Practice The Journal of Design, Creative Process & the Fashion Industry

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Slow + Fashion – Women’s Wisdom

Hazel Clark

To cite this article: Hazel Clark (2019) Slow + Fashion – Women’s Wisdom, Fashion Practice, 11:3, 309-327, DOI: 10.1080/17569370.2019.1659538 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17569370.2019.1659538

Published online: 07 Nov 2019.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rffp20 Fashion Practice, 2019, Volume 11, Issue 3, pp. 309–327 DOI: 10.1080/17569370.2019.1659538 # 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Slow + Fashion – Hazel Clark Women’s Wisdom

Hazel Clark, PhD is Professor of Abstract Design Studies and Fashion Studies at Parsons, School of Design, New York. Her most Building on ideas I first published in 2008 as, “Slow þ Fashion - An recent publications are Fashion Oxymoron or a Promise for the Future … ?”, this paper brings new and Everyday, Life: London and New York (2017), with Cheryl insights to the value of a slow approach to fashion. The cases explored Buckley, and the anthology for that research indicated the significant role of women practitioners. Fashion Curating: Critical As a consequence, further investigation and thinking leads me to pro- Practice in the Museum and þ Beyond (2018) with Annamari pose here a development of the slow fashion discourse that respects Vanska.€ and is informed by feminine strategies and values, or what I am choos- [email protected] ing to call women's wisdom. In this paper, the work of women thinkers, scholars and design professionals is discussed to explore the potential of 310 Hazel Clark developing further the “þ” of slow þ fashion and to draw from and value the long-established existence of beliefs and methods common to women that can also pre-date and transcend , modernity, and Eurocentricity, and which are not formed on the basis of patriarchy. Attention is drawn to everyday values, history, sensory studies, micro- phenomenology, and practices that indicate the potential for a system change in fashion. Implicit is a shift in worldview to chal- lenge the fashion status quo, and to introduce different economic logic, business models, values and processes than those that currently domin- ate the fashion system. The paper demonstrates that models already exist in theories and practices which have been devised and applied by women. It concludes that women's wisdom added to a slow þ fashion can contribute to establishing much needed sets of principles to move us forward and change perspectives.

KEYWORDS: Slow fashion, , women's wisdom

This paper revisits ideas I first published in 2008 as, “Slow þ Fashion - An Oxymoron or a Promise for the Future … ?” (Clark 2008, 427–446) During the ten plus years since that publication a considerable amount of attention has been to paid to “fashion and sustainability” and “slow fashion” by scholars,1 design practitioners and the fashion industry. That year also marked the formation of the Centre for at the London College of Fashion, which celebrated its tenth anniversary with the “What’s Going On?” conference in the autumn of 2018. While acknowledging the considerable contributions of the Centre, its researchers and professors, including director Dilys Williams, Sandy Black, co-editor of this journal, and Kate Fletcher, there continues to remain the need for sets of principles to move us forward and change perspectives. Still today, definitions of and debates around sustainable or slow fashion continue frequently to be determined according to mar- ket-based conditions and assumptions. As a contribution to the continu- ing discourse on fashion, design and sustainability this paper brings a new theoretical perspective to the “slow fashion” discourse. My return to “slow þ fashion” acknowledges a continuing interest by scholars in the 2008 article, which will be re-published in 2019 in the Russian edition of Fashion Theory (Clark 2019a). An updated version will also be included as a chapter in the anthology Slowness in Fashion (Clark 2019b). In the interim period valuable definitions have emerged. Kate Fletcher, for example, stated in this journal that “slow fashion is not business-as-usual ……Norisitproduction-as usual but with long lead times. Slow fashion represents a blatant dis- continuity with the practices of today’s sector; a break from the val- ues and goals of fast (growth based) fashion.” (Fletcher 2010, 262) Fletcher’s words set a tone for this article, but they also beg the Slow þ Fashion – Women’s Wisdom 315

Figure 1 The Doughnut: a twenty-first century compass. Between its social foundation of human well-being and ecological veiling of planetary pressure lies the safe and just space for humanity. Courtesy Kate Raworth (2017).

