Designing Sustainable Fashion: Possibilities and Challenges

2017

At a first glance, for the clothing consumer, fashion is, by definition, a term contradicting sustainability, being based on cyclical changes of aesthetics. The accountability to which today’s product design specialist is bound, in order to provide sustainable products, while observing ethical and technological rigor concerning environmental protection, can be transferred, through the product, to the consumer who becomes responsible, in his turn, for consumption of the product and all other post-consumption actions. This accountability has changed the lifestyle of consumers, which has led, in turn, to the emergence of ecological requirements relating to products in general and to fashion in particular. Thus eco-fashion emerged, an antithetical concept to fast-fashion, a specific concept of consumerist economy. Fast actions bring innovation and quick feedback, while slower ones provide stability, promoting holistic thinking and causal chains of responsibility; a combination of the tw...

2014

This paper is focused on the sustainability design theme in relation to fashion and, specifically, how to create a service which gives 'value' to the product. This specific part was presented as part of the results of Sofia Aiello's Design for the Fashion System Master Degree thesis. Starting, then, from a problem the goal is to educate consumers in alternative fashion product 'consumption'. How can consumer awareness be raised? How can consumers be made aware of the quality of the garments they buy and wear? How can the first steps towards sustainable fashion be made without falling into a facile utopian slogan trap? Starting from the past, from ways of saving, conserving and looking after clothing to create a system which discourages consumers from throwing their clothes away and encourages them to create new bonds with these and build a history with them. Responding to these questions and finding potential solutions to them required analysing the issue in depth, tracing an ideal fashion system development trajectory and describing its characteristics and action methods. Overall, then, the main objectives of this paper are threefold in order to demonstrate that sustainable design in contemporary fashion is: 1-NECESSARY 2-AFFORDABLE 3-POSSIBLE

International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education, 2019

The purpose of this research was to identify perceptions and attitudes toward sustainable fashion from personnel involved in fashion design and to uncover the challenges in implementing sustainable design practices. Data were gathered through qualitative open-ended questions in five interviews, and 50 fashion designers were selected as research subjects for a survey. The major findings of the research show that there are internal (personal and organisational) and external challenges to incorporating sustainability into the fashion design process. Internal challenges consist of the lack of consensus and knowledge regarding sustainable design, lack of design-led approaches implementing sustainability in fashion and perceived trade-offs with other design criteria, such as aesthetic styles, costs, and fashion trends. External challenges include the complexity of sustainability issues, perceived insufficient consumer demand, attitudes and behaviour gaps in consumer purchasing decisions on sustainable collection ranges and insufficient incentives or values for businesses to implement sustainable design strategies.

2011

The fashion industry has been aware of social responsibility and sustainable practices for some time recently. It is still a challenge for this industry to successfully incorporate and interweave these issues in the current concept of commodity culture. Though fashion today impacts most, if not all, aspects of consumerist culture, the primary impact is on the lifestyle industry particularly clothing. sustainable practices in the fashion sector, this role of designers has to go beyond. This would mean the designer incorporating a sustainable framework in the Design and Product Development Process. Much of the Design education today deals with issues of sustainable strategies and practices as add-ons to the basic design and product development process course work. This paper aims at identifying possible areas in the Design process where the issues of sustainable strategies and practices can be interwoven into the process itself. Information and data will be gathered from design institutes, design educators and design businesses in India to identify points in the Design and Product development process that are conducive to enhancement leading to innovation for sustainability. It is proposed to use this research as a base to further determine the barriers, constraints, facilitators and enablers to incorporating sustainable strategies in the Design Process course work and develop a teaching model that is more inclusive of these issues.

