Post Growth Fashion and the Craft of Users

In order to bring about change, sustainability has to be real to people. Yet we know very little about people’s everyday experiences of fashion and sustainability. For instance, how does it feel to wear a garment that connects us with others? What is our understanding of engaging with sustainability through the clothes we wear? Just as each of these personal experiences is different, so is each person experiencing them. Yet most of our experience of fashion has no space for this heterogeneity: instead what we face is a limited set of fashion encounters, reproduced in London, Tokyo or Sydney. This is but one of many flashpoints that signal the profound nature of the sustainability challenge for the fashion sector. A challenge that requires us to transform not only fashion products and manufacturing processes but also fashion’s context, its rules and goals, business models and methods of promotion. In this chapter I explore the interconnections between real, lived experiences of sustainability in fashion and what they suggest about the shape and structure of the industry that formed them. My interest is in amassing a collection of ideas that improve fashion qualitatively and not in quantitative scale. Together these ideas offer a tentative glimpse of prosperity in fashion that exists outside the economic and business model of growth.