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Fashion Practice
The Journal of Design, Creative Process & the Fashion Industry
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Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes
and Practices of Use
Kate Fletcher
To cite this article: Kate Fletcher (2012) Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes and
Practices of Use, Fashion Practice, 4:2, 221-238
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Fashion Practice, Volume 4, Issue 2, pp. 221–238
DOI: 10.2752/175693812X13403765252389
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Durability,
Fashion,
Sustainability: The
Processes and
Practices of Use
Kate Fletcher
Kate Fletcher is a researcher,
writer, and design activist, whose
work over the past fifteen years
has shaped the field of fashion
and sustainability. She works with
fashion businesses, non-profits,
and government. She authored
Sustainable Fashion and Textiles:
Design Journeys (2008) and co-
authored Fashion and Sustainability:
Design for Change (2012).
kate@katefletcher.com
Abstract
Longer-lasting materials and products are often promoted as a strategy
to increase resourcefulness and sustainability across product groups in-
cluding fashion. Yet these gains depend on changed user behavior and
consumption patterns, which in fashion in particular are influenced by
social and experiential dimensions, not just material products. Obsoles-
cence of fashion products, driven by aesthetic change and tied to chang-
ing social preferences underscores the psycho-social nature of factors
which affect fashion garment lifespans. This is reflected by ethnographic
222 Kate Fletcher
evidence that shows that garments which defy obsolescence do so in
informal or unintentional ways, rarely as a result of design planning
or material or product qualities. This article suggests a point of depar-
ture for design for durability that shifts away from a familiar focus on
materials, products, and user–object relationships to instead explore
material durability as emerging from strategies of human action. It
suggests that durability, while facilitated by materials, design, and con-
struction, is determined by an ideology of use.
KEYWORDS: fashion, durability, design, sustainability, use, social practice.
Introduction
Durability enjoys an easy relationship with sustainability. Resilient
materials and products have potential to lengthen product lifetimes.
Longer lifetimes in turn provide us with more opportunities to access a
product’s utility. By extending the potential for satisfaction with existing
pieces, no additional ones are required. New consumption is forestalled,
resources are saved, waste is reduced, needs are met.
It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that durability is a foundational
idea of the area of study known as design for sustainability, a discipline
that has enlarged its scope and field of action over the last two decades
and which aims to envision and give form to alternative ways of living
(Manzini 1994; Walker 2006). Much of the development work of the
theories and practice of design for durability, such as those pioneered
by the organization Eternally Yours (van Hinte 1997, 2004), have been
developed in product design. Over the last decade many of these ideas
have migrated to fashion where they have been appropriated both at a
materials-level and to influence product–user relationships. Experienced
practitioners of design for durability have long recognized the limita-
tions of many of these approaches. Many of the same issues that dog the
success of durability as a strategy to influence consumption patterns in
product design also influence the outcomes of the fashion design process;
most notably, user behavior. Expending resources and effort to extend
the life of products pays few dividends unless, as users, we make use of
the utility provided by longer-life products, and subsequently change
our patterns of consumption. Despite the user-dependent nature of the
factors that affect on-the-ground lifespans of products, most work in
this area focuses on durability as originating from a product itself and
that product’s potential for robustness and enchantment, not from the
“lifeworld” and social actions of the user. Yet the incongruity of relying
on things to influence people’s behavior to in turn foster longevity of
those things is amplified in the context of garments by the deeply social
nature of fashion: what one person chooses to wear, and to wear for a
long time, is also affected by the decisions and actions of others.
Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes and Practices of Use 223
In this article, I engage with a “dialogue of evidence” and draw on
extensive knowledge of design for sustainability in fashion, and on pri-
mary ethnographic research conducted in six locations in Europe and
North America to explore durability and its relationship to fashion in
practice. I first offer an introduction to obsolescence and then review
durability within the familiar frameworks of materials, fashion prod-
ucts, and emotional engagement with garments. I then shift the focus
away from products to instead explore durability as emerging from
social relations and human action, and what Karen Tranberg Hansen
has called “clothing competencies” (2003: 306). I conclude by sug-
gesting that fashion as a system of dress can act to promote longevity
of garments by viewing durability as an outcome of activities linked
to satis fying use of clothing. I propose that durability in fashion can-
not only be promoted as a product-based phenomenon, but rather it
emerges from an individual and collective practice with dynamic impli-
cations for our use of materials.
