Fashion Design for Sustainability: A framework for participatory practice

To foster an understanding of our interdependence as humans in the natural world, new ways of knowing, doing, being and learning to live together must be formed. Such a dramatic shift from dominant worldviews of control over nature towards co-existence involves critical reflection of intentions, beliefs, habits and practices at personal, societal and species levels. Fashion Design for Sustainability (FDfS) explores living well together in nature through fashion’s social, industrial, cultural, economic and educational dimensions from micro to macro scales. This research explores FDfS with participants across a spectrum of engagement, circumstances and locations to invert the current fashion system from one that exacerbates relationship inequalities, to one of interdependence. This paper describes a framing for fashion in such a context, developed to be in constant beta, maintaining its underlying ambition, whilst informed by participants.