Listed below (with my parentheses) they have a clear resonance with slow þ fashion principles (2017,22–25):

1. Changing the goal (from growth to dynamic balance) 2. Seeing the big picture (of embedded economy and longer term thinking and planning) 3. Nurturing human nature (to become socially adaptable humans) 4. Getting savvy with systems (to recognize dynamic complexity) 5. Designing (economies) to distribute 6. Creating to regenerate (by a cyclical rather than a lin- ear approach) 316 Hazel Clark

7. Being agnostic about growth (that means not always seek- ing more)

The challenge in the twenty-first century is to meet the needs of all people, using regenerative and distributive economies. This can take advantage of technological developments such as Blockchain, the digital peer-to-peer decentralized platform that can track all types of value exchange between people. Such a facility can make possible the kinds of transparency and reduced intermediation that is advocated in slow þ fa- shion (Raworth 2017, 159). Another example of decentralization offered by Raworth is “care-currency,” where care is earned by giving care. While she cautions that such schemes must serve to reinforce rather than replace the human instinct to care for others, they do offer alterna- tives that are not predicated on capital growth (Raworth 2017, 158/9). Moving away from a standpoint of quantitative growth and personal greed is key to addressing problems of unsustainability. A shift in goals and attitudes is crucial to inculcate a change in the business of fashion. It should be stressed that slowing down fashion’s commercial growth, including the numbers of garments produced for sale, would not signal an end to fashion. Rather, it would represent a significant and much needed change away from businesses taking a quantitative approach, based on maximizing (leading to increased waste) to a more qualitative and circular approach to production for greater initial use, and then subsequent re-use. It would also build a need for more varied skill sets within the industry, rather than necessarily creating unemployment. The kind of distributed and decentralized models offered by Raworth can point a way forward for fashion businesses to exist and prosper outside of the large conglomerates and without the main object- ive being excessive economic profit. New York already has such initia- tives, where a community focus is included in the business plans. In 2007, Miko Underwood founded Oak & Acorn—Only for the Rebelles, as the first sustainable denim brand in Harlem, which works closely with its local community (http://www.oakandacornbrand.com/ #about). The company re-uses, re-purposes and re-engineer’s denim and non-denim garments obtained from within the community. The goal and mission are to shift consumption habits through education, by pro- viding viable access to alternatives. As the design director, Underwood sees her responsibility as creating a brand that people can believe in, with an ethos that can be identified throughout the product. She describes her creative process as having been founded in authenticity, and the desire to construct a long-standing brand.7 Earlier in her career, when working globally with factories for denim development and pro- duction, she discovered how much environmental pollution was pro- duced by jean manufacturing. It built in her the desire to create a better American denim brand, grounded not in capitalism, but by a desire for change. The brand website describes the mission as being “around the Slow þ Fashion – Women’s Wisdom 317 social, political & ecological issues in America.” It also informs those who are unaware that in the USA over 97% of apparel consumed is imported and the “fashion industry is the second largest polluter of the environment and contributor to modern slavery.” Underwood is com- mitted to hosting events and promoting sustainability as a lifestyle, which includes healing through the arts and meditation. Oak & Acorn also responds to real community-based problems, including working with We Got Us Now, a US movement in support of children and young adults impacted by parental incarceration. It is an issue particularly important for Underwood, herself the daughter of an incarcerated par- ent, in a country with amongst the highest rates of imprisonment in the world, where black men serve sentences at six times that of white men (Robertson 2019). The kind of practice that Miko Underwood has developed pays attention to and respects the varied and complex social and cultural potential of fashion, addressing what it is, who needs it and moreover who creates and produces it. In doing this her business is responding to the local context, with transparency, while addressing the relationship of wearer to garment. This is distinct from fashion as defined through mass- and economic growth and determined by large fash- ion companies and global conglomerates. Research has clearly demon- strated fashion’s potential for agency via the ordinary, everyday relationships of people to what they wear, aesthetically, psychologically and emotionally. This has been seen historically, with one of the most memorable challenges the semiotics of mainstream fashion being through the development of counter or sub-cultural style (Hebdige 1979). Punk in particular, proved to be a major anarchistic challenge to the fashion establishment, which the latter later embraced, and has con- tinued to do so for the last forty years. Evidence shows therefore that fashion can serve as a liberating means of individual empowerment, not just as a dictate of popular and rapidly changing trends established by the fashion system. A number of more recent research projects, bear wit- ness to this definition, and I go on to discuss them and to include some examples located in New York.

