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Writing sustainably
“Sustainable fashion under the current regime of fashion means making sure nobody questions what is they really sustain, just keep the current model running perpetually”. – Otto Von Busch
To transform dreams into material things. Visions of the past, present, and future turned into tangible material objects. Its pattern forever the same, yet never failing to excite us. A new season, a new hope, an alternative vision of today and tomorrow. Solid and tangible are the things it offers us, though so vaporous the ideas on which it prevails. I attempt to describe verbally what is happening, a fool’s endeavor. These words are static, permanent. This world as fluid as ever. Fashion is in sync with the zeitgeist, so they say. I verge into cyberspace attempting to discern what is happening, realizing any notion of a collective mood is out of date. A beehive of infinite voices living in different separate worlds, times, according to different sets of ideas. The past mangled open to interpretation, the future a blank void of infinite possibilities. Navigating the zeitgeist today is an impossible objective. I look around and realize fashion is freer than ever. Like the internet, fashion has provided a place for everyone. Days spent here are never the same. I wake up a blank slate. I fall asleep trying to compute today’s conflicting ideas.
Yet here I am attempting to write about what is happening. To add value to the piling stack of texts that have been produced in the past. Thinkers have written about fashion; its mechanisms have been laid out. We know its faults; we can point at alternatives, yet here we are, producing more clothes than ever. We have arrived in the age of the Anthropocene and it has become impossible to separate the superficiality of fashion with its real tangible impacts. It is the awareness that fashion is – in fact – not a space of limitless possibilities, but deeply tied to the finitude of our ecology. Fashion has always been situated at an awkward intersection between the material and immaterial. Its tangibility is found in its direct impact on the environment and the physical material it produces. A real input and output, measurable, verifiable, limited, and impacting the livelihoods of millions down supply chains. Yet fashion as an industry, a production of objects, claims most of its value as an inventor of unlimited possibilities, providing a space where new ideas are set in motion, tested, celebrated, and forgotten. Fashion’s input is real and finite, its output is superficial and infinite.
My primary job is to convert matter into words. Like the flat pattern construction on a piece of paper, my words have the potential to bring about real substance, with a durability that lasts into tomorrow. Fashion as a system in perpetual movement is hard enough to navigate, and language – our primary tool to make sense of the world – is meant to guide us through this increasingly erratic phenomenon accelerating into some sort of future. Today, however, we have become so attuned to the transient language of Twitter and Meta-spheres that we have lost our capability to employ stable words that denote the tangibility and fragility of nature, as well as the state of present-day global circumstances.
I look around and realize narratives surrounding sustainability are a-plenty in the industry. New terms, reports, and statistics proposing possible futures are erected weekly, providing hope, but simultaneously serving as fuel for a greenwashing machine rampant in front of a public eye unable to keep focus. The language on sustainability is continuously evolving, almost at the pace of fashion itself. I wonder whether the daily exposure to news articles serves my understanding of the problems we are facing or whether they merely conceal the harsh, tangible, uncompromising reality approaching us. It is a language that does not sustain, but instead constantly evolves, morphs, and branches out into different directions, like Fashion itself.
For fashion to maintain the public’s attention, communication on sustainability has proven to necessitate fashionable language that is ever-changing. It has turned corporate sustainability into a self-celebratory language game that the industry has mastered, and now it’s armed with enough variations of the S-word to build a wall of pretenses behind which it can fool everyone it’s making process. Another term, a new report, another year to continue business as usual. Circular design, conditional design, design for longevity, inclusivity, to name a few, all falling under the same green umbrella yet simultaneously antagonistic to each other.
Circularity, today’s name of the game, representing humanity’s hope to sustain business as usual without the negative environmental consequences: “To decouple economic growth from environmental impact”. To dissect circular design is to quickly realize what it serves. It eschews any investigation into the systemic failures of fashion, rather seeking to maintain it with technological innovations. Circular fashion, Otto von Busch argues, is an attempt at perpetuating the conflict of the industry without negative environmental feedback, but “withholds any urgency to upset the status quo and mitigate the violence” (Busch, 2020). Meanwhile, we are trying to make the industry more inclusive, yet most of the techno-centric discourse around sustainability seems to serve the rapid growth large corporations. Vast sums are thrown to make supply chains more efficient, make websites that are more interactive, Ai, robots able to deliver same day, and we keep wondering why consumption rates are increasing. All for inclusivity in an industry notorious for its ruthlessness towards talents, forcing them upward the same suffocating ladders of corporations that continue to swallow up anything that shows signs of success. Fashion, self-expression, indeed thrives on diversity. Though I wonder if such ideals will ever see the light of day in an industry of ever-growing conglomerates each fighting for our limited attention spans.
