Sustainable practice: The future mode of temporality in fashion

Fashion is indicative of time and, serving as the interpretive and representational forms of a society, is measured against the cyclical rhythms of trend diffusion and style adoption. This article examines the function of time within the framework of historical research, reviewing the construction and translation of contemporary fashion. The temporality of material objects is further probed by an analysis of the sociocultural development of current sustainable practices to grasp the affective nature of time and its relationship to the fashion system. With an overview of emerging sustainable design practices, the relationship between time and meaning creation is critically examined, analysed and discussed. The social production of design and its utilization of the body-as-space are presented in relation to the social construction of time, explicated as part of a subjective, embodied experience. This article presents a new modality of time in how it is articulated, imitated, reproduced and reinterpreted through material culture and future sustainable practices.