Date: 02-17-2019
Response to Sophie Woodward’s “Accidentally 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.