Sustainable fashion textiles design : value adding through technological enhancement

A key concern in the field of contemporary fashion/textiles design is the emergence of ‘fast fashion’: best explained as "buy it Friday, wear it Saturday and throw it away on Sunday" (O'Loughlin, 2007). In this contemporary retail atmosphere of “pile it high: sell it cheap” and “quick to market”, even designer goods have achieved a throwaway status. This modern culture of consumerism is the antithesis of sustainability and is proving a dilemma surrounding sustainable practice for designers and producers in the disciplines (de Blas, 2010). Design researchers including those in textiles/fashion have begun to explore what is a key question in the 21st century in order to create a vision and reason for their disciplines: Can products be designed to have added value to the consumer and hence contribute to a more sustainable industry? Fashion Textiles Design has much to answer for in contributing to the problems of unsustainable practices on a global scale in design, production and waste. However, designers within this field also have great potential to contribute to practical ‘real world’ solutions. ----- ----- This paper provides an overview of some of the design and technological developments from the fashion/textiles industry, endorsing a model where designers and technicians use their transferrable skills for wellbeing rather than desire. Smart materials in the form of responsive and adaptive fibres and fabrics combined with electro active devices, and ICT are increasingly shaping many aspects of society particularly in the leisure industry and interactive consumer products are ever more visible in healthcare. Combinations of biocompatible delivery devices with bio sensing elements can create analyse, sense and actuate early warning and monitoring systems which can be linked to data logging and patient records via intelligent networks. Patient sympathetic, ‘smart’ fashion/textiles applications based on interdisciplinary expertise utilising textiles design and technology is emerging. An analysis of a series of case studies demonstrates the potential of fashion textiles design practitioners to exploit the concept of value adding through technological garment and textiles applications and enhancement for health and wellbeing and in doing so contribute to a more sustainable future fashion/textiles design industry.

A solution to fashion textile unsustainability

Today, polarisation of the fashion textile industry has already begun as smart, intelligent and conscientious fashion emerges as a backlash to the experience of choice fatigue, poor quality, dumb design and greenwash. But the process, development and manufacture of fashion textiles is complex. And the demand, both customer and industry driven, for new integrated product policies,2 designed to minimise environmental impacts by looking at all phases of a product's life cycle, is problematic due to complexity and a lack of networking tools. This article explores these issues through the construct of the department store of the future.

The Fleet Store : pop up fashion retail gallery

The Fleet Store is a project that was created to research the impact of enterprise and authentic learning models, in increasing the viability and improved career potential of fashion business, design and creative industry (fashion major) students. Reflective Thinking techniques were employed to gain valuable insights into the quality of the experience, the networking and the motivational and experiential learning for all students. The lecturer acted as the Managing Director and curator of the entire event while maintaining pedagogy to support the experience. Research focussed on the ways in which student learning outcomes have been improved by creating product a professional and economically viable pop up fashion outlet in an inner city, high profile shopping precinct. The first QUT double degree fashion business students were supervised and guided to be responsible for creating and maintaining a profitable fashion outlet in collaboration with their lecturer Kay McMahon, Wintergarden Management, Brisbane Marketing, Creative Enterprise Australia and QUT Fashion. Reflective thinking and further research into career outcomes (that are acknowledged as being supported by the experience) are currently being undertaken.

From cultural to creative industries : theory, industry, and policy implications

Across post-industrial societies worldwide, the creative industries are increasingly seen as a key economic driver. These industries - including fields as diverse as advertising, art, computer games, crafts, design, fashion, film, museums, music, performing arts, publishing, radio, theatre and TV - are built upon individual creativity and innovation and have the potential to create wealth and employment through the mechanism of intellectual property. Creative Industries: Critical Readings brings together the key writings - drawing on both journals and books - to present an authoritative and wide-ranging survey of this emerging field of study. The set is presented with an introduction and the writings are divided into four volumes, organized thematically: Volume 1: Concepts - focuses on the concept of creativity and the development of government and industry interest in creative industries; Volume 2: Economy - maps the role and function of creative industries in the economy at large; Volume 3: Organization - examines the ways in which creative institutions organize themselves; and Volume 4: Work - addresses issues of creative work, labour and careers This major reference work will be invaluable to scholars in economics, cultural studies, sociology, media studies and organization studies.

