IMA Documentation

The usual images of sustainable fashion conjured in the minds of the fashion consumer are brown/rough fabrics, ill-fitting and bland pieces, and generally unfashionable fashion. This is wholly uninspiring to the average consumer, leading them to ignore the sustainable fashion movement altogether. However, in her piece “The Life-Cycle of the Fashion Garment and the Role of Australian Mass Market Designers,” Alice Payne offers several solutions to correct the above assumption about sustainable fashion. Payne is not speaking to the consumers; she is focusing on the possibilities in sustainable design rather than simply blaming the consumer. She uses Australia as a case study, but it is clear that she is optimistic about her results if amplified on a worldwide scale. 

I found her ”Garment use” section the most interesting. I have often mentioned in class the importance of intent behind design in furthering the sustainable fashion movement. When intent is removed from the design process, fashion pieces become disposable. Payne elaborates that in Australia, clothing retailers are beginning to realize the potential of this intent behind design, from designing clothing that doesn’t need to be washed so often to involving “services” with the purchase of a fashion piece. I am also optimistic that this will work worldwide, but fashion companies will not adapt without the demand of a sustainability-conscious consumer. 

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.

I thought this article was very readable and did a good job summarizing all the different points in the cycle and the steps that can be taken for sustainability at each. I’ve hear about mass brands knocking off high fashion designers but one point that I never thought about before was how Australia is a season behind so it can just take the patterns. It also makes me wonder whether there is less of an issue with excessive seasonal consumption in places where the climate is more stable year round. I feel like for me somehow I misplace clothes between seasons or see new trends that I want to try but I feel like if the weather didn’t change that much I wouldn’t buy as many new clothes each season and would wear the ones I have for longer.

For the retail/use side of things one thing I think could help is teaching basic sewing skills or having people in stores to do really basic things. Some fancier places offer tailoring or alterations but I’ve also heard of people saying that they threw away a perfectly useable garment just because they didn’t know how or couldn’t be bothered to sew a button back on. Things like this could reduce a lot of waste and are so easy to teach. One more issue is with the growing digital market people buy a lot of clothes on impulse. I know I’ve bought some things on Taobao that I don’t even end up liking but they’re so cheap that it’s easier to just keep them instead of returning them. Rather than buying cheap clothes they won’t wear people should spend that money buying better quality sustainable clothes.