Fashion & Sustainability: Design for Change

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book examines how sustainability has the potential to transform both the fashion system and the innovators who work within it. The book is organized in three parts. The first part is concerned with transforming fashion products across the garment's lifecycle and includes innovation in materials, manufacture, distribution, use, and re-use. The second part looks at ideas that are transforming the fashion system at root into something more sustainable, including new business models that reduce material output. The third section is concerned with transforming the role of fashion designers and looks to examples where the designer changes from a stylist or shaper of things into a communicator, activist or facilitator.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Conceptually, fashion seems antithetical to the idea of environmental sustainability, often satisfying consumer demand through wasteful manufacturing practices and labor abuse. Fletcher (London College of Fashion) and Grose (California College of the Arts) argue that fashion is an ecological system, one open to redesign. Asking "what would sustainability have us do?," the authors explore fashion's complex relationship with economics and commerce, and argue that "outside the box" thinking could leverage this relationship toward a lighter environmental footprint. In part 1, the authors show how products are transformable through the use of novel materials, manufacturing redesign, and innovations in distribution practice. Part 2 goes further, exploring ways that the fashion system itself could be made sustainable. Wasteful resource use can be reduced through the design of transfunctional and modular garments, and the fashion industry's "sell more units" business model could be completely reimagined as a lease service model. Part 3 theorizes on how designers might assume new roles, using their skills for sustainable ends rather than passively accepting the current economic model as unyielding. Ample illustrations, clear concept charts, and good endnotes make this book a fine choice for fashion, ecology, and business students. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. C. Donaldson independent scholar