Reflections around artefacts : using a deliberative approach to teaching reflective practices in fashion studies

While requiring students to think reflectively is a desirable teaching goal, it is often fraught with complexity and is sometimes poorly implemented in higher education. In this paper, we describe an approach to academic reflective practices that fitted a design subject in fashion education and was perceived as effective in enhancing student learning outcomes. In many design-based disciplines, it is essential to evaluate, through a reflective lens, the quality of tangible design outcomes - referred to here as artefacts. Fashion studio based practice (unlike many other theory based disciplines)requires an artefact to be viewed in order to initiate the reflective process. This reflection is not solely limited to reflective writing; the reflection happens through sight, touch and other non-traditional approaches. Fashion students were asked to reflect before, during and after the development of an artefact. Through a variety of media, a review of the first garment prototype - called a Sample Review - occurred. The reflective practices of students during the Sample Review provided a valuable insight into their own learning, as well as a valid assessment indicator for the lecturer. It also mirrored industry practices for design evaluation. We believe that this deliberative approach, characterised by artefact-prompted reflection, has wide applicability across undergraduate courses in a variety of discipline areas.

Fashion, the body and technology : tracing early 20th century techno-utopian ideas, aesthetics and impulses in 21st century wearable technology

‘Wearable technology’, or the use of specialist technology in garments, is promoted by the electronics industry as the next frontier of fashion. However the story of wearable technology’s relationship with fashion begins neither with the development of miniaturised computers in the 1970s nor with sophisticated ‘smart textiles’ of the twenty-first century, despite what much of the rhetoric suggests. This study examines wearable technology against a longer history of fashion, highlighted by the influential techno-sartorial experiments of a group of early twentieth century avant-gardes including Italian Futurists Giacomo Balla and F.T. Marinetti, Russian Constructivists Varvara Stepanova and Liubov Popova, and Paris-based Cubist, Sonia Delaunay. Through the interdisciplinary framework of fashion studies, the thesis provides a fuller picture of wearable technology framed by the idea of utopia. Using comparative analysis, and applying the theoretical formulations of Fredric Jameson, Louis Marin and Michael Carter, the thesis traces the appearance of three techno-utopian themes from their origins in the machine age experiments of Balla, Marinetti, Stepanova, Popova and Delaunay to their twenty-first century reappearance in a dozen wearable technology projects. By exploring the central thesis that contemporary wearable technology resurrects the techno-utopian ideas and expressions of the early twentieth century, the study concludes that the abiding utopian impetus to embed technology in the aesthetics (prints, silhouettes, and fabrication) and functionality of fashion is to unify subject, society and environment under a totalising technological order.

Nourishing or polluting : redefining the role of waste in the fashion system

Waste is intrinsic to the fashion system. Fashion is predicated on built-in obsolescence, and as such outmoded garments are rapidly discarded to charity shops or landfill. However, the story of fashion is also one of abundance and extravagance in design ideas. Every season there are new design details – prints, embroidery, embellishments, shapes and textures. This excess of ideas is in itself another form of waste, albeit one that is culturally nourishing. The grave of a fashion garment may also be the grave of a season’s research and creativity. This paper compares the tangible waste of the industry with its intangible waste, namely fashion’s creativity and cultural excess. Fashion’s excess and abundance of trends and ideas makes any move to curb the environmental impact difficult. For all practitioners of fashion – whether designers or consumers – the waste and excess inherent in the fashion system is a difficult ethical terrain to negotiate. However, inverting the wasteful phases of the production cycle can help reframe waste from pollution to a source of nourishment for future practice. While creative excesses of designers may be ‘wasted’ after a season, fashion styles and tropes are recycled and reinvented, with the once passé styles and design ideas from previous years revalorized and returned into the fashion system. Similarly, material garments acquire new value through entering or re-entering the second hand or vintage markets. Design processes can utilise pre or post-consumer textile waste, or eliminate waste through design. In these processes, waste becomes the primary source of nourishment for future fashion cycles.

Fashion meets journalism : mapping and evaluating Australian fashion media

This study demonstrates how to study fashion journalism from the point of view, that it is its own field of journalism, akin to other journalism beats such as politics, sports and health. There is scope here for comment on the co-evolution of fashion and journalism, leading to ‘fashion journalism’ developing as a distinct field of study in its own right. This research contributes more generally to the field of media and cultural studies, by developing the threepart producer/text/reader model, which is the standard ‘media studies’ analytical framework. The study of fashion media from a cultural studies perspective acknowledges that cultural studies has pioneered the formal study of both journalism and fashion, for instance in studies of women’s magazines; but it has not brought the two areas together sufficiently. What little work has been done, however, has allowed theorists to explore how magazines promote feminism and form culture, which acts as a step in concreting fashion’s importance theoretically. This thesis has contributed to cultural studies by showing the relationship between the corporate industry, of both fashion and media (producer), and the active audience (reader) can be rethought and brought up to date for the more interactive era of the 21st century.

