Fashion Design

The clothing industry employs 25 million people globally contributing to many livelihoods and the prosperity of communities, to women’s independence, and the establishment of significant infrastructures in poorer countries. Yet the fashion industry is also a significant contributor to the degradation of natural systems, with the associated environmental footprint of clothing high in comparison with other products.

Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion recognizes the complexity of aligning fashion with sustainability. It explores fashion and sustainability at the levels of products, processes, and paradigms and takes a truly multi-disciplinary approach to critically question and suggest creative responses to issues of:

• Fashion in a post-growth society

• Fashion, diversity and equity

• Fashion, fluidity and balance across natural, social and economic systems

The chapter 'Fashion Design' explores the ways that fashion, whether bespoke or mass production, is a human experience, an exchange with others, activated through the designer as relationship and shape maker. Fashion designers are well placed to explore what this engagement between people and materials might mean. Its practitioners however, not withstanding pioneering people and organizations, do not actively express the breadth of contribution, or the authentic marks of time and place that fashion, when seen in this broader way, might seek to identify. Sustainability exploration offers such an opportunity, seeking radical re-imagining and re-designing of ways in which we can connect, and co-operate through fashion.