In Australia and New Zealand the practice of outsourcing fashion and textile production has led to the parallel outsourcing of some of the resulting negative environmental consequences. However, the loss of manufacturing jobs and an increasing amount of consumer sales being directed to offshore brands also contributes to emerging social and economic problems. This practice-led research aims to encourage a broader perspective of waste minimization as a strategy to address the known problems of postconsumer textile waste that result from a consumer focused, global fashion system. The author proposes a theory of minimization, throughout the production cycle, as a potential design strategy to generate a stronger commitment between the fashion industry and more sustainable design practices. A culture of excess and wastefulness, that devalues fashion garments without conscious consideration of the raw material, production or design value, is impacting the potential for more sustainable consumer practices. In addition to textile waste, excess exists in manufacturing processes where the cost of labour is devalued and the need to develop designed, streamlined, efficient and ethical manufacturing methods is not as significant to reducing production costs. An exploration of design practice that engages with a reductive method of design development, through alternate strategies for garment cutting, patternmaking, grading and construction, provides the basis for an analysis and discussion of how design can contribute to reducing waste within the designer fashion industry. Design is proposed as a driver for a localized fashion scene focused on developing micro-fashion business models. The implications of this project are that a focus on waste as a physical byproduct of contemporary manufacturing systems, producing product for an international fashion marketplace, is leading to missed opportunities for developing localized, sustainable design solutions. Keywords: fashion, textiles, design, sustainability, waste minimisation, practice

IJMRAP, 2022

Fashion industry is considered as one of the largest contributors of pollution in the world. The continuous degrading condition of environment has led to a clarion call to adopt sustainable methods not just at every stage of the manufacturing process but also for the afterlife of the garments when it reaches the customers. this paper attempts to explain the need to focus on the simple yet important ways that can be taken by people to safeguard the depleting natural resources. As the fact that cannot be ignored that both the companies and the consumers equally bear the responsibility to pave the way towards sustainable fashion.

2012

Fashion is a huge industry and affects environmental, economic and social system in many ways. Exploitation of resources for ever changing trends in fashion is immense and providing these demands put enormous pressure on the environment. In such a situation sustainable practices in every human activity has become important and fashion is not less affected by this drive. Fashion professionals have to play major role to inculcate the concept of sustainable fashion with responsibility in their product line. It is important that while designing, designer should understand the benefits of sustainable operation starting with concept development level. In this paper design solutions for sustainable fashion are inferred in a design school scenario. The main idea to do so is to develop more sensible and responsible designs, which can be better solutions for sustainable fashion. The sustainable fashion was achieved to a certain extent by using available materials to its ultimate usage, using waste material, recycling of the products, planning second life for the fashion product, slowing down the fashion etc.

International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts (IJCRT) , 2023

To determine the development of sustainable fashion practices, the study analyses the roles and viewpoints of designers and customers. "Assessing the Progress of Sustainable Fashion Practices" responds to the issues brought up by Rina Singh, the creator of the brand Eka, who feels that the term "sustainability" has become overused in the fashion business. According to Singh, the majority of Indian fashion firms should adhere to sustainability as a basic philosophy rather than just as a marketing strategy. The study examines the idea of sustainability from both the standpoints of designers and consumers. In an effort to bridge the gap between modern and traditional Indian components, designers have been shown to embrace a design approach. By including classic styles that may be worn repeatedly, this method discourages mindless consumption and indicates an intentional effort to encourage sustainable practices. Additionally, consumers are essential to the development of sustainable fashion. The article stresses the significance of mindful consumption and exhorts readers to make careful, long-term clothing purchases. Consumers may substantially help the fashion sector adopt sustainable methods by adopting this mentality. The implementation and effects of sustainable fashion techniques are generally critically evaluated in this study, taking into account the views of both designers and consumers. The research highlights the need for ongoing efforts to close the gap between rhetoric and reality while also shedding light on sustainability's difficulties and successes.

2015

This working paper is a discussion of different notions and conceptions of aesthetics that may be at play in the development of new design. The empirical cases discussed in the paper derive from the context of design education in a module aimed at developing a new design expression for contemporary, sustainable fashion. In programming the didactic setting for the students’ projects, several types of aesthetics must be considered: the aesthetic codes of the textile and fashion design discipline, both in terms of materials and expression, deriving from within the design practice itself, and the aesthetic codes of mediated expressions seen in, e.g., fashion magazines, which create a frame of aestheticization influencing how fashion expressions are valued. In this field of tension between internal aesthetics and external aestheticization, the students set out to create a new design expression for sustainable design, which brings them close to a third aesthetic mode: an avant-gardist aes...