The knock-on from the knock-off : recent shifts within Australian mass market fashion design practice

Australia's mass market fashion labels have traditionally benefitted from their peripheral location to the world's fashion centres. Operating a season behind, Australian mass market designers and buyers were well-placed to watch trends play out overseas before testing them in the Australian marketplace. For this reason, often a designer's role was to source and oversee the manufacture of 'knock-offs', or close copies of northern hemisphere mass market garments. Both Weller and Walsh have commented on this practice.12 The knock-on effect from this continues to be a cautious, derivative fashion sensibility within Australian mass market fashion design, where any new trend or product is first tested and proved overseas months earlier. However, there is evidence that this is changing. The rapid online dissemination of global fashion trends, coupled with the Australian consumer’s willingness to shop online, has meant that the ‘knock-off’ is less viable. For this reason, a number of mass market companies are moving away from the practice of direct sourcing and are developing product in-house under a northern hemisphere model. This shift is also witnessed in the trend for mass market companies to develop collections in partnership with independent Australian designers. This paper explores the current and potential effects of these shifts within Australian mass market design practice, and discusses how they may impact on both consumers and on the wider culture of Australian fashion.

Fashion system Shanghai : the advent of a new gatekeeper

The term fashion system describes inter-relationships between production and consumption illustrating how the production of fashion is a collective activity. For instance, Yuniya Kawamura notes systems for the production of fashion differ around the globe and are subject to constant change, and Jennifer Craik draws attention to an ‘array of competing and intermeshing systems cutting across western and non-western cultures. In China, Shanghai’s nascent fashion system seeks to emulate the Eurocentric system of Fashion Weeks and industry support groups. It promises emergent designers a platform for global competition, yet there are tensions from within. Interaction with a fashion system inevitably means becoming validated or legitimised. Legitimisation in turn depends upon gatekeepers who make aesthetic judgments about the status, quality and cultural value of a designers work. Notwithstanding the proliferation of fashion media, in Shanghai a new gatekeeper has arrived, seeking to filter authenticity from artifice, offering truth in a fashion market saturated with fakery and the hollowness of foreign consumptive practice, and providing a place of sanctuary for Chinese fashion design. Thus this paper discusses how new agencies are allowing designers in Shanghai greater control over their brand image while creating novel opportunities for promotion and sales. It explores why designers choose this new model and provides new knowledge of the curation of fashion by these gatekeepers.

How do Chinese fashion designers become global fashion leaders? A new perspective on legitimisation in China’s fashion system

The term fashion system describes inter-relationships between production and consumption, illustrating how the production of fashion is a collective activity. For instance, Yuniya Kawamura (2011) notes systems for the production of fashion differ around the globe and are subject to constant change, and Jennifer Craik (1994, 6) draws attention to an ‘array of competing and intermeshing systems cutting across western and non-western cultures. In China, Shanghai’s nascent fashion system seeks to emulate the Eurocentric system of Fashion Weeks and industry support groups. It promises designers a platform for global competition, yet there are tensions from within. Interaction with a fashion system inevitably means becoming validated or legitimised. Legitimisation in turn depends upon gatekeepers who make aesthetic judgments about the status, quality, and cultural value of a designers work (Becker 2008). My paper offers a new perspective on legitimisation that is drawn mainly from my PhD research. I argue that some Chinese fashion designers are on the path to becoming global fashion designers because they have embraced a global aesthetic that resonates with the human condition, rather than the manufactured authenticity of a Eurocentric fashion system that perpetuates endless consumption. In this way, they are able to ‘self-legitimise’. I contend these designers are ‘designers for humans’, because they are able to look beyond the mythology of fashion brands, and the Eurocentric fashion system, where they explore the tensions of man and culture in their practice. Furthermore, their design ethos pursues beauty, truth and harmony in the Chinese philosophical sense, as well as incorporating financial return in a process that is still enacted through a fashion system. Accordingly, cultural tradition, heritage and modernity, while still valuable, have less impact on their practice.

Fashion meets journalism : mapping and evaluating Australian fashion journalism

Fashion journalism can be understood as a complex, inter-dependent set of professional practices that have arisen in a variety of media at the intersection of fashion and journalism. This thesis, Fashion Meets Journalism: Mapping and Evaluating Australian Fashion Journalism, answers the question, 'What is Australian fashion journalism?' in three stages: First, it maps the extent of fashion journalism across media in Australia to locate the field and focus on the sites of fashion journalism; second, it foregrounds practices of the journalism branch, evaluating how and why the field is pitted against other types of journalism when they share an inter-dependent set of professional practices. The opinions of leading industry producers are also sought regarding the matter. Then, considering the current position of fashion journalism, implications for fashion media and journalism are explored in order to improve the visibility of fashion journalism and solidify it as a professional practice.