Stitching fashion together through multivoiced perspectives
Fashion and design must embrace the contributions of the more-than-human world.
As a fashion designer and researcher, I understand that, while my name might be stitched into the neck of a garment, design is never an individual endeavour. However, the media, the fashion world, and even educational discourse all uphold the myth of the designer as the solitary creative. This profoundly distorts ideas of authorship and reciprocity. The multitrillion-dollar industry that clothes us and provides us with opportunities for self-expression at personal, community and societal levels, rarely recognizes and regularly abuses its myriad human and more-than-human contributors.
Fashion, individualism, and sustainability
Fashion is personal and public, functioning as both a second skin and a barometer of our times (Lars Svendsen and Joanne Entwistle are notable among the cultural historians and social scientists who have analyzed the latter dimension). It is also a massive system of production and consumption. While a global audit has yet to be carried out, estimates suggest that at least 150 billion garments are made each year. Fashion’s vast scale makes it an apt mediator in discussing the practice of interdependence that Thich Nhat Hanh terms interbeing. Framing fashion with such questions of relational identity and belonging renders absurd the myth of individualism that props up consumerism. The fashion and beauty industries ride high on such notions, a fact well-articulated by L’Oréal’s iconic slogan “because I’m worth it.”
However, fashion’s debt to nature has been dramatically called in by environmental change and the climate crisis.
However, fashion’s debt to nature has been dramatically called in by environmental change and the climate crisis. The industry’s response has largely consisted of risk management, and ultimately the continued commodification of nature. There is no sign that sterling work toward understanding environmental impacts through life-cycle analysis and materials and product innovation will stem fashion’s harm to the more-than-human world. McKinsey’s 2025 State of Fashion report projects apparel consumption to rise by 63 percent, to 102 million tons, by 2030. If the industry continues its current trajectory, it will use more than one quarter of the world’s carbon budget by 2050 (Ellen McArthur Foundation, 2019). Despite this, sustainability is slipping down the agendas of many of the worst emitters.
Toward a more-than-human fashion
The fashion world has yet to experience a more-than-human turn. Such a transformation will require attentiveness to intentional goal-setting and revisions of the system’s rules and governance design. Ultimately fashion’s ills emerge from a deeply entrenched logic of extraction and exploitation. It’s time to let go of fashion’s narrative of exceptionalism and to embrace what interbeing could mean for design, enhancing life and configuring the object-world in fulfilling and useful ways. The question is urgent: How can humans and human organizations embed reciprocity with the more-than-human world into their laws, rules, operating principles and design practices?
Luckily cultures and practices around the world provide many promising examples. At Centre for Sustainable Fashion, a university-based research and education collective of sustainability-committed creatives, researchers and educators, we have been exploring ways to live well together in and through fashion for nearly two decades. Crucially, our engagement always starts from care, concern, and practical involvement and is guided by participatory design research parameters described by Yrjö Engeström as multivoicedness, networks, tensions, qualitative transformations, and historicity. Together with social scientists, citizens, NGOs, and students, we focus on the design of fashion’s governance and raise an open call to imagine governance as stewardship. What if designers ventured beyond solving material problems to consider the design of governance? How might luxury fashion boards embody more-than-human decision-making?
What if designers ventured beyond solving material problems to consider the design of governance? How might luxury fashion boards embody more-than-human decision-making?
Concrete steps forward
Our project explores stewardship as both philosophy and practice through a constellation of four networks: a multidisciplinary research and business team, a citizen stewardship board, a group of advisors, and cohorts of master’s students. These networks exemplify Johan Rockström’s 3I principles of earth systems justice: intergenerational, intragenerational, and multispecies voices. We are now one year into a three-year process of co-investigation.
The citizen stewardship board, NGOs, and others at this year’s Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen role-played our first prototype for governance redesign. This spectacle of stewardship invited discussions about interbeing that recognized the tension in intentions, knowledges, capabilities, and agency among participants. The conversation grappled with how different humans speak of the more-than-human and the power dynamics, fears, and constraints—both real and otherwise—that restrict the design of multivoiced governance.
The more-than-human world is something we all experience. However, participants’ imagination of what is possible and valuable in governance differ vastly. In year two we intend to bring MOTH governance to life by exploring:
- Designers as condition-creators and garment-makers, able to balance conflicting conceptions of stewardship.
- Materials as mediators of dialogue, translation, conflict navigation, and practices of care.
- Role-play and possibility imagining as methods of design prototyping, testing, and iterating.
- Fashion as a powerful site for reciprocity with the capacity to expand ecological literacy and dissolve myths of separation.
This work is ongoing, its findings emergent. It is not about a product made but one in the making, an emergent and paradoxical process rather than a static condition. As we embark on the second phase of the project, we seek ways to recognize fashion as a series of relational practices mediated by material parts. Without recognition of and credit given to the more-than-human world, fashion is nothing but the emperor’s new clothes. There are no garments to stitch labels into on a dead planet.
