SUSTAINABILITY IN FASHION in Summer 2020 (CM5091-3WK1)

Fashion is mediated to us as a constantly changing series of fashionable, style-building products. Yet, the many processes that go into a product, all its ingredients and treatments, its full journey, its true cost, the hundreds of hands that shape it, often go unrecognized and even unrecorded. Moreover, the fashion and textile industries have grown from a diverse set of situated craft practices to an interconnected global business of unprecedented scale and speed. In this process its geographic, economic and temporal dimensions, cultural and aesthetic practices as well as environmental and human impacts have changed dramatically.

This course explores fashion not (only) as product but process. It explores this industry from field to fashion and investigates the complex global fashion system from cultures of extraction, design, manufacture, to cultures of representation, consumption, wearing and disposal/re-use. The fashion chain will be studied through a series of rich textual and visual sources, lectures, debates and visits. Moreover, in recent years a discourse of sustainability has been mobilized – also in relation to fashion, used to critique, challenge and redirect the current fashion system but also employed as a marketing tool. We will explore the concept of sustainability, its history and meaning, its language and its limits. How is it possible to unlearn and undo today’s finite fashion system which relegates its “consumer” to passive users rather than active makers?