Similarly, the notion of “slow fashion” has gained traction in fashion media, being presented as the green antithesis to “fast fashion”. Kate Fletcher – one of the more prolific fashion activists active today - argues that the notion of “slow fashion” is being misused in fashion media today and has been superficially mediated as a descriptor of products that are - in some sort of way – “less fast”. Fast fashion – she argues – “is not about speed, but greed: selling more, making more money. Time is but one factor in an equation that involves labor, capital, and natural resources that get juggled and squeezed in the pursuit of maximum profits”. Meanwhile, she makes it clear that “slow fashion is not time-based but quality-based”. She emphasizes how the term “slow fashion” is used – being a lexicographical opponent – to differentiate garments in existing growth business models, as a means to continue business as usual. She points out that “fast” may be the opposite of “slow” in language but that, in the terms of “slow culture”, they are not (Fletcher, 2010). Instead, they represent different philosophies, with different outlooks on economy, business models, values, and manufacturing processes. We can thus observe how the once-legitimate movement of slow culture has been vindicated from its true meaning, functioning instead as a signifier for eco-consciousnesses within existing “fast fashion” business models. Slow culture – she argues – has been turned into a trend and is “being used a tool for increased material throughput and continual economic growth”. This, again, highlights the power of language, and how words and terms can easily be transmogrified into signifiers and marketing angles that serve rather than thwart existing circumstances.
Our favorite brands are now armed with enough lingo to keep us perpetually floating in this promised dreamworld. The circular discourse provides proof of our inability to come to terms with our fated embeddedness in nature. We act upon the world as if we have already transcended it. We employ narratives aiming to further disassociate ourselves from the planet, as if it is a dead resource we no longer need. In 2018 we told ourselves we had twelve years left(Watts, 2018), yet here we remain, continuing our daily prayers to our techno-gods hoping a for that one device to magically fall from the sky.
Sustainability communication, Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham argue, “is dominated by technical, quantitative, and management terminology spawned out of scientific reductionism”. Their recent work Earth Logic partly contemplates on the power of language in shaping our outlook on the world. It points out how situating “production” and “consumption” as polar opposites creates separation between practices which, in reality, are fluid and should overlap. More problematically, it positions consumers as passive actors in a rigid system which they cannot influence. Action starts with the right language; communication makes thoughts and actions visible, graspable, and achievable (Fletcher & Tham, 2021).
“Imagine a vocabulary without consumption. Instead, we would use a diversity of words to define a diversity of practices – nurturing, stewarding, growing, mending, borrowing, relating, sharing.”
Much like our economy and technological progress, neither fashion nor language is allowed to sit still, and I have surrendered myself to a nomenclature that has long defied longevity or any attempt at clarity or unification. If writing about sustainability is ever to become sustainable, we must recognize the tangible potential of words. This society is arguably as complex as ever, and the reality of our imminent doom is approaching. Language is to serve a deeper understanding of our environment, not obfuscate it. We need a language that respects both the finitude of our attention spans and nature itself. Words and sentences, like our clothes, need to be put together with care and consideration – constructed to last, invite collaboration, and foster creativity.
Busch, O. von. (2020). The Psychopolitics of Fashion Conflict and Courage Under the Current State of Fashion. Bloomsbury Visual Arts. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350102330
Fletcher, K. (2010). Slow Fashion: An Invitation for Systems Change. Fashion Practice, 2(2), 259–265. https://doi.org/10.2752/175693810x12774625387594
Fletcher, K., & Tham, M. (2021). Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan (1st ed.). The JJ Charitable Trust.
Lehmann, U. (2015). Ulrich lehmann, fashion as translation. In Art in Translation (Vol. 7, Issue 2, pp. 165–174). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. https://doi.org/10.1080/17561310.2015.1038893
Watts, J. (2018, September 8). This article is more than 3 years old We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN. The Guardian.