Giving a Damn and Hyperopia: Decolonizing for Sustainability

The more effectively a clothing company functions the more destructive it is (to the world). That is the nature of the beast. (Kate Fletcher)

On the 5th of June, 2019, I attended a community event at ArtEZ (a tertiary art and design education institution in Arnhem, The Netherlands). The Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion was the first item on the agenda. Kate Fletcher, Research Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at University of the Arts London and one of the original founders of the Union, was there to explain the Union. She elicited interests and concerns specific to Arnhem/The Netherlands. Laudably, the Union organizes such assemblies to keep in close touch with its members. 

[I encourage readers to look up the union website: concernedresearchers.org. ArtEZ stands firmly behind this initiative just as I do. It has the potential, as a global movement, to be a game changer that we so desperately need. Print out the Manifesto and hang it on walls and doors!] 

Kate Fletcher said something during her introduction that remained on my mind throughout the afternoon: "It turns out that it is easier to conceptualize the end of the world (as we know it) than a world that is not driven by capitalism." Think about that! Scary! --  given that it behooves us to think of, and live, alternatives to capitalism if we would like to postpone the end of the world. 

The group split up into smaller discussion units to hash out a variety of fashion sustainability concerns and then reported back. We did not discuss that scary paradox but the entire session was devoted to fashion re-visioning. Kate Fletcher's words were always in the back of my mind.

By the end of the day, some wind had returned to my sails. A collective framework had emerged. We all talked about the same things: making fashion more fair; making fashion better meet our needs by bringing it closer to home; making fashion more precious so that we stop throwing it away so wantonly; recognizing the physical world in our clothes. Two red threads that ran through it all included: 'caring' and 'togetherness', two of the words that Kate would bring back to share with the Union. 

I brought them home with me, too. The power of caring and doing it collectively! Eureka! The wrench in the capitalist wheel! Collective caring demolishes the primary credo of maximizing wealth at all cost. It would change everything. Nature would not be raped and pillaged to satisfy vanity; labours of love would prevail above worker exploitation; our clothing would not be made of oil and would biodegrade; and I daresay all wearers of such clothing would be happier. But how to achieve this utopian world, so exciting to consider? 

Aye, there's the rub!

We need examples. As I cogitate on Professor Fletcher's visit, I am struck by how profoundly we need anthropological knowledge, awareness of how other societies have organized their apparel, the awareness of alternatives. How limited we are if we can't think of a single one!

The word 'fashion' is no doubt part of our problem. The literature references the 'fashion system' as though it were singular -- while in fact it has morphed endlessly since fashion began (whether that beginning is assigned to the 17th 18th or 19th century). It has trickled up and trickled down and spread sideways, imposed itself and appropriated. As economics made visible, fashion's talent is to adapt endlessly to change. To position Western fashion as a monumental entity relative to non-fashion is to promulgate two pieces of fake news at once. Western fashion is, in fact, varied and not monumentally singular. And because fashion is ubiquitous, non-fashion doesn't exist. Everywhere there is and always has been fashion, in every society and in every time period. The examples out there are endless. The notion of fashion has shortened our vision.

Decolonizing fashion is of critical importance in this time of environmental crisis. It makes it possible to see different fashion systems; acknowledge and respect them; give them room to survive; learn from them: care about them collectively. That would be a fashion revolution. 

Decolonizing Fashion -- and the Bulang

I wrote a blog for our Research Collective for Decolonizing Fashion and felt it fair to share it here as well, since my recent ideas have been so strongly informed by the Weaving Centre in North Sumatra.

Not too long ago, I attended the State of Fashion exhibition in Arnhem (June - July 2018).  It was a magnificent exhibition, well worth the more than 12 hours that I spent there in total. As someone who has considered the decolonization of fashion from an anthropological viewpoint[i], the exhibition gave me important new insights into what decolonizing can and should mean. It really is a revolutionary concept. I learned that much of thought-shaking significance has transpired since I wrote about what amounts to the racism of Western Fashion -- but I also perceived that the State of Fashion still needs to undergo more decolonizing to become whole.

Let's face it. The West is NOT superior. It is the Big Bad Wolf. The West is the undisputed leader in destroying our beautiful-but-abused Planet Earth. The conceit that we in the West have managed to uphold as descendants of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution is surely due for eternal rest, but it is still ubiquitously alive and, unfortunately, kicking. Fashion is our proof. The West had it, but the rest did not, according to conventional wisdom. Now that the rest seems to be having it too, we lull ourselves with the happy delusion that the world has become a more fair place and that 'they' have caught up. In reality, this global fashion system demonstrates that the tentacles of our destructive, now global, economic system have reached the farthest corners of the globe. It is exploiting the universal human need for clothing and body decoration to reproduce itself everywhere like a virus. The process is complex and can inspire creative anti-fashion, contra-fashion, alternate fashion and subversive fashion responses as people tangle with its dominance, but it also true that local indigenous systems of clothing dynamics are wiped out quietly in its path and claim no headlines as they go. 

