Author: Xiaoyan Kong

As Hethorn says at the very beginning, it is not a new concept to sustain people through fashion. However, she’s questioning if the real world fashion practice has really meet the goal of meeting people’s need through fashion. What she realizes is that often time customers are placed at the last of the linear process which essentially reverse the order. Then Hethorn introduces several ways that people can apply to place customers at the central of the designing process which inspires me but also confuses me in some way.

What she writes that inspires me is the ways she describes that can help us identify “individuals’ needs and desires, aesthetic and functional, as a basis for creating a sense of well-being through design”. It reminds me of a design that’s the world’s most sponsored design award within the humanitarian field. It is a plastic water filter that costs 3 dollars to make. Now it is being broadly used in those areas without access to clean water. Though it’s not related to fashion, but the ideas behind them are similar – The design is just based on the needs and wants of users. It is a solution for a selected area/time/group of people.  

What Hethorn confuses me is the part she talks about moving from target market to individual consumers. Based on what she says, I feel it is more of the difference between mass production and customized clothes. Since human born differently. There will always have customers dislike the products designed for most of the population. But what if we narrow the target market? Will it be a both sustainable and effective way to produce clothes for right customers and at the same time making money.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

It surprised me a bit when I first read “Technology is essentially the prime enabler that allows sustainable fashion to thrive and develop today.” I know technology has infiltrates almost every aspect of our life now. But I didn’t expect it can play such an important role in sustainable fashion. When I heard about sustainable products, I usually pay more attention to what material or resource they use instead of what technology they are using. And it’s interesting when people see if something is made of reusable resource, many of them have a default agreement that this is a sustainable product. As Sarah Scaturro introduces her bamboo fiber sweather in the article, even though using bamboo is considered as ecological friendly. However, it covers the fact that the chemical process it goes through is actually damaging the environment. It reminds me of the lego botanical elements made from sugarcane. Sustainable sourced plastic is what they’ve stressed so much. But is it realy eco-friendly product? Then I read this article saying that “For the moment, much of the expansion for sugarcane crops has been resigned to degraded and pasture lands… the increased use of fungicides, insecticides, and herbicides“. I would like to say lego is defenitely going in the right direction but maybe not a final solution. All in all, technology is a double-edged sword, and it is also a really sharp sword. Scaturro has a positive attitude toward the relationship between tech and sustainable fashion. And I agree with that instead of denying the current tech values, it’s important we should change the meanings and manifestations of tech from inside.

When we talk about sustainable fashion in our first class, we discussed a lot of ways that people or the industry can use to make fashion more environmentally friendly and sustainable.  Yet, we didn’t connect all of them together, they are all almost separate with each other, being considered as one single solution. Reading this article written by Alice Payne makes me realize doing good on only one aspect or process is far less than enough. She uses bamboo as an example – from the material property perspective, it belongs to renewable sources and hence sustainable. However, from the product processing side, turning bamboo into fibre needs tons of energy and it does so much pollution. Life-cycle assessment – the tool Payne introduces to us, is a more comprehensive solution. It involves each progress of fashion production, from “fibre (cradle), moving through to textile production, garment design process, manufacture, distribution, retail, use phase and eventual disposal (grave)”. It just reminds me of a commercial application that launched by Infor. It is called the Infor Fashion Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution suite. The suite enables integration of all key aspects of product development with the company’s entire supply chain, from line planning to product design, development, procurement, processing, inventory management, customer information and distribution products. Though both Infor and Alice Payne use the same concept of life-cycle, we can see Infor’s intention is helping company making as much money as possible by saving them time then to focus on fashion design, while Payne tries to seek a way that life-cycle solution can exist in mass market to make it fairer and environmentally responsible. There’s no wonder, all businesses have to take profit into account. But it seems people are still not paying enough attention to the non-money part of life-cycle thinking. We still have a lot to work on.

When I think about research, especially ethnography research, I always imagine it to be a long researching process. I believe in order to get a precise and in-depth understanding of the culture or social phenomenon, it is necessary to put that much time into the study. However, in this reading, as Pink and Morgen introduce, short-term ethnography is not “quick and dirty” but something that involves “different methodological, practical, and analytical entry points into the lives of others”.

The traditional long-term ethnography research definitely have great value in different aspects. Pink and Morgen help me to see that there are actually short-term research being accurate and useful in some circumstances as well. Here, the authors introduce three types of intensity “of the research encounters themselves; of the ethnographic-theoretical dialog; and of the post-fieldwork engagements with materials”.

It reminds me of one case that might be applied to how the authors think about short term ethnography. Companies often hire anthropologists as consultants for seeking specific and focused research on specific aspects of society. At other times, an anthropologist can be hired to outline the culture with specific findings and propose strategies for conducting business in the region. All in all, short-term ethnography cannot substitute long-term ethnography for sure. But both approaches have pros and cons, we shouldn’t deny neither of them Instead, we should choose the right one for specific situation.