"Learn how to be sustainable and work for social change in the fashion industry. This book explains concepts, applications, legal and regulatory issues, and tools available to professionals throughout the fashion industry. Call to Action, Case Studies, Conversations with Industry Professionals, and Company Highlights in every chapter will help you practice sustainability in your career. Some of the featured companies include Everlane, thredUP, ABL Denim, Eileen Fisher, Patagonia, Alabama Chanin, Krochet Kids intl., Loomstate, and Conscious Step. Industry professionals interviewed include Treana Peake, Caryn Franklin, Annie Gullingsrud, Katherine Soucie, and Elizabeth Shorrock, among others"--
Praise for the previous edition: "[A] fascinating book." John Thackara, Doors of Perception "Provides the foundations for a radical new perspective." Ethical Pulse "At last a book that dispels the idea that fashion is only interested in trend-driven fluff: not only does it have a brain, but it could be a sustainable one." Lucy Siegle, Crafts Magazine Fully revised and updated, the second edition of Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys continues to define the field of design in fashion and textiles. Arranged in two sections, the first four chapters represent key stages of the lifecycle: material cultivation/extraction, production, use and disposal. The remaining four chapters explore design approaches for altering the scale and nature of consumption, including service design, localism, speed and user involvement. While each chapter is complete in and of itself, their real value comes from what they represent together: innovative ways of thinking about textiles and garments based on sustainability values and an interconnected approach to design. Including a new preface, updated content and a new conclusion reflecting and critiquing developments in the field, as well as discussing future developments, the second edition promises to provide further impetus for future change, sealing Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys as the must-buy book for fashion and textiles professionals and students interested in sustainability.
This book examines how sustainability has the potential to transform both the fashion system and the innovators who work within it. Sustainability is arguably the defining theme of the twenty-first century. The issues in fashion are broad-ranging and include labour abuses, toxic chemicals use and conspicuous consumption, giving rise to an undeniable tension between fashion and sustainability. The book is organized in three parts. The first part is concerned with transforming fashion products across the garment's lifecycle and includes innovation in materials, manufacture, distribution, use and re-use. The second part looks at ideas that are transforming the fashion system at root into something more sustainable, including new business models that reduce material throughput. The third section is concerned with transforming the role of fashion designers and looks to examples where the designer changes from a stylist or creator into a communicator, activist or facilitator.
When thinking about lowering or changing consumption to lower carbon footprints, the obvious offenders come easily to mind: petroleum and petroleum products, paper and plastic, even food, but not clothes. When people evaluate ways to lower their personal carbon footprint by changing purchasing habits, they are bombarded with information to avoid petroleum and petroleum products, plastics, paper, even food, but not clothes. Most consumers do not think of clothes as a source of environmental damage. Yet, clothes are made with petroleum products through chemically-laden industrial processes that generate significant pollution. The fashion industry is among the largest organic water polluters in the world, accounting for significant greenhouse gas emissions and generating massive amounts of waste as a function of the frequent discarding of used clothing. In the Dirty Side of the Garment Industry: Fast Fashion and Its Negative Impact on Environment and Society, author Nikolay Anguelov exposed the ecological damage from the fast-fashion business model. In this book, The Sustainable Fashion Quest: Innovations in Business and Policy, the author takes this one step further by focusing on solutions. This book uses the familiar (yet complex) industry of fashion as a lens to examine how business pressures and national and international policies can have both positive and negative social and ecological impacts. It provides an analysis of extant and emerging policies to address the divergence in the ongoing quest to maximize economic development and minimize the social costs of the industrialization process. It also examines emerging technologies and innovative business models that have the potential to revolutionize how fashion is perceived, manufactured, and consumed. This book begins with an introductory letter that outlines the social and environmental issues facing the fashion industry, as well as emphasizing the seriousness and urgency of addressing them. Each chapter then focuses on a major aspect of the industry with an increasing emphasis on policy. The chapters outline the impact of global-level and business-level decisions on the industry’s success, its social and environmental impact, and its relationship to consumers. The goal of the book is to define that transition, explain its challenges, and educate readers on the possibilities to become powerful drivers of change through their professional actions and their personal behavior as consumers. While the book specifically analyzes the fashion industry, it also explains the implications for other industrial sectors. It uses a product everyone is familiar with (we all buy clothes, after all) to examine the decisions, impacts, and policies shaping the industry behind the scenes. The linkages are applicable to other fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) business sectors, such as consumer electronics, which are starting to face sustainability criticism for relying on a business model of promoting a high frequency of repeat purchasing.
This book provides a critical insight into sustainability and fashion in a retailing and marketing context. Examining a truly global industry, Sustainability in Fashion offers international application with a view to contextualising important developments within the industry. Contributors use their diverse backgrounds and expertise to provide a contemporary approach in examining key theoretical concepts, constructs and developments. Topics include consumer behaviour, communications, circular economy and supply chain management. The individual chapters focus on sustainability and provide a range of fashion sector examples from high street to luxury apparel.