At the State of Fashion event, people who work critically within the fashion system scrutinized it thoroughly and unapologetically. Fashion has failed, was their message: it is hugely wasteful, the most destructive industry after oil and gas; it serves to make the rich richer on a massive scale; it ruthlessly denies local creativity; it alienates us all by failing to take account of our emotional needs; it heartlessly tells us that we are lacking unless we buy in, literally; it straightjackets us into filling expectations about gendered ways of being; it refuses to keep abreast of developments that could reduce our ecological footprint; it uses fibres that destroy our rainforests and water; pesticides and herbicides that ruin our soils, dyes that turn our rivers black; labour practices that reduce makers to slaves. Buying in is an agonizing form of global suicide. This is not the fashion that we want!  We are seduced and railroaded into buying and wearing what we abhor in principle.

So, what is the fashion that we want? Can do we achieve it again? (Yes, it was once available.) What are the changes needed? How do we go about achieving those changes? What kinds of new systems and structures do we need to create?

The State of Fashion shone its light on a plethora of strategies currently being explored: new dyes, fibres, construction techniques. New systems of making, new ways to value and not waste, new ways to recycle and re-use. It encouraged conscious reflection on what fashion is and what it should do for us, and on the thought systems incorporated in the making of fashion. It was deep, thorough and thoughtful and it should be required fare for all. May the exhibition travel!

What I saw in the exhibition and its programs was a gratifying awareness of humanity. It was not Us vs them (the West vs the rest, Those with Fashion vs those without). It was about constructing a new, global fashion morality; about respect for our deepest needs and longings as creative, gendered, caring, diverse humans; about fairness to all involved in fashion production, and also consumers and our dear Mother Earth. It passionately and earnestly conveyed the imperative of breaking free of the straightjacket into which the global Fashion system has strapped us and the boundless potential that revised clothing production holds for creating goodness in the world.

For all its rightness, however, it failed to integrate the fundamental awareness that fashion is NOT and has NEVER BEEN exclusively Western. It focused on the reformation of the Global Fashion System. Yes! Necessary! Kudos! But it did that almost exclusively, and in so doing, it continued to walk on the same fundament on which the Western Fashion System was constructed in the first place.  Its recognition that there are other fashion systems was weak. They have always been there -- although now largely forgotten and ignored, and worse yet, undermined and destroyed by that obese, conceited Western variant. Among those desecrated systems are examples of what is being sought in the West: sustainable systems that meet local needs, that don't harm the earth, that respond to local creativity, that are not exploitative, that are meaningful, that do good for all involved. They were always overlooked in Fashion Studies. Now they are still being overlooked in critical fashion analyses.

I attended a thoughtful session in which I tried to explain my own efforts to keep an exemplary system in a Southern nation alive. "Who can support me in this effort? How can I find support?" I asked. From this radical group, I expected and desperately wanted an endorsement, a recognition of the preciousness of my alternate, non-Western fashion and of its importance as an ideal or a model for our current industry, an answer to so many of our questions, a possibility of working together, of turning the non-Western example into a potential hero of a disastrous Western story, a way to build more fairness in the story of North and South. I was disappointed.   One answer that I received was, "Why not appeal to a church group for charity? They may be interested in craft." And that from a foremost leader in The Netherlands for changing the fashion industry. I should not have been surprised. I know that there is still no extant framework by which to assess my tale and my passionate quest to save an indigenous fashion system. I want collaboration, and recognition from industry and producers that what the Global Fashion System has almost completely decimated is still available to be supported and recognized as the ideal that they are looking for. Before it is too late, and the last jewels have been quashed in its merciless path.

There is plenty of urgent work to do. We, the Research Collective for Decolonizing Fashion still need to impress upon teachers and practitioners how powerful and pervasive the colonial and racist notion of Fashion still is, that a new Fashion model must accommodate and respect cultural diversity and multiple historical narratives, that our Obese Global Fashion Mono-System must, in the future comprise diverse threads, diverse patterns, multiple layers, and various techniques; that it must be restorative of what it has crushed in its thoughtless, greedy pursuit of wealth. For me, that would be 'the new luxury'. It is there, and has been there all along, but it will not be seen or found unless fashion is decolonized.

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[i]Niessen, Sandra. 2010. “Interpreting ‘Civilization’ through Dress” in the first international (10-volume) Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion  Vol 8: West Europe, Part I: Overview of Dress and Fashion in West Europe. Oxford: Berg Publishers, pp. 39-43. 

Niessen, Sandra. 2003. “Afterword:  Reorienting Fashion Theory”  In Niessen, S.A., A. Leshkowich, and C. Jones (eds.)  Re-orienting Fashion:  The Globalization of Asian Dress.  Oxford:  Berg Publishers.  pp. 243-266.