Alice Payne - Designing Fashions Future

DESIGNING FASHIONS FUTURE

Dr Alice Payne is an Associate Professor in Fashion in the School of Design, Queensland University of Technology. Her research centres on environmental and social sustainability concerns throughout textile and apparel industry supply chains. Alice has examined perspectives on sustainability along the cotton value chain, the cultural and material flows of post-consumer textile waste, and design processes of mass-market product developers, independent fashion designers and social entrepreneurs. She is co-editor of the book Global Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion (Bloomsbury 2019). As a researcher in QUTs Centre for a Waste-Free World, Alice collaborates with colleagues from across the university on initiatives addressing waste. Alice is also an award-winning designer and has exhibited in Australia and overseas.

DESIGNING FASHIONS FUTURE

PRESENT PRACTICE AND TACTICS FOR SUSTAINABLE CHANGE

Alice Payne

For Willa

Thanks, mate

Figures

Tables

Perhaps most books stem from irritating conversations. Heres two that provoked me. First, at a university open day, a father saw my sticker saying Ask me about fashion design and he waved me away saying, No thanks, not fashion, I dont have a daughter. And yet here you are, I said, wearing clothes. He just gave me a funny look and walked away (fair enough). The interaction is familiar many people perceive fashion as having nothing to do with them. To him, I would say, my friend like it or not, fashion concerns you and your son as much as it may have concerned the daughter you never had. As a clothed human you are fashioned in culture, in time and in place. Regardless of whether you consider yourself fashionable, your clothes came to you through global production networks at once designed objects, the outcome of an industrial process, at once things in motion, drawn from the earths materials. Knowingly or not, you participate in fashion, a system of dress comprised of industry, culture and change.

Second story: A decade ago, when I told a colleague I was going to research fashion designers in the mass market, those who design socks and t-shirts and jeans, she said, Thats not design, what they do. Not design? Did these garments spring fully formed into being, of their own volition? Were they plucked from trees? A cheap t-shirt may not be good design, or ethical design, or original design, but it is absolutely designed; a host of decision makers called it into being. Of course, the fault lies not with either of them, my colleague and the father at the open day. Their view of fashion design is one shared by most people: its the frocks worn by thin women on runways, or its the creative propositions of avant-garde designers. In actuality, I propose that fashion design is far more.

In this book Im calling for a redefinition of fashion and a redefinition of fashion design practice. I argue this redefinition is essential if people, communities and industries are to grapple with the devastation both cultural and material wrought by our current fashion systems and the larger systems in which they are nested. The conventional definition of fashion design is the conceiving of new garment designs. Yet far beyond garments, fashion design must be redefined to include the design of fashions value chains, business models, materials, processes, brand stories and trend stories and beyond these again, as the agency the designed exhibits in locking in processes and practices. In building this systemic view of fashion design practice, I draw upon some sixty formal interviews with research participants and hundreds more informal conversations. In this book I build up a picture of fashion systems from the perspective of those working within them and, in so doing, trace the functioning of design decisions throughout. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, with all its attendant challenges, my hope is the redefinition of fashion design I am putting forward will show a pathway for future practice. So, if youve picked up this book thinking its about the conventional view of fashion design a word of warning I barely mention Coco Chanel, just saying .

This is a really important, very timely book that brings together many disparate areas of study to make a significant contribution within fashion studies, fashion design and design more broadly. Different theoretical conceptions of fashion are carefully discussed and then grounded in very specific, empirical examples and the real life of fashion (for designers, brands and consumers). Alice Paynes approach and definition of fashion design and definitions of both separately (fashion and design) is really innovative. By teasing these terms apart she provides an intellectual framework for considering fashion and fashion design on two scales or registers from the design practices occurring within the dominant model of fashion system and design in these fashion systems within these systems. She importantly asserts the need to think about fashion design beyond the usual auteur model of the high-end designer, to consider all the various actors and practices involved in the design of mass fashion garments. This is an important corrective and long overdue understanding of fashion design within fashion studies, which tend to privilege designers but not consider the role design plays throughout and across the entire fashion system/s.

The definition of fashion offered is also really creative, exciting and groundbreaking. Here, fashion is defined in a broad and all-encompassing way in contrast to other fashion publications which define it more narrowly or focus on specific features predominantly, such as fashion-as-change, fashion-as-culture and fashion-as-industry, or, indeed, fashion as northern modernity. This definition builds a comprehensive understanding of the shifting networks of both material and immaterial fashion production, promotion, use and destruction, at all manner of scales which offers a comprehensive way of thinking through fashion design both in terms of histories, geographical scale and lifecycle. This scaling up and down geographically really works and is woven (pun intended) into the chapters which focus either on the systems or narratives that sustain fashion design, and looks at a very micro-level at how these systems, practices and narratives form part of the daily professional narratives and practices of fashion designers themselves.

All of this defining and framing makes for a far more interesting, creative and exciting lens through which to consider fashion sustainability. Indeed, this is the book on fashion sustainability Ive wanted to read for years (!). Unlike other books that stay within a very narrow definition of what fashion, design or sustainability means, the author creatively repositions sustainability within a much wider intellectual, social, ethical and practical context.

Designing Fashions Future also successfully repositions sustainability within the context of a comprehensive understanding, as well as historically and geographically located context, of what fashion as a system or multiple systems means. Discussing issues that are normally kept separate, this book bridges the gap between literature on fashion design practice with more scholarly, intellectual literature of fashion as culture/idea.

Drawing on material studies and ANT provides a much-needed analysis of the many material and non-human components that assist with, comprise and shape fashion design practices. Indeed, the book does incredibly well to locate this analysis of fashion, fashion design and sustainability within the intellectual and scholarly debate concerning fashions evolution, and connects this intellectual tradition and history to debates about design studies and material studies. This bridging of the gap between fashion design and other forms of design is also what makes this a valuable book