Wearing and Using Much of the contemporary work which has examined the relationships between people and their clothes has employed an ethnographic approach. Instrumental was anthropologist Sophie Woodward’s investi- gation of the everyday use and wear of clothes, published as Why Women Wear What They Wear (2007). Such research depends on col- laboration, either amongst groups of scholars, or between researchers and their subjects. The effectiveness of collective engagement was borne out in Kate Fletcher’s Local Wisdom project (http://localwisdom.info/ about). Initiated in 2009 and continuing until 2014, the research took place in 16 locations, involved seven universities and colleges, in nine 324 Hazel Clark slow þ fashion can contribute to establishing much needed sets of princi- ples to move us forward and change perspectives.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes 1. An indicative overview is provided by the following books: Fletcher, K. 2008. Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys. London: Earthscan; Black S. 2008. Eco Chic: The Fashion Paradox. London: Black Dog; Brown, S. 2010. Eco Fashion. London: Laurence King; Gwilt, A. & T. Rissanen. 2011. Shaping Sustainable Fashion Changing the Way We Make and Use Clothes. London: Earthscan; Black, S. 2012. The Sustainable Fashion Handbook. London: Thames and Hudson; Fletcher, K. & L. Grose. 2012. Fashion & Sustainability: Design for Change. London: Laurence King; Fletcher, K. 2013. Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys. London: Taylor and Francis; Fletcher, K. 2016. Craft of Use: Post-Growth Fashion. London: Routledge; Fletcher, K. and Ingun Grimstad Klepp, eds. 2017. Opening up the Wardrobe: A Methods Book. Norwegian: Novus Press; Farley, J. 2014. Sustainable Fashion: Past, Present, and Future. London: Bloomsbury Publishing; Gardetti, Miguel Angel, and Ana Laura Torres. eds. 2013. Sustainability in Fashion and Textiles: Values, Design, Production and Consumption. Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing; Hethorn, J., and C. Ulasewicz .2015. Sustainable Fashion: What Next? A Conversation about Issues, Practices and Possibilities. New York: Bloomsbury; Minney, Safia, Lucy Siegle, and Livia Firth. 2011. Naked Fashion: The New Sustainable . Oxford: New Internationalist; Ricchetti, M., and & M. L. Friza. 2013. The Beautiful and Good: Reasons for Sustainable Fashion. New York: Rizzoli; Rissanen, Timo, and Holly McQuillan. 2016. Fashion Design. London: Bloomsbury; Subramanian Senthilkannan Muthu, ed. 2017. Textiles and Clothing Sustainability Sustainable Fashion and Consumption. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. 2. I have chosen the term “women’s wisdom” cautiously, but consciously, rather than using “,” which has been and still is open to polarities of definition. It should be stated that relative to contemporary feminist thought, my sense of “women’s wisdom” comes closer to the “feminism for the 99%” put forward by Fraser et al. than to “corporate feminism” (Fraser, Bhattacharya, and Arruzza 2018). 3. One example is Sheth, Jagdish, Nirmal Sethia, and Shanthi Srinivas. 2011. “Mindful Consumption: A Customer-Centric Approach to Slow þ Fashion – Women’s Wisdom 325

Sustainability.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 39 (1): 21–39. 4. The term “made in patriarchy” is adopted from Cheryl Buckley’s seminal article, first published in 1986, which brought a feminist perspective to demonstrate how women had been ignored in design history within the context of patriarchy. Reworking the article in 1999, Buckley draws further attention to an absence, or withholding, of women’s contributions in , pointing out a tendency in fashion history and design history “to address gender instead of women.” (Buckley 1989, 2009, 285) Changing perspectives are important to note also in the public domain. For example, since 2017, the #MeToo movement has drawn attention internationally to sexual assault and harassment of women, especially in the workplace. 5. For further reading see Herman E. Daly, ed. 1980. Economics, Ecology, Ethics: Essays Toward a Steady-State Economy, and Herman E. Daly & John B. Cobb, Jr. 1989. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. Boston: Beacon Press. 6. They also challenge directly Abraham Maslow's familiar five-tier model of human needs, where “self-actualization” sits at the top of the pyramid structure. 7. Email exchange with Miko Underwood, July 9, 2019. 8. Zygmunt Bauman (2007, 36) highlights how the “nowist” aspect of the contemporary consumerist era is “hurried” in its desire to acquire and collect, which leads to the, even more hurried, necessity to discard and replace. 9. My thanks to Lydie Valentin for introducing me to the work of Professor Petitmengin and its potential relevance for fashion.

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