Fashion Design and Laundry Practices: Practice-Orientated Approaches to Design for Sustainability

This doctoral enquiry develops practice-orientated approaches to design for sustainability. It focuses on the relationship between garment design, laundry practices and sustainability, and responds to research that evidences domestic laundering as one of the most environmentally damaging stages in a garment’s lifecycle (Allwood, et al.,2006; Hansen, et al., 2007).

A one-year laundry study surveyed the use and laundry of sixteen garments to ascertain the relationship between garment design and laundry behaviour. The research findings revealed that laundry behaviours are complex and unpredictable, and often not directly linked to producing cleaner clothes. Laundry routines are underpinned by factors beyond cleanliness including: garment use, social auditing, garment aesthetics,life stage, cultural norms, and spatial arrangements within the household.

Through re-examining laundry as a social practice the research develops a series of design provocations to challenge the organisation of laundry practices, and by extension the frequencies and processes in which laundry is carried out. The findings highlight that understanding laundry as a social practice opens a space to reconceptualise design, laundry behaviour and sustainability. It decentres material products and attends to the embedded social dynamics that are set within a nexus of spaces, materials, thoughts, actions and emotions. This provides an alternative lens from which to view and develop design theories and practice for sustainability in fashion. The central insight from the research shows there are multiple benefits from incorporating social theory into methodologies for design for sustainability.