about sustainable fashion comes from a misunderstand of what the consumption of clothing is. Instead…how we consume arises more out of routinized or repetitive actions than individual deliberations” (135). While I at first was slightly skeptical of Woodward’s “accidental fashion” approach, I began to be convinced, through her examples such as peoples’ jean habits, that purely providing people with information about what the “ethical” choices are, is not necessarily enough. Part of me is pessimistic about the fact that people do not take ethical actions when provided with enough information, however I do appreciate Woodard’s argument that perhaps there is another approach to sustainability. While I do think that the environmental crisis in our world today is serious enough that her approach is not sufficient by itself, I do think it may be a good starting point to get every day consumers thinking more about sustainability in their own lives. 

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