Re-fashioning the way we wear: dressing practices and sustainability
Creators: name: Rollason, Tamzin
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 441004
subject: Social change

description: This thesis uses an interpretive content analysis and digital ethnography to reimagine the relationship between dressing practices and the materiality of fashion garments for environmentally sustainable outcomes. I identified and analysed the content of fashion brand websites and fashion blogs with a focus on sustainability to gain insights into the general understandings that organise and make sense of sustainable fashion. I set up a closed Facebook group for a digital ethnography to generate and collect data about the dressing practices of individuals engaged with and concerned about sustainable consumption lifestyles to identify already existing practices in the sustainable use of fashion. 

A growing awareness and concern in the community about the ecological sustainability impacts of the fashion industry has pushed the fashion industry to address these issues. Despite the strategies employed by the fashion sector to reduce these impacts, research indicates that the pre and post-consumer ecological consequences of fashion has continued to increase. While fashion is a difficult sector to change as it has long, complex and opaque supply chains, has limited data and is subject to little regulation, it is an important area of research for sustainability transitions. Not only are the ecological consequences of the sector in need of remedy, but the social and economic significance of fashion suggest it may provide new insights into envisioning sustainable futures. 

I found there are practice dynamics that persist from mainstream fashion that are impeding the development of sustainability in the fashion sector. In particular, these are general understandings that are consistent with neoliberal ideologies that underpin the eco-modernisation model of sustainable production and consumption. I identified three general understandings of innovation and material solutions; using marketing to encourage responsible, conscious individual consumption by influencing attitudes and behaviour; and business as usual of increasing production, sales and growth. Contrastingly, I found that the entanglement of dressing practices and sustainability concerns were organised by general understanding about long use, loved garments and coping with the social and material demands of everyday life. 

Social practice theory and in particular Schatzki’s site of the social is a conceptual framework for investigating the problem of sustainability in fashion as procedural and relational. An SPT site ontology links the complex dynamics across the dualistic divide of producer and consumer as practices that are part of the same phenomenon. This affords investigation of existing social processes, identification of opportunities for intervention and the drawing up routes to navigate future fashion imaginaries. 

The practices of the fashion industry are holding back the development of sustainable fashion in three ways. First it is the persistence of unsustainable practices, second is the innate unsustainability of these practices causes confusion and uncertainty about sustainable fashion, and the third is that these practices distract from meaningful change. This means emerging sustainable dressing practices have to compete with dominant ideas about fashion, such as novelty and cleanliness, which have unsustainable outcomes. 

This suggests that sustainable fashion needs to be addressed as a wicked problem (Rittel and Webber 1974) that will not be resolved by persisting with existing approaches. The profoundly complex social and economic significance of fashion means that incremental changes are unlikely to produce the degree of change needed to fix the impacts of fashion, not least of all as the social aspects of fashion means it is prone to commodify values and identities. Changing the intent of fashion production to facilitate existing sustainable dressing practices by learning from examples outside of the dominant systems of production is an opportunity to rethink or transform the practices of the fashion industry. 

By providing an insight into fashion that highlights an alternative that has positive outcomes for all players in the industry this thesis has illustrated a way of forging new paths to sustainable fashion futures.