It should be acknowledged that for some, the notion of pursuing
durability in fashion at all is problematic, not least because durability,
and the associated ideas of resilience and constancy, would seem to deny
fashion its essential, ever-changing nature. Moreover, as an economic
and cultural process, fashion is challenged by the idea of a more dura-
ble material culture. For as, “a market-driven cycle of consumer desire
and demand; and...a modern mechanism for the fabrication of the self”
(Breward and Evans 2005: 2), fashion and associated ideas have come
to be almost exclusively organized around industrial capitalism and con-
sumerism based on rapid product obsolescence and continually increas-
ing throughput of resources. As Joanne Finkelstein states, “if we are
relying upon the properties of procured goods for our sense of identity,
then we are compelled to procure again and again” (1991: 145). Here
the dominant, consumerist story and imagery of fashion is reinforced by
business, cultural preferences, and views on what is both desirable and
practicable (Fletcher 2012) with well-recorded serious environmental
implications (Allwood et al. 2006). Within this dominant story, alterna-
tives, including those that promote longer-lasting products as part of
a bigger strategy of paced consumption, resourcefulness, and human
well-being are rejected. Yet this was not always the case. As Gronow
(1997: 79) notes, “originally fashion was not consciously created; it was
born as a side-product of purposive social action.” And if fashion, by
definition, is always relevant to its time and context, then social action,
including that supporting durability will also shape fashion.
Obsolescence and Fashion
Since the publication of Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers in 1960,
knowledge of obsolescence has been building as a key way to influence
224 Kate Fletcher
both supply and demand of products by influencing users’ perceptions of
their products continued usefulness. As Burns (2010: 43) states, “Plan-
ning for durability was no longer a priority. Obsolescence in its earliest
form, meaning to wear out, had evolved into the newly discovered
use of psychological obsolescence...as a means to influence consumer
spending.” This change, which coincided with the growing capacity of
factory production of clothing and increasing supply of materials after
the restrictions of the war years, marked a shift in the perception of
clothes from a durable consumer good with an intrinsic material value,
to a non-durable consumer good with novelty and brand value (Fine
and Leopold 1993, cited by Skov 2011: n.p.). Indeed particularly in the
saturated fashion markets of industrialized economies where most new
purchases of clothing are additional or replacement acquisitions rather
than sales to new customers, a tendency towards a short “service life”
and low intrinsic material value is an inevitable effect of the market-
based system of mass consumption and production of fashion (Stahel
2010: 160). For the prevailing business model’s bottom line to keep
showing growth, garments have to become obsolete, at least in psy-
chological terms. Yet irrespective of their waning psychological appeal,
the vast majority of garments endure physically. When these pieces are
confined to the back of the wardrobe, they do not dematerialize.
The legacy of psychological obsolescence associated with the fashion
industry is found both in growing levels of discarded clothing (Allwood
et al. 2006: 16) and, where they are not disposed of and additional
ones bought, in the increasing numbers of rarely used garments stock-
piled in homes. Statistics for the UK reveal that the volume of clothes
bought each year is nearly double that which is discarded, suggesting
rising rates of ownership and storage (Textile Outlook International
2009: 100). At least some of this consumption of clothing can be seen as
essential to meet the fundamental human need of protection—insulating
and shielding the body—though this physical need is quickly satisfied
with minimal resource use. In the economic period of satiation cur-
rently enjoyed by those of us in the rich North, it is using materials and
marshaling resources for development of our physic life that is the chief
challenge for sustainability. In the context of fashion, the resource inten-
sity of our need for identity formation, communication, and creativity
as expressed through our dressed bodies is also the chief challenge for
durability, though few have explored its implications.
A process of analyzing and categorizing the different mechanisms of
product obsolescence has been underway for the last fifty years. Burns
(2010: 45) synthesizes this debate into four modes relevant across prod-
uct groups. They are: aesthetic (where changing appearance renders
existing products obsolete); social (shifting societal preferences and
norms lead to retirement); technological (changing technology renders
functioning product obsolete); and economic (cost structures promote
disuse and replacement rather than maintenance). In the fashion sector
Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes and Practices of Use 225
the primary, though not exclusive, tools of obsolescence are aesthetics
closely connected to social preferences and cultural conditions. Here a
cycle of invention, acceptance, and discard of a continually changing
series of temporary modes of appearance is disseminated across social
groups. Stewart Brand describes obsolescence another way; “fashion
can only advance by punishing the no longer fashionable” (1994: 54).
