Miguel Angel Gardatti, Director of the Sustainable Textile Centre in Buenos Aires, whom I have met through the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion (RCDF), paid me the huge honour of inviting me to write the 'Afterword' for his forthcoming book, Florecencia y Defashion: Desmantelande la violencía de la moda. In part, this was an acknowledgement of my having coined the term 'defashion', a word that we desperately need to indicate the radical and total change in the way fashion is perpetrated in the world. My response to Dr. Gardatti's invitation is now translated into Spanish and accompanies the other chapters on the publisher's desk, due to arrive on the market in April 2026. Stay tuned for more information about the events that will surround the launch of this significant book, and how you will be able to purchase it.
Afterword
By the end of COP30, it was still impossible for all the parties to agree to a reduction of oil and gas. The industry and its associated governments were recalcitrant. The willing were profoundly frustrated and signed the final text with reluctance. The urgent burden of building a world without fossil hydrocarbons felt heavier and more daunting than ever. And then something remarkable happened. Leading political figures from Colombia and The Netherlands, with the full support of the President of COP30, began to prepare the way for the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels to be held in Colombia in April 2026.[1] If the roadmap to a fossil-free world could not be drawn on the formal stage, by dint of the will of the members it would be drawn nevertheless.
Progressive and ambitious fashion community, take note! COP30 presents us with a model! It has become clear that the growth of industrial fashion, ever since its inception, has been a function of fossil fuels: as fuel, as synthetic fibres, and as bedmate and glamourous promoter, directly and implicitly, of high fossil carbon lifestyles. We will never cease to love and long for beautiful ways to adorn the body -- nor do we have to -- but the industry of fashion has exceeded its ‘best before’ date. Growth in the industry is sacrificing the planet. This is indefensible. It is clear that the industry of fashion must go. It is time for the radical concepts of Defashion and Florecencia to be made normal.[2]
The Roadmap
Normalization is a process. Vision and goals are laid out in this volume, but there is no roadmap, only steps. The road will be made collectively and iteratively, by walking.[3] The good news is, we are already stepping out.
This we know: a milestone will be reached when the industry of fashion is no longer recognized as having a leading role to play. Like the fossil fuel industry, it is unable to lead; it is entrenched in business as usual to expand profits. It is unrealistic to expect the industry to hang out a new north star. Collectively, we must build an alternative fashion world outside it, from the ground up. Decolonized, the road will be a coalescence of plural and multilateral paths. Those paths will bring us from centralized, industrial fashion dominance to the diversity of the pluriverse. Except intuitively and abstractly, most of us are unfamiliar with a fashion pluriverse. Aside from members of some relatively independent tribal communities, everyone alive today knows only the dominance of the industry of fashion. And yet we must assume the challenge of building the pluriverse of alternatives.[4]
Industrial fashion has encouraged consumption addiction through many forms of social compulsion. This raises questions: What is fashion when it is not a pathology? When advertising is not a condoned pusher? When styles are not dictated from above? When cultivating shame is no longer part of the game? When the sell is not sexualized? When enslaved millions, especially women and especially in the Global South, are free to make clothes in their own traditions? When clothes are treasured and not squandered? The end of the extractive and predatory fashion industry may be as difficult to envision as the end of capitalism, but it also offers new latitudes for our creative powers. We can step into that world. Homo sapiens created the original fashion pluriverse; collectively, we can do so again.
Initiatives ‘from below’ are already leading and building momentum: mending, second-hand, farm to fashion[5], earth-friendly fibres[6], reshoring and localizing clothing production[7], reduction[8], and recycling[9]. Central – though too often ignored – is the obligation to treasure what still remains of the fashion pluriverse that existed before the erosive industry emerged.[10] We are already in transition. But mending and sharing clothing are no silver bullets to reduce fashion consumption. Like research into earth-friendly materials, they are steps along the way. Early road construction. Lagos Fashion Week, recipient of the 2025 Earthshot prize for building a waste-free world[11], is another step. The prize sent the message that overproduction and overconsumption are complex problems that need to be tackled from multiple angles, in this case circularity, craft-driven innovation, and community empowerment. Indirectly, the message is that strategies from the Global South are innovative and indispensable. Notably, however, Lagos Fashion Week still operates within the idiom of the conventional fashion system.
How can the ante be upped? What should be the next steps, proportional to the current urgency, to call a halt to fashion’s sacrifice zones, including waste, toxins, unfair labour practices, erosion of alternative and indigenous systems of dress, insidious fashion advertising, and fashion’s support for fossil-heavy lifestyles?
There is a need to call the parties together in an International Conference to Design the Pluriverse of Fashion, to transition away from the Industry of Fashion. The behemoth must be superseded consciously and systematically. This volume, sharing visions for a fashion pluriverse, is a flagstone in the groundwork for a multilateral conference. A roadmap can be drawn to assemble the willing, to note and track, COP-style, their contributions to reduce dependence on the industry, as well as their heightened ambitions as time progresses. This is an indispensable step to be embarked on immediately. However, the frustrations and failures of COPs also warn of its limitations.
