For Water Justice in Fashion Design

According to the United Nations, the fashion industry consumes 93 billion cubic meters of water annually and 20% of global industrial water pollution comes from textile dyeing and treatment. From Indonesia’s Citarum River, one of the most polluted rivers in the world due to the dense number of local textile factories to Bangladesh’s Buriganga River considered to be biologically dead resulting from tanneries and dyeing waste, design history has chosen to neglect the role of water in constructing design narratives. Is this because water has no voice to explain the inter-existence between human and non-humans and the political ecologies at play in constructing design narratives?

Yet, the recognition for all living and non-living entities can be seen through the landmark case from 2017 when the Whanganui River which belongs to the Maori peoples in Aotearoa (New Zealand), became the world's second (after Te Urewera) natural resource to be given the same legal rights as a human being. This reflects the Māori belief in which they regard themselves as part of the universe, equal with nature. How might design justice in nature shift from privileging humans towards inter-existence in design?

Fashion’s making processes continue to build upon and reinforce dominant colonial concepts that privilege the human and reinforce how fashion design is practised through technologies of separation, control, and appropriation. Instead, decolonial thinking emphasises the significant role that coloniality plays in shaping dominant extractivist thinking, an approach that separates resources from their original contexts. Extractivist approaches ignore modernity’s roots in decontextualising knowledge systems from their sources; in a fashion context, this extractivist process then commodifies decontextualised fashion knowledges and embeds them with exchange value. This paper will discuss the challenges for re-centering water justice in fashion design to support the creation of new and possibly ‘decolonised’ fashion practices.