Indeed perhaps no industry has better perfected the cycle of invention-
acceptance-dissatisfaction-invention than fashion; and has so success-
fully de-linked it from physical need or function. In the fashion sector
each new circuit of this cycle offers little in the way of material develop-
ment or progression. Rarely does a new item better protect our bodies
physically or offer enhanced functionality; rather we buy afresh to make
visible our identity both as an individual and part of larger social groups
within a particular place and time.
There is a substantial body of work exploring the relationship
between products and modes of obsolescence in order to attempt to
lessen their effect (see for example Cooper 2010), yet little of this is
specific to fashion and clothing. While many of these ideas are por-
table between product types, garments differ from other products such
as electronic devices, domestic appliances, and furniture in a number
of key ways that act to change the relevance and application of con-
cepts and strategies. For instance, an item of clothing has a softer, more
mutable surface as compared with the hard surface of many consumer
products. As such, strategies to extend the durability of clothing or tex-
tile materials become almost always expressed as a change in surface
quality. By contrast, in a product with a hard surface, an unchanging
visual and material quality is possible that allows for a more predictable
aesthetic over time, with different implications for design for durability.
Further, while garments can be seen as having much in common with
other domestic objects, items worn on the body have an intimate quality
that confers upon them a personal, sometimes private, status different
to other household products. Inevitably such intimacy changes the rela-
tionships that influence longevity and the relevance of strategies, such as
sharing, which may be both bolstered or undermined depending on the
piece. Other differences reflect the significant role played by garments in
identity formation as compared with other products, as an aide to nego-
tiating the space between the inner self and the outside world; and the
dominance of the aesthetic and social modes of obsolescence in fashion
compared with the influence of other modes such as technology in the
retiring of many other products. Taken together such differences warn
against the wholesale transposition of generic durability approaches be-
tween product areas. This being said, as we work to lessen or even break
up the accelerators of obsolescence, there is little doubt that while being
mindful of the factors that govern a specific product’s longevity, shar-
ing knowledge and practice across product groups is likely to generate
innovation.
226 Kate Fletcher
In this article, I now explore two groups of design for sustainability
strategies for durability in the fashion context, starting with material-
and product-level durability.
Material- and Product-level Durability
While ideas of design for durability at a conceptual level challenge con-
sumerist culture and the contemporary fashion system; long-lasting and
robust materials are easily assimilated into existing garments and prod-
uct optimization methodologies and are often aspired to as a feature of
“good design.” Actioning durability as a materials-level strategy is both
practical and palatable and over the last twenty years, the benefits of
pursuing long-life materials as an aid to enhance durability of clothing
has been recommended as supportive of sustainability goals (see, for
example, Mackenzie 1997). Seemingly this idea still has currency. In
2012, the organization WRAP, which now facilitates the “Sustainable
Clothing Action Plan” for the UK recently commissioned research into
durability in the fashion and clothing sector that emphasizes garment
durability as contingent of such specific material phenomena (WRAP
2012).
While it is true that garments are material things, potential physical
longevity of the garment depends less on the fabric itself than on the
piece as a whole—the constructed material object. For a garment will
last only as long as its least durable component. A product (as distinct
to a material) strategy of durability attempts to balance a piece’s lifespan
across component parts to build a shared, similar longevity of seam,
fabric, fastening, facing, etc. It allows for workmanship to be as durable
as the hardworking fabric on a garment’s cuffs, hems, and knees. It
matches a fabric with poor dimensional stability or wash fastness with
low-grade seam construction. Such tactics build an internally consistent
product strategy for durability that prevents squandering resources by
over-specifying resource-intensive long-lasting components in conjunc-
tion with others that only have the potential for a short life.
