ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that research into everyday clothing practices can be usefully developed as an approach to understanding sustainable fashion. It will first consider current research into everyday clothing practices from the anthropological and sociological literature. This work does not tend to be ‘into’ sustainable fashion, but, as I will argue, offers important insights into how we understand and define fashion, as fashion is not understood as a separate or isolated phenomenon, but is embedded in wider cultural practices. Sustainability is not seen as a separate ‘addon’, but rather as something that emerges from everyday practices. Second, the chapter will then consider this in light of the framework of practice theory that has been developed within sociology to consider ordinary consumption and sustainability (Warde and Southerton, 2012). It will briefly outline the approach and how this could be usefully developed within the arena of clothing. Rather than see everyday clothing practices as inherently problematic, as consumers are ‘blamed’ or assumed to be fickle (Cooper, 2010), the chapter will suggest that it is important to understand in what ways people’s already-existing clothing practices can be seen to be sustainable, and how this can be enhanced or enabled through design practices (see also Chapter 1). Adoption of this approach, which is not moralistic in terms of what people ‘should’ do, nor assumes practices to be negative or problematic, offers more optimistic possibilities for future developments. The chapter will adopt an unconventional approach to the literature: although it aims to develop an approach to understand sustainable fashion, it will not focus upon the rich anthropological literature on issues pertinent to sustainable fashion such as recycling (e.g. Norris, 2005). Instead, the chapter aims to be provocative in suggesting that new understandings of fashion and sustainability can be developed through looking at everyday clothing practices.
