Category: Sustainable Fashion

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Week 1: Response to Woodward – Tiger (Syed)

Date: 02-17-2019

Response to Sophie Woodward’s â€śAccidentally sustainable? Ethnographic approaches to clothing practices”

I started reading this article with the hope of finding what Woodward means by the interesting title, “accidentally sustainable”. From how I understand it now, she means it as an ironic way to refer to the fact that with little awareness about sustainability, people actually have a particular love for jeans, which are particularly sustainable in most cases. People don’t intend to be green, which, nevertheless, with jeans they somehow manage to. Jeans serving as a starting point, what Woodward addresses in the article is that from an ethnographic perspective, fashion industry might be more compatible with sustainability than we think it is, and that ways of sustainable fashion could be found accordingly.

It is interesting to see that Woodward puts in words exactly what I wanted to express in my last response – about fashion as practices of assemblage. For too long, I have – and I assume that not only I have – been understanding fashion on a narrow aspect. The word “fashion” evokes in my head images of runway models in peculiar outfits and dramatic makeup. It is lately that I have come to realize that for common people like us, what fashion actually means lies in how we choose and purchase our clothing, as well as how we create various matches among the limited amount of clothing that we have. It is more of the case because most of us cannot afford to, or barely feel the need to constantly update our wardrobe with new clothes. Every few months we visit department stores and shopping malls to consciously purchase clothes that we think match what we already have at home. The actual situation might be overlooked if we simply criticize “fast fashion” from the larger scale, where brands are blamed for mass production because that embodies their valuing profit more than anything. Ethnographic approaches, however, allow us to see that from consumers’ perspective, sustainable fashion may not be fully understood, but is interestingly implemented one way or another.

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Response to Sophie Woodward: Accidentally Sustainable – Hope Myers

I wouldn’t identify myself as the most fashionable person, especially when I was younger, but still when I was choosing between a few new schools for middle school I specifically didn’t want to go to the one with uniforms. Even though I basically gave myself a uniform every day of jeans and a t-shirt it was still extremely important to me that I had a choice. Yes people could probably get by wearing the same clothes most of the time and rarely buying new ones, but it’s become such an ingrained part of our society and an important part of a lot of people’s lives. Like tech it seems like fashion has fallen into the trap of planned obsolescence, and Woodward’s chapter made me think about the question relating to the chicken or the egg. Did brands first start pushing fast fashion or were they compelled by the consumer market? I think the answer lies somewhere in-between with both propelling the idea, it’s not a one-sided thing. The same is true for making fashion more sustainable, it can’t just be on the individual consumers or the brands to change everything, we have to work together. Shopping is rarely an individual thing, we rely on our family, friends, the company, and societal trends to help us pick and choose what we buy. Woodward said that “people’s participation in clothing and fashion practices is always embedded in specific personal, relational, and social contexts” and I think this quote is a good summary for her chapter. Despite her title of accidentally sustainable, it’s not actually an accident, we will have to work very hard from every level to begin tackling the issue.

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Week 1: Response to Li Edelkoort and Kate Fletcher – Ji Hwan Shin

It was interesting to watch Li Edelkoort’s “Anti-Fashion Manifesto” because she highlighted the backwards trends the fashion industry has been following and how these choices eventually led to fashion becoming “unfashionable.” True to what she stated, many fashion houses are promoting representation by including models of color and different sexualities. Also, several online campaigns like Calvin Klein’s #MYCALVINS social media movement are bringing a more interactive approach to advertising.

I feel like at this point in history, the negative effects of mass production on the environment and the exploitation of workers should be the focus of attention in the fashion industry. Just like Kate Fletcher mentioned in her piece about slow fashion, a vision of sustainability should challenge economic priority that has been prevalent in both industrial and high fashion. In order to satiate consumers’ increasing demands for off the runway and affordable apparels, companies churn out cheap and low quality garments that are achieved through heavy exploitation of labor. Edelkoort’s comment about how consumers’ purchasing decisions can actually be life threatening for others really highlights the need for a dialogue of ethics and sustainability to take place.

I also liked Edelkoort’s idea to revolutionize fashion studies by putting emphasis on textile education. Bringing the high tech aspects of Silicone Valley and the slow craft artisans of the Hudson Valley, she says that more and more young people are transforming traditional machines to create price conscious garments of higher quality. She proposes that larger fashion brands should foster these rising young brands while encouraging designers to form bonds. I believe that revolutionizing textile education while having more resources available for bright young minds will direct the fashion industry closer towards sustainability.

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Response to Woodward-Alessandra Hallman

This idea of something being “accidentally sustainable” was something I came across last year. I was waiting in line to pay at a Zara and I saw this tiny, makeup-removing microfiber towel. At the time, I solely used cotton pads to remove the day’s dirt off my face, often using two or more pads a day. After buying and using the towel once, I was hooked. I did not set out that day to find something to make my daily routine/life more sustainable, and yet I came across and bought an item that did just that. Am I allowed to feel proud of doing so? Am I just doing the bare minimum, and nothing will make up for buying clothing at Zara in the first place? This oscillation between good consumer versus bad consumer is a main fixture of Professor Sophie Woodward’s chapter “Accidentally Sustainable? Ethnographic Approaches to Clothing Practices.” Woodward is done with the idea that the consumer simply buys clothing because they’re a victim of the fast fashion system. She’s even less tolerant of the argument that consumers are the villains in the fast fashion system, buying clothing for the sole purpose of its disposability. Instead, she clarifies that the consumer buys a fashion product in their own “specific personal, relational, and social contexts.” Woodward, like Edelkoort, disagrees with the sustainable fashion philosophy of making every stage of the fast fashion industry start from square one. Instead, she argues that we can trust the average consumer and designer to choose/design fashion products with longevity, intent and continued use in mind. This way, much more fashion products will go the way of the American blue jean, a lauded and memory-filled addition to any wardrobe, and one that is rarely thrown out.8

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Response to Woodward – Xiaoyan Kong

(I recatagorized this post. The date it published should be Feb 17, 2019 @12:08)

In this reading, Sophie Woodward explains how ethnographic research about everyday clothing can help people understand sustainable consumption, and explore an approach to sustainable fashion. She begins the article by defining fashion as “practices of assemblage”, as part of our daily routine and consumption. Then she introduces how we should understand fashion and clothing from the people who wear and select them instead of a fashion system defined from the outside.

Before she shows the example of the relationship between jeans and sustainable in the reading, I would not expect wearing jeans could be a sustainable choice. I’ve heard so many news talking about how jeans is one of the most environmental unfriendly kind within textile industry. And textile industry ranks as the second that does the most pollution with our environment.

However, talking from the ethnography perspective, Woodward uses jeans as a perfect example of how people create a sustainable habit with something they already have in their wardrobes. As Woodward says, “New items that are purchased are often combined with things people already own, and the frequent shifts in fashion are often shifts such as the lowering of hemlines rather than complete shifts in types of clothing”. It really provides me a different way of thinking how sustainability can works.

The second-hand clothing market in Zambia also reminds me of a clothing exchanging market that I went to last month in Shanghai. People who went there just need to bring clothes that they think are no longer fashionable to them, and exchange them with others clothes. I think it also makes the clothes “accidently sustainable” which I hope societies can have more of this kind of event to attract individuals.