For garments that physically wear out and no longer function and for
those that are made obsolete by economics—that is where it is cheaper
to buy a new piece rather than mend an existing one—material- and
product-level durability delivers benefits. Indeed more broadly, knowl-
edge about the strength and wearability properties of materials and the
methods of garment construction that are the most long-lasting is valu-
able. Yet the tangible sustainability benefit of enhancing the material
durability of clothing is contingent on two key assumptions. The first,
that if you make garments physically robust, then people will continue
to use them. And the second linked notion, that that this extra utility
afforded to the product by designing for physical resilience, translates
into lower levels of consumption: i.e. fewer pieces are bought because
Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes and Practices of Use 227
the existing one lasts longer. However, these suppositions are shaky
at best. Anecdotal evidence suggests that for certain garments, such
as workwear, it may be the case that durable fabrics and construction
enable overalls and protective gear to be worn longer and delay re-
placement consumption. But for fashion clothes, which already endure
physically long past their period of use, putting resources and effort into
enhancing the physical durability of seams and fabrics is worth little if
it is aesthetics or social preferences—or even changing waistlines—not
material robustness that determines a piece’s lifespan. Making a gar-
ment last is very different to making a long-lasting garment.
Emotionally Durable Design
A substantial body of work, most notably by Jonathan Chapman in
his book Emotionally Durable Design (2005), has shaped ideas around
psychological mechanisms to construct meaning in material culture that
attempt to foster sustained use of products by consumers. Ideas of emo-
tional durability contend that products are discarded when they display
an absence of meaning. And by cultivating an emotional and experiential
connection between person and object, we can disrupt our dependency
on consumption of new goods to construct meaning and our sense of
self. As part of his doctoral research in which he surveyed the product
relationships of over 2,000 users of domestic electronic products, Chap-
man (2009: 33) developed a six point experiential framework to initiate
engagement with emotional durability and design, specifying points of
intervention and pathways which offer starting points and lend struc-
ture to investigations:
• Narrative:usersshareauniquepersonalhistorywiththeproduct;
• Detachment:usersfeelnoemotionalconnectiontotheproduct,
have low expectations of it, and thus view it favorably because it
makes few demands;
• Surface:theproductageswellphysicallyand developsatangible
character through this process;
• Attachment: users feel a strong emotional connection to the
product;
• Enchantment:usersaredelightedbyaproductandtheprocessof
discovery of it;
• Consciousness: the product is perceived to have free will. It is
temperamental and users need to acquire skills to interact with it
fully.
Other thinkers have also developed categorized approaches to emotionally
durable design. Batterbee and Mattelmäki (2004) for example classify
three groups of objects with meaningful associations: meaningful tool
(the object enables satisfying activity), meaningful association (the
228 Kate Fletcher
object acts as carrier of cultural or individual meaning), and living ob-
ject (the object fosters an emotional bond). Alistair Fuad-Luke (2010:
147) collates a number of different approaches to extending product–
user relations. A summary is offered here:
• Extended durability via high quality, good design, reliable,
upgradable, maintainable products;
• Sharingproducts;
• Co-operatively designing and producing products together with
users;
• Retentionofnarrativeandaestheticappealthroughusepersonal-
ization and aging with dignity;
• Creating personal narratives through customization, personal-
ization, and memory
• Increasingsensorialvariety;
• Makingsocialconnections.
Notwithstanding the challenges of transposing these ideas between
design sectors, there has been a groundswell of work in this area in
fashion in both commercial and research contexts. This work includes,
among others, the garments created co-operatively with users such as
by Antiform (antiform 2012), which has resulted in the production of
an eight-piece collection with sixty-four local people (beaders, knitters,
artists, seamstresses, and volunteers); those designed to be shared such
as by the small knitwear brand, Keep and Share (keepandshare 2012),
which creates unisize pieces with few fastenings to aid the possibility
of collaborative consumption and the creating a rich use history and
personal narrative; the London-based studio and shop Here Today
Here Tomorrow (heretoday-heretomorrow 2012) that through its
workshop and training courses erodes the social and practical distance
between the making and using of fashion; the modular garments of
DePLOY (Deploy 2012), which can be used in different configurations
to increase variety without consumption; and the garments in the final
collection of MA student Saida Bruce designed to promote enchant-
ment by incorporating hidden details that become revealed over time
(saidabruce 2012).
Critiquing the Efficacy of Durability Strategies
Yet irrespective of the originality and value of this work to animate a
product in order to foster engagement and delay disposal, the findings
of consumer studies research reveal that consumption patterns are not
necessarily impacted by emotionally durable design. Sian Evans and Tim
Cooper note, “attachment doesn’t necessarily lead to lifespan optimis-
ing behaviour” (2010: 334). Simply because users have formed a bond
with a piece, does not mean it will be used or replacement consumption
Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes and Practices of Use 229
prevented. They go on, “In cases where such attachment was identified,
new products were no less likely to be purchased; attachment merely led
to accumulation and storage of seldom-used items” (2010: 334).
