Sustainability in Fashion

Dilys Williams was invited by The National Portrait Gallery to speak on fashion and sustainability to a public audience. Dilys shared some of the reasons and means for fashion to make a distinctive contribution to our collective prosperity.

Abstract:

Fashion is a series of vibrant actions and interactions manifesting peoples’ ideas, needs, likes and skills in tangible forms, often but not exclusively mediated through creation and communication of worn artifact. In the words of Joanna Finkelstein, fashion is a hybrid phenomenon, located at the interstices between economics and art, psychology and commerce, creativity and banality… as a social, economic and aesthetic force and more often than not, all three at the same time.’ Fashion’s effects occupy spaces on our streets, in our workplaces and homes, spanning physical and virtual locations. It acts as a microcosm of wider social, ecological, cultural and economic wonders and horrors in our world.