Fashion as Ecosystems
The more profound transition is ontological shifting. For this, there is no roadmap. Without it, fashion can be reined in, but not replaced. Shifting from where we are now to where we need to be, will be iterative because it is transformative. Walking that road into existence will change the players as much as the landscape. Alarmingly, current trajectories of climate, soils, water, and species diversity, in short, physical landscapes, will be steadily degrading en route, and this will require unprecedented adaptation in the process of building fashion systems in synch with planetary boundaries. The possibilities available to us dwindle as we dawdle.
Dress in the pluriverse will be plural because it is cued to local circumstances, expressions of local genius rooted in unique historical and cultural relationships. Dress is not just a series of objects, but material expressions of relationships with the many environments in which those items are embedded. Recently Agus Ismoyo, batik maker in Yogyakarta, Indonesia invited an American audience to “look beyond batik as a finished product and instead experience it as a living process — one shaped by ecological rhythms, philosophical inquiry and spiritual intention.”[12] An ecological perspective would generate a different, more holistic definition of fashion. It is instructive to compare fashion to a flower. The conventional point of view is focused on the flower. An ecological perspective will see that the quality of the flower depends on the whole plant: leaves, stem and roots. The health of those parts requires rain and sunlight and an enabling climate. The quality of the soil is also at issue, with all of the minerals, fungi and micro-organisms that are requisite for plant growth. In addition, there are insects that visit the flower, without which the plant cannot reproduce, and the insects cannot survive[13]. To adapt the question posed by ecologist, Rex Weyler[14], where are the boundaries of the flower – ergo fashion? The latter intersects fully with history, technology, the physical environment, culture, economy, politics, and people from makers to wearers. To limit the focus to the flower is to miss the fullness of the phenomenon of fashion. Ismoyo’s holistic insights echo a recently-penned definition of fashion (Niessen 2023) that emphasizes its ecological connections in the broadest sense.[15] The current pathology of fashion is systemic and not to be cured through any single component or intervention, but rather a collective shift in ways of being on our planet.
Ismoyo may be a harbinger of this kind of change. “I am part of nature,” he explains, “I grow within it. I am not separate from it.”[16] He is quick to note that his process of learning the spiritual depths of batik cannot be steered because control and domination are antithetical to living within planetary boundaries. His path is iterative and made by listening care-fully to his natural and cultural environments.
Christiana Figueres, Chief Negotiator of the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015, now chair of the Earthshot Prize, has consistently assumed the burden of goading and guiding the globe’s dominant economic and political players towards a fossil-free world. Now, ten years after the agreement was endorsed by the parties, she expresses concern about the failures on the part of those same players to step up to ensure the future health of the planet. In her ever-optimistic struggle to find a way out of the impasse, she, too, has recently (2026) underscored the need to ‘shift our worldview’: to recognize belonging within the entire web of life, rather than dominance; to replace short or long-term thinking with continuity; and to move away from extraction and toward relationships and reciprocity. She expresses her debt to Indigenous wisdom, “grounded in care and balance, harvesting only with intention and always giving back in recognition of what has been received…this wisdom is not optional, it is fundamental.”[17]
The concept of defashion was conceived in the awareness that the indigenous dress systems – although currently being sacrificed by the growth and dominance of the industry of fashion -- need to be recognized as signposts on potential paths towards planet-friendly ways of dressing. They are proof of how the task of dressing in harmony with cultural and natural surroundings has been accomplished many times, in every culture, throughout history. Learning to read and understand the wisdom inscribed in these traditions is as urgent as the need to reclaim our clothing from the dominance of the fashion industry.
If fashion represents ecologies of being, not just a succession of styles (as the industry is advantaged by having us believe), then conclusions must be drawn. Then shifting from fossil-based clothing is of no trifling significance. Dressing the body is a cultural universal; it is culturally ubiquitous, deeply rooted in the history and culture of every society throughout time. Ingredients of dress are prominent in histories of the earliest trade; textile idiom has informed thought and language; textile-related techniques have shaped human capacity through engineering, medicine, farming, shipping, the list is long. Currently, the monetary wealth and CO2 footprint of the industry is ballooning. Coming off fossil fashion would contribute significantly to lowering the temperature of the climate crisis. But more than that, the conceptual ecosystems of fashion, developed since it was industrialized, must not be underestimated. Fashion’s role in proliferating conceptions of modernity and linear time is an example. Taking back not just our physical items of clothing, but also the conceptualizations of fashion, is an enormous and daunting challenge. Sustainability will not come with new fibres, linking with craft production, reductions in production and consumption, nor mending and recycling. It will come from all of that, in addition to a process of learning to live gently on our planet, with respect and care. Changing the way we do fashion has the potential to alter the very fabric of our existence. How profoundly reclaiming our clothing from industrial reliance on fossil fuels can shape the trajectory of getting off oil and gas is difficult to say, but it has significant potential. The urgency to kick our fossil addiction weighs heavily. Let us endorse the onus to reclaim our clothing from fossil hydrocarbons and thereby assume a significant role on the path towards a healthy planet.
