ABSTRACT
Introduction In this chapter, I want to examine some of the ways in which fashion has been analysed and criticised within the social sciences, particularly from my own discipline, sociology, and explore what connections we might make between fashion and sustainability that have not been fully addressed within this literature. What I suggest is that much critical analysis of fashion from social science scholars, from the late nineteenth century onwards, chimes with contemporary sustainability debates and criticisms, even though the term sustainability isn’t used in this early literature. Broadly speaking, the association with femininity has done much to diminish and discredit fashion, with early tendencies to see fashion as immoral and not worthy of intellectual analysis. This classic literature has been challenged more recently with the growth of fashion studies in Europe and North America. This literature is summarised in the first part of the chapter. In the second part of the chapter, I want to consider how we might bring fashion and sustainability together for a more comprehensive analysis. I argue that we need to find new and innovative ways to examine these in a more integrated way and argue for an actor-networktheory (ANT) approach.
