Name: Mehr Un Nisa Javed
Date: 17th Feb-2019
Professor: Nimrah Syed
The reading was divided into the sub headings Introduction, Fashion as practices of assemblage, Practice theory and sustainability and Future Research Directions. This chapter aims to argue that “research into everyday clothing practices can be usefully developed as an approach to understanding sustainable fashion.”Moreover, they’ve also looked at how the day to day clothing of people is sustainable and how it can be further enhanced. It was interesting to see how the author used the example of the denims/ jeans which people own. They don’t replace them really quickly and instead they buy the shirts etc to suit the clothes which they already have. Therefore, this is a sustainable practice. Moreover, the author adds that the choices of the people of what to buy are based upon specifically what they own (what clothes they already have) and what would suit them better according to their culture example, Indian people would prefer to wear more of sarees and the western people would prefer to wear more western clothes such as jeans , skirts etc. Thus, this proves that “fashion does not only exist in the abstract but is also composed precisely of a series of localised practices and interactions at the level of consumption, production, distribution and design.”
If we look at the global impact of the clothing industry we see that we need to rethink about our interaction with out clothing.
Woodward suggests that rather than seeing our day to day actions as problematic, we should clearly observer them and they may help us to see the existing ones, more preferable behaviours (Woodward 2015), which would lead to the development of the preferable future solutions. Building on this idea we can say that a clothing item which we do not wear is a static object. Solutions for producing eco-friendly clothes or improving the clothing production methods are the approaches which are meant to improve the environmental impact of these objects, but it is important to see them as objective. However, the clothes which we wear on daily use are the ones which hold information that can lead to the sustainability solutions.
Overall, I would say that the main crux of the reading is that “fashion change does not have as much of a bearing on consumer behaviour as previously thought” (Woodward, 2015).