The production, use and eventual disposal of most clothing is environmentally damaging, and many fashion and textile designers are becoming keen to employ more sustainable strategies in their work. This book provides a practical guide to the ways in which designers are creating fashion with less waste and greater durability. Based on the results of extensive research into lifecycle approaches to sustainable fashion, the book is divided into four sections: source: explores the motivations for the selection of materials for fashion garments and suggests that garments can be made from materials that also assist in the management of textile waste make: discusses the differing approaches to the design and manufacture of sustainable fashion garments that can also provide the opportunity for waste control and minimization use: explores schemes that encourage the consumer to engage in slow fashion consumption last: examines alternative solutions to the predictable fate of most garments – landfill. Illustrated throughout with case studies of best practice from international designers and fashion labels and written in a practical, accessible style, this is a must-have guide for fashion and textile designers and students in their areas.
There is no doubt that the textile industry – the production of clothing, fabrics, thread, fibre and related products – plays a significant part in the global economy. It also frequently operates with disregard to its environmental and social impacts. The textile industry uses large quantities of water and outputs large quantities of waste. As for social aspects, many unskilled jobs have disappeared in regions that rely heavily on these industries. Another serious and still unresolved problem is the flexibility textile industry companies claim to need. Faced with fierce international competition, they are increasingly unable to offer job security. This is without even considering the informal-sector work proliferating both in developing and developed countries. Child labour persists within this sector despite growing pressure to halt it.Fashion demands continuous consumption. In seeking to own the latest trends consumers quickly come to regard their existing garments as inferior, if not useless. "Old" items become unwanted as quickly as new ones come into demand. This tendency towards disposability results in the increased use of resources and thus the accelerated accumulation of waste. It is obvious to many that current fashion industry practices are in direct competition with sustainability objectives; yet this is frequently overlooked as a pressing concern.It is, however, becoming apparent that there are social and ecological consequences to the current operation of the fashion industry: sustainability in the sector has been gaining attention in recent years from those who believe that it should be held accountable for the pressure it places on the individual, as well as its contribution to increases in consumption and waste disposal.This book takes a wide-screen approach to the topic, covering, among other issues: sustainability and business management in textile and fashion companies; value chain management; use of materials; sustainable production processes; fashion, needs and consumption; disposal; and innovation and design.The book will be essential reading for researchers and practitioners in the global fashion business.
This book explores the ‘craft of use’, the cultivated, ordinary and ingenious ideas and practices that promote satisfying and resourceful use of garments, presenting them as an alternative, dynamic, experiential frame with which to articulate and foster sustainability in the fashion sector. Here Kate Fletcher provides a broad imagining of sustainability in fashion that gives attention to tending and wearing garments, and favours their use as much as their creation. She offers a diversified view of fashion beyond the market and the market’s purpose and reveals fashion provision and expression in a world not dependent on continuous consumption. Framing design and use as a single whole, the book uncovers a more contingent and time-dependent role for design in sustainability, recognising that garments, while sold as a product, are lived as a process. Drawing from stories and portrait photography that document the ways in which members of the public from across three continents use their clothes, and the work of seven international design teams seeking to amplify these use practices, Craft of Use presents a changed social narrative for fashion, borne out of ideas of satisfaction and interdependence, of action, knowledge and human agency, that glimpses fashion post-growth.
Is your company using its talent to create social value? Or is it simply managing risks? To address the problems facing society and business today, sustainability is not good enough. Instead, companies need to do their part to lead social change. In Sustainability to Social Change, leadership and social innovation experts Philip Mirvis and Bradley K. Googins share their hands-on research to reveal how leaders can design and guide their companies to create more inclusive prosperity and become agents of social change. The book reveals the inside story of how socially innovative companies are making the strategic shift from minimizing risk to creating social value. It then outlines the strategies and practices that leaders can use to address the five biggest problems facing companies and society today: Purpose, Prosperity, Products, Planet and People. Filled with real life examples, hands-on guidelines and self-assessments to rate your company's performance, Sustainability to Social Change helps you pivot your company's mindset and practices in order to enhance society and the environment, and fuel its own success. Online resources include a guide to help employees become socially conscious, operate in a purposeful company, become allies for equity and social justice, add social value at work and establish "green" habits.
As issues surrounding sustainability in the fashion industry continue to evolve, the conversation in this collection of essays from leading fashion scholars, thinkers and practitioners has been updated with current concepts and industry practices. This revised edition examines the challenges that designers, product developers, and consumers confront as they create, wear, and recycle clothing and fashion. The introductions to each section have been completely revamped to provide readers with a foundation for the concepts and principles of sustainability covered in detail in the chapter essays. Contributors include experts such as Lucy Dunne writing about how technology is helping create a sustainable fashionable future and Timo Rissanen on his innovative methods for creating fashion with zero fabric waste. New to this edition: - New sidebars focusing on an expansion of Real World Applications -Best Practices sections feature new examples of contemporary industry practices - Discussion questions at the end of each chapter - New chapter on social justice and corporate social responsibility (CSR) emphasizes the conditions of garment workers and human sustainability
