Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes and Practices of Use

Longer-lasting materials and products are often promoted as a strategy to increase resourcefulness and sustainability across product groups including fashion. Yet these gains depend on changed user behavior and consumption patterns, which in fashion in particular are influenced by social and experiential dimensions, not just material products. Obsolescence of fashion products, driven by aesthetic change and tied to changing social preferences underscores the psycho-social nature of factors which affect fashion garment lifespans. This is reflected by ethnographic evidence that shows that garments which defy obsolescence do so in informal or unintentional ways, rarely as a result of design planning or material or product qualities. This article suggests a point of departure for design for durability that shifts away from a familiar focus on materials, products, and user-object relationships to instead explore material durability as emerging from strategies of human action. It suggests that durability, while facilitated by materials, design, and construction, is determined by an ideology of use.