Let us call together the parties to liberate our clothing from the industry of fashion and (re-)build the Pluriverse of Dress. Let us defashion and flourish.
Selected Sources
Figueres, Christiana and Rivett-Carnac, Tom. – The Future We Choose: Surviving the climate Crisis. Manilla Press. 2020.
Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1970.
Interbeing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbeing
Ismoyo, Agus, personal communication, 2 january, 2026.
Machado, Antonio. Campos de Castilla, 1912.
Niessen, Sandra. ‘Violence by Definition’. In Pierre-Antoine Vettorello (ed), The Yarn [Zine] Issue 1. Antwerp, Belgium. 2023.
Niessen, Sandra. ‘Fashion, its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability’. In Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 24:6. pp. 859-877. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2020.1800984
[1]The roadmap proposal https://fossilfueltreaty.org/first-international-conferencewas the initiative of the Minister of Environment of Colombia, Irene Vélez Torres, and the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Climate Policy of the Netherlands, Sophie Hermans. They worked with the support of the COP30 president, André Aranha Corrêa do Lago https://cop30.br/en/brazilian-presidency
[2] The US Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont argues repeatedly that extreme wealth in the hands of the few is what is radical, not moves to reduce disparity in wealth, which are often what are deemed ‘radical’. The claim being made here is parallel: a clothing industry that sacrifices the planet is radical in the extreme, and begs for reform. In this light, the sanity of doing away with the industry must be normalized.
[3] ‘The road is made by walking’ has been inspired by Paolo Freire, (author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed) who may have taken it from Antonio Machado’s Campos de Castilla (1912): “Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road– Only wakes upon the sea..“ https://brianmclaren.net/we-make-the-road-by-walking-where-did-the-title-come-from/
[4] The conclusions to The Future we Choose (2020), an inspiring work by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, written after the Paris Agreement to set out the steps that must be taken to get off fossil fuels, concludes with a chapter entitled, ‘The New Story’. It starts with two premises:
“First, even at this late hour we still have a choice about our future, and therefore every action we take from this moment forward counts.
Second, we are capable about making the right choices about our own destiny. We are not doomed to a devastating future, and humanity is not flawed and incapable of responding to big problems if we act.” (p. 163)
[5] Many exciting initiatives are happening here, including increased adherence to bioregionalism. Liflad https://liflad.substack.com and Fibershed https://fibershed.org are initiatives to watch.
[6] Earth-friendly fibres – A tremendous amount of successful and productive research is being devoted to this theme, but this focus is often, narrowly and erroneously, perceived as being synonymous with ‘sustainability’.
[7] Technological developments will enable the ambition to make clothing local. Fantasy Fibre Mill is an example of an initiative to invent machinery suitable to the task at a local level. https://www.fantasyfibremill.com
[8] No great successes have been booked in this regard, aside from urging individuals to change their consumption habits (e.g. https://www.sustainablyurban.ca/blog/the-10-garment-challenge-year)
[9] To date, recycling initiatives have yielded disappointing results. In the end, little clothing is ultimately recycled, only 1% becoming new clothes due to issues with technology, finance, and fibres. There are expectations that technologies will improve and, with time, the other conditions as well. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20201208STO93327/fast-fashion-eu-laws-for-sustainable-textile-consumption
[10] Our Common Market highlights alternatives https://www.ourcommon.market
[12] Agus Ismoyo, together with his wife, Nia Fliam, and son, Desmond, recently invited an audience in Washington, D.C. to “look beyond batik as a finished product and instead experience it as a living process — one shaped by ecological rhythms, philosophical inquiry and spiritual intention.” https://museum.gwu.edu/artist-talk-and-trunk-show-batik-character-cosmos-and-creation
[13] Credit is due the notion of ‘interbeing’ given profile by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. Coincidentally, he used the figure of a flower in one of his explanations of interbeing: “When we look deeply into a flower, we have the impression that the flower is full of everything. There is sunshine inside, there’s cloud inside, there is earth, minerals – even our consciousness is in the flower. Time, space, everything… It looks like everything in the cosmos has come together to help the flower to manifest as a wonder. So the fact is, the flower is full of the cosmos.” (2021) be’https://plumvillage.app/to-be-means-to-inter-be/ July 12, 2021.
[14] Rex Weyler, one of the founders of Greenpeace, during an interview with Nate Hagens (Roundtable #2, Deep(er) Ecology: William Rees, Nora Bateson, Rex Weyler, 2024, 22.00 – 24.08) posed the question, ‘when does the nitrogen of an apple being eaten cease to be of the apple and started to be of the person eating the apple?’ He argued that individuals are integral expressions of entire ecosystems, and emphasized the importance of species diversity for the success of the entire ecosystem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE39xfNRRyw
[15] “Fashion is ecologies of dress and bodily adornment through which we express our relationships with our environments.” (Niessen 2003)
[16] Agus Ismoyo, personal communication, 2 January 2026.
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