Week 1. / 2 response to Woodward

My main take away from this reading is that, as the author mentions, “sustainability is not an aim , but an outcome”. In order to understand sustainability in fashion and design fashion products for people, one needs to observe what people do with fashion, what happens to the products post-purchase. This means that fashion cannot be defined externally but often comes from social practices and every day activities. Woodward introduces the term, “Accidentally sustainable” in case of jeans. From ethnographic research it turns out people own jeans for longer time than other clothes thus it’s a more durable piece of clothing. This could be because denim is more durable than other materials or because people tend to wash their jeans less than other clothes but most likely because jeans is “a medium to be ordinary.”The author mentions, it is found that there are some pieces of clothing that are “slow-burners” such as denim skirt or skinny jeans, something people wear over longer period of times and it does not go out of fashion. Fashion emerges from wider cultural values and every day activities and there is a relationship between wearer and clothes. People have a desire not to replace things and often recombine things they already own with new ones. So I believe, when designing sustainable fashion, one has to think about what pieces of clothing do people already own and love? What are ways of recombining these? What are ways of developing long term relationships with clothes? Sustainability does not only come from the production side but from the consumers too. 

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