Chapman (2010: 65) himself recognizes the limitations of designing
for attachment and engagement:
Although a designer can certainly elicit within users an emotional
response to a given object, the explicit nature of the response
is beyond the designer’s control; the unique assemblage of past
experiences that is particular to each user, their cultural back-
ground and life journey determines this. Designers cannot craft
an experience but only the conditions or levers that might lead
to an intended experience. What those required conditions are,
however, is still unclear to design.
This is corroborated by research that reveals that those products that
defy obsolescence do so in informal or unintentional ways, rarely as
a result of design planning (Park 2010: 81), and which shows that
consumers often behave in a way so as to reduce the lifespan of prod-
ucts, with an idiosyncratic approach to maintaining quality (Evans and
Cooper 2010: 321). It is also reinforced by the findings of my ongo-
ing ethnographic research project, Local Wisdom (localwisdom 2012),
which show that satisfying, resourceful practices of use of garments
are rarely motivated by durability. Such insight acts to downplay the
potential of the traditional design process to influence the way in which
a product is used and durability promoted and it instead emphasizes
durability as contingent on user behavior. It suggests that design for
durability requires a different approach.
Here I am indebted to the work of anthropologist Karen Tranberg
Hansen (2003), who in her research exploring secondhand dress
in Zambia is confronted with a similar inadequacy in the dominant
approach to understanding her field. For Tranberg Hansen, the prob-
lem is that material culture, with its emphasis on socially constructed
things or commodities, falls short in explaining the fashion practices
she observed in Zambia which are dominated by social exchanges and
relationships. In her analysis she overcomes this by, “shifting the focus
from things to social relations and interactions. With this shift, the point
of departure is not the things themselves but rather the strategies within
which they are embedded” (Tranberg Hansen 2003: 301). She takes
Jonathan Friedman’s suggestion to approach objects and relations from
a different perspective, turning around Appadurai’s (1986) now founda-
tional idea of material culture that things have social lives, arguing that
her evidence from the streets of Lusaka reveal instead that, “things do
not have social lives. Rather social lives have things” (Friedman 1991,
cited in Tranberg Hansen 2003: 301). In so doing her point of departure
becomes people.
230 Kate Fletcher
In the remainder of this article I, like Tranberg Hansen, affect a
changed point of departure to develop a more expansive and accurate
understanding of the relationship between fashion and durability. Such
a shift changes the focus of investigation of durability from the object
(with or without its qualities of enchantment and attachment) to the
behaviors, habits, and material expression of the person using it. Dura-
bility becomes embedded in the techniques and processes of use.
Local Wisdom
Since 2009, I have been conducting social practice research through an
ongoing project, Local Wisdom, that explores the tending, fixing, and
satisfying use of clothing—described as the “craft of use” (localwisdom
2012). This project draws on ethnographic methods alongside design
process to open up the “deep inner space of the wardrobe” and amplify
its insights so as to drive change towards practices of sustainability in
fashion. The project attempts to connect the world of material relation-
ships, so often the preserve of industrial activity, with that of social rela-
tionships, the majority of which, “belong to the consumer’s life world”
(Skov 2011: n.p.). Thus it seeks to explore sustainability in fashion not
just as a material phenomenon but also as a broader and more dynamic
process of human actions, relationships, and their associated material
effects (Lifkin 2010: 118). The project’s aim is to generate knowledge,
insight, and inspiration from social practices that are often ignored by
industrial interests. These individual, material, and social actions and
processes associated with garments are recorded using portrait photog-
raphy and object histories and so far have been gathered in eight loca-
tions in Europe and North America. The process begins with the setting
up of a “community photo shoot,” typically in a public building, in a
varied selection of rural towns and cities. The shoot is widely advertised
in the vicinity; signs are put up in newsagents’ windows, in local librar-
ies, and sports centers. Advertisements are placed in local newspapers
and interviews given on community radio networks. The project con-
nects with local networks as varied as the climate change campaigning
group Cape Farewell (capefarewell 2011), local fashion weeks (e.g. in
Berlin and Dublin), and the Transition Towns movement (transitionnet-
work 2011). An open invitation is extended to the public to attend the
shoot and share the stories of how garments are used. The project aims
to pay special attention to use-related garment practices, as distinct to
production-related ones. That is, to uncover the behaviors that go on
around, with, and to clothes during their period of use, rather than their
production (either industrially or hand- and homemade). On the day of
the shoot, a photographer and audio equipment to record the garment’s
history is set up and the team waits to see who turns up and which
garment practices emerge.
Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes and Practices of Use 231
The qualitative data generated by Local Wisdom is limited, personal,
and specific. It is not generalizable to the wider population nor does it
allow us to make predictions about the behavior of individuals other
than the members of the public who volunteered to their share garment
use practices with the project. Yet what it does do is offer tentative
insight into the post-purchase use practices of garments, which have
been shown to be both the source of most customer satisfaction and
environmental impact (Peattie 2010: 254) but about which relatively
little is known. It is often reported, for example, that mechanisms for
collecting and feeding back the experiences of users seldom exist (Nor-
man 1998: 142).
The everyday garment use practices explored in Local Wisdom are
not focused on durability in particular, yet many of the qualitative object
histories gathered reveal evidence of long-lasting garments. Practices as
varied as dressing to reflect a personal history, to support self-reliant
communities, to defy the contested values of a garment producer, and
to resist cultural pressure to launder are often played out with garments
that are established parts of our wardrobes, though not only those that
are physically robust (these range from a silk dress, to a denim jacket;
a cotton jersey top to woolen knitwear). Such evidence tentatively rein-
forces the view that durability is not fostered through resilient materials
and design intention, but through the practices of use. Other practices
uncovered by Local Wisdom explicitly articulate use over the long term,
such as those that mark evolving life stories on and through our clothes
and those with three or more owners. In these practices, while mending
and altering were common, the physical durability of the garment per se
appears less critical to the piece’s durability than a user’s habit of mind
fostering long-term use. It seems that durability in fashion is mainly a
product of nurture not nature. Its potential, present within most pieces,
is uncovered as garments are used.
The use practices that foster durability are social practices that
facilitate and emerge around the extended iterative use of those gar-
ments through time. Rarely, if at all, do these “craft of use” practices
need much in the way of extra material consumption or money to make
them possible. Rather they are contingent on individuals finding creative
opportunity in routinized types of behavior with existing clothes. That
is, in honing the skills of use and investigating the informal pathways
of influence in fashion that spring from wardrobes, to start the process
of recognizing where widespread action can take place. Wardrobes have
been described as representing “a ‘philosophy of having’...both liter-
ally and figuratively” (Skov 2011: n.p.), yet in the case of the “craft of
use,” a different representation emerges, the wardrobe as a philosophy
of being.
The “craft of use” also provides a challenge for those engaging with
change, involving a transition from “the certainties of controllable things
in space to the self-organising complexities of an endlessly ravelling and
232 Kate Fletcher
unravelling skein of relationships over time” (Brand 1994: 71). In order
to cultivate a process of tending and use of garments, the one-off act of
creating a piece within knowable, fixed parameters becomes subsumed
by an infinitely more complex task of engaging with the social context
of garment use. In the hands of users, garments have a life of their own.
And it is this life of action, relationships, and material effects that influ-
ences how long these pieces last. The “craft of use” is thus an expression
of the potential for satisfaction and individual agency with garments
and a celebration of already existing extended use practices.
Three Vignettes from the Local Wisdom Project
A Life of Action
“I call this my three stage jacket. It began about forty years ago as
a very slim waistcoat that was given to me. I knitted a panel and
put it into the back just to be able to fasten it together at the front,
you see. And then about fifteen years ago I added sleeves and a
collar and some trimmings. And then, only about five years ago, I
became a bit too big to button it up so I added latchets across to
the front so that I can fasten it.” (Figure 1)
Wear to Wear out
“This is a dress that I’ve had for 25 years and share with my sister.
We sort of have it for 5 years each and then post it back to each
other and it’s like fancy dress for me... it brings out a different
Figure 1
A life of action. Image courtesy of
Local Wisdom. Photograph: Fiona
Bailey.
Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes and Practices of Use 233
part of me. At the moment I just wear it for special occasions but
I once met a woman who was in her 80s and who wore evenin-
gwear all the time. She’d made a decision years before not to buy
any new clothes and to wear everything until it wore out. She’d
worn her way through her wardrobe and had got to her evening-
wear. So when I’m in my 80s I’m going to wear this dress...”
