Category: Sustainable Fashion

Slides link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/198ETLYYKEmfw-gvRuK8xV6XIXN7aCQVDHhfMdpfm9XQ/edit?usp=sharing 

Group members: Samanta Shi and Mehr Un Nisa Javed

Textiles are an extremely broad topic, so our group decided to focus on different textile materials and their impacts on the earth. I worked on the textile industry’s environmental and social impacts, as well as innovative new textiles that aim to lessen the carbon footprint and waste generated. With the help of an extremely comprehensive report on the textiles economy that Samanta found, I was able to find eye opening facts about the serious effects of the fast fashion industry. It was shocking to me to find out how little clothing material can be recycled and that 100 billion USD is lost because of all the fabric waste. Previously when shopping at fast fashion stores, I only saw the finished product but never truly thought about what it costs to put it on the rack. Incredulous amounts of water and fossil fuels are used to produce the textiles, adding to drought and water and air pollution. Additionally, I was never aware that every time clothes are put through a washing machine, hazardous substances in the dyes and microplastics in plastic based materials are stripped from the clothing and end up in the ocean, furthering ocean pollution and threatening ocean life. People often point to car emissions and individual water usage as a large source of pollution, but the clothes we wear have an immense effect on the health of our planet as well. However, a chart in the report of future actions that could be taken to lessen these effects, including more thoughtful designs and increased recycling innovation, shows that the industry has potential to make a turn into the right direction. 

Additionally, I was amazed by the new innovative fabrics that are currently being made, ranging from biofabricated leather to lotus fibers. Technology has come such a long way to turn food items into wearable fabrics. Not only are these fibers more sustainably sourced than popular materials today, they also have great benefits to the wearer, including temperature control and durability. Coffee ground, pineapple leaf, and banana fibers are sourced from waster products that farmers would throw away, which takes whole advantage of the product and lessens waste. While these fabrics may not be the most accessible or easily made, it shows that there is lots of room for new innovation to lessen textile effects on the planet. 

Li Edelkort exposes how the fashion industry has not evolved so much over the last years. Although there is an increasing production and demand for clothes, the methods used to design and sell fashion remain the same.  A problem she highlights  is the way fashion is taught at schools, where students all want to become famous designers rather than creating everyday clothes that are sustainable and fashion. She suggests schools should teach more about industrial fashion design as well as textile materials as there is not enough research being done concerning new types of materials that could be adopted in the industry. Last semester, I participated in the Trash Fashion Show and although I designed something that looked good and made out of trash, I still feel it was not that sustainable as the clothes I made could not be worn more than a few times and less be washed. When I was thinking about my design I was thinking about what kind of materials could replace fabric and still be wearable and practical, but I could not really come up with an idea, so I ended up using plastic. I have recently seen at some stores, more and more clothes made out of plastic, especially coats or jackets but  I am not sure how these clothes can be washed or if they are actually useful.  So I think doing more research on textiles and other materials would truly make fashion more sustainable.  

Both Fletcher and Edelkort describe many problems concerning the fast-fashion industry such as the bad quality of the clothes, the low wages of people who make the clothes and how the marketing make people consume these clothes in great amounts. For instance, it is really questionable how the owner of Inditex, one of the biggest companies of fast-fashion, is one of the richest men on earth while people who actually make these clothes come from poor countries where often that is the only job that they can take even though the salaries are really low. We should move to a more slow-fashion industry where more small brands are supported and there is more awareness that companies can sell less at a higher price but with better quality and fairness to all people involved in the industry.   

Date: 02-19-2019

Response to Sarah Pink and Jennie Morgan’s “Short-Term Ethnography: Intense Routes to Knowing”

Never did I encounter the word “ethnography” until a few months ago, when a friend introduced it to me as a way of doing social research. Nevertheless, I’m not a stranger to short-term ethnography, because less than a year ago I was with some classmates in Anhui (安徽) Province doing a service program with some rural kids infected with AIDS/HIV. We spent a few days there interacting with the kids. Although a service program is undoubtedly different from a social research, there are similarities between the two that make what Pink and Jennie say related to my experiences. Now that I’ve read about Pink and Morgan’s idea on short-term ethnography, not only have I realized the things that we could have done better in the program, but I’ve also learned how short-term ethnography could be effective as well, despite more people’s belief in long-term ethnography. What inspires me the most is the “intensity of the ethnographic-theoretical dialog” as Pink and Morgan addresses. It is required of ethnographers that they are ready to raise more theory-oriented questions that cut to the chase, which makes prior study extremely significant. For the service program, we were asked to learn a lot of materials about the kids’ living conditions and the situation of AIDS/HIV in China. What kind of confuses me is that Pink and Morgan suggest that details are crucial in short-term ethnographic studies: wouldn’t focusing on details make ethnographers more easily biased because the larger picture is forgotten? Besides, I don’t quite understand what they mean by Morgan drawing from her museum curating experience, which, according to them, “enabled [Morgan] to recognize and ask participants to reflect on practices that were unspoken and would have been otherwise invisible”. Though, their paper does inspire me in a lot of ways in terms of the short-term ethnographic trip that we are about to go on.