(Figure 2)
Sulphuric Denim
“This was my Dad’s jeans jacket when he was a teenager and he
was a chemistry student in the early seventies and he wore this in
the lab and he got sulphuric acid all down the front so it’s got acid
burns through it... I kind of like the fact that he was wearing this
when he was, sort of, nineteen, twenty, in a lab and burning holes
in it... Plus it’s just a shoddy jacket... The fabric’s pretty horrible...
the waistband’s just been cut off and folded over. I like, I guess,
honestly bad workmanship if you know what I mean. I’ve never
been one for washed products and rips and tears and destruction
artificially so generally that means you get stuff that reflects how
you wear things, what you do...” (Figure 3)
User-ship
Such empirical evidence supports the view that durability is an outcome
and not an aim of using products. A point underscored by durability’s
Figure 2
Wear to wear out. Image courtesy
of Local Wisdom. Photograph:
Fiona Bailey.
234 Kate Fletcher
nonlinear relationship with user satisfaction. Mackenzie et al. (2010:
307) suggest that while lack of durability of products is a source of
dissatisfaction to consumers, neither is perpetual durability valued: “a
lifespan considered reasonable is a prerequisite for satisfaction, but
does not ensure it.” Thus product life extension becomes a nested sys-
tem within broader discussions about satisfying fashion practices that
recognize the importance to durability of a garment’s materiality—its
fabrics, construction, and design—and the overriding influence of these
practices on a product’s eventual length of life.
Figure 3
Sulphuric denim. Image courtesy of
Local Wisdom. Photograph: Kerry
Dean.
Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes and Practices of Use 235
Walter Stahel describes this expanded view of durability as “user-
ship” (2010: 175), that is something that emanates from performance
rather than products. Evoking ideas of user-ship as distinct to owner-
ship moves the durability debate away from product-centric business
language that has largely dominated product lifetimes’ discussions to
date and back to a debate of wider society; reflecting the reality of du-
rability as a behavioral issue related to material objects. This is not an
insubstantial task, for we are largely ‘locked in” to fashion conventions,
habits, social norms, and industry structures that reflect a vision of our-
selves as consumptive individuals, not as users, and where many of the
practices of satisfying use are little valued and driven underground. Not
only are such practices personal, variable, and slow to enact, they also
fall outside the narrow spectrum of fashion activity that is valued by
consumer society.
In this space a different role for design practices for durability
emerges. Here the aim is to foster and amplify the skills, habits of mind,
and abilities of users to create and engage with fashion from within a
context of satisfaction and resourcefulness. This fashion-ability, “craft
of use,” or “clothing competence” (Tranberg Hansen 2003: 306) is a set
of skills, ideas, and identifiable practices that are conducive to promot-
ing the satisfying use of garments and to the creation of fluid appearance
in dress appropriate to both time and place that is expressed in a fashion
“moment.” Here fashion is contingent on clothes worn in ways that
requires people’s (user’s) active collaboration. Other authors call this
competence “task knowledge” (Evans and Cooper 2010: 334), some-
times framed as an extension of practical household management skills
and perhaps has similarities to early experiences of fashion as a practice
of “making,” often in groups. Evidence from the Local Wisdom project
suggests that such competencies promote the extended use of garments.
It is here that fashion as a process can be seen to bolster durability and
begin to offer an alternative to the throwaway society.
Conclusion
As in other product sectors, strategies that attempt to foster durability
in fashion are limited by the behavior and consumption practices of
users. Despite this, most activities that promote durability start from
materials and products, not users. The ability of a traditional design
process to reach into the life world of the user and influence behavior
appears to be weak, and in the context of fashion clothes, weakened
further by fashion’s social nature, which sees it influenced by human
exchanges and actions and not just material objects.
In this article I have articulated a new point of departure for ex-
ploring durability in fashion, supported by evidence from ethnographic
research into satisfying practices of garment use as well as research in
236 Kate Fletcher
other product areas. It reveals that long-life garments exist, but that
their extended lives are determined more by an ideology of use than
by a garment’s physical robustness or the strength of the user–object
relationship. In short, durability is user-based rather than product-
based, though played out in material form. This suggests that in order
to promote greater resourcefulness and longevity of products in fashion,
it is to clothing competency and the “craft of use” that we must turn
our attention. For such processes recognize the social and experiential
dimensions to fashion, which, facilitated by a garment’s materials,
design, and construction, influence how long clothing lasts.
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