Craft of Use

Post-Growth Fashion

Kate Fletcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317297819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

This book explores the 'craft of use', the cultivated, ordinary and ingenious ideas and practices that promote satisfying and resourceful use of garments, presenting them as an alternative, dynamic, experiential frame with which to articulate and foster sustainability in the fashion sector.

Here Kate Fletcher provides a broad imagining of sustainability in fashion that gives attention to tending and wearing garments, and favours their use as much as their creation. She offers a diversified view of fashion beyond the market and the market's purpose and reveals fashion provision and expression in a world not dependent on continuous consumption.

Framing design and use as a single whole, the book uncovers a more contingent and time-dependent role for design in sustainability, recognising that garments, while sold as a product, are lived as a process. Drawing from stories and portrait photography that document the ways in which members of the public from across three continents use their clothes, and the work of seven international design teams seeking to amplify these use practices, Craft of Use presents a changed social narrative for fashion, borne out of ideas of satisfaction and interdependence, of action, knowledge and human agency, that glimpses fashion post-growth.

Use and Using The Stories of Ethics of Use, Material Resourcefulness and Transfer of Ownership

DOI: 10.4324/9781315647371-1

The stories of ‘ethics of use'

Brands control fashion supply chains assiduously; but downstream, after a garment is sold, the user is in charge. A user's subsequent actions can uphold a brand's values, be incurious about them or defy them in a range of direct or subtle ways. When it happens, subversion comes in many forms: the protestations of a blog, the cutting and reworking of scissors and thread, or the attitude with which a garment is worn, upending the worldview of the corporation that made it.

Long life as a political tool

I got this when I first went to New York in 1986, It's an old jumper ... early purchase and I've had it ever since. It's just from a shop out there 'J Crew' which probably, in itself, isn't ethical, but just because I've kept it all this time, I've forced them into it.

London, UK, 2010

Open imperfect

I'm wearing an outfit that was made for me by a man in Chinatown. So one day I was rushing to my medical appointment for my green card and I glanced to the right, and there was this beautiful old Chinese man approaching me, in a beautiful shirt. And I said to him, 'Wow, I love your shirt, it is so beautiful'. And then he said to me 'I made it, I made that shirt'.

And then I said, 'Oh wow, do you make clothes?'. He couldn't speak English very well so our conversation didn't really go anywhere, but I said, 'Do you have a shop or are you somewhere or can I meet you somewhere?' because he said he had more clothes. We couldn't figure it out somehow and then he said, 'come and follow me'. So I followed him ... he had a little alley that was locked off by a fence. So he opened it and put his cart and his bicycle in there.

Then he took off his shirt and he gave it to me. And then I said, 'can I give you money for it?' but he said, 'No, no, it's fine'. And then I said 'I want to give you some money for it', because I could also see he was not a wealthy person. So I gave him some money and then he said, 'shall I make clothes for you?'. I said 'Yes, please'. So we exchanged telephone numbers.

So when we meet up again he had made new clothes for me, and he had made a series so I could kind of pick clothes. He made his shirt in smaller versions for me and he made these pants for me, which are quite extraordinary, I think. And they have a lot of details (laughs). He is not a perfect sewer at all, which I love, but there is some kind of spontaneity in his compositions ... he put elastic as the fly placket.

... They are all [made from] upholstery fabric sample books, and here you have the holes still ... [from where they were bolted] in the corner? (laughs] ... I ended up with eight pieces, something like that. And I think I wear three pieces quite regularly.

This was ... I think in the late spring last year. It just touched me. He was so beautiful, and of course he also needed the money, I understood that, but I liked the way that he didn't sew so perfectly. I wish I could have this unskilled quality in my own clothes. I'm a designer, so I make clothes, and I always look for this quality. Where there's a sense of openness and spontaneity.

I [also] like sewing [with] skill ... I designed good [within] in the [commercial fashion] system ... so I also designed really finished clothes. Now I hand make clothes so I always look for that more spontaneous coming together of things. That is not restricted within the habituations of our thinking about clothes. I like things that feel free and that have a certain awareness about them.

For me it's very important that clothes are not a shield. I want to feel open to the world and I want to feel fluid in relation to the world. I don't want to feel harnessed in relation to the world [and adhering to the aesthetics of the commercial fashion industry]. So for me I always look for clothes that have this kind of opening somehow ... the kind of unexpected or unconditioned something ...

New York City, USA, 2013

Buy nothing

I'm trying not to buy anything, at all. I have a house full of stuff. I have forty odd pairs of shoes, it's ridiculous. And everything I go for I mean I have to ask that question in the shop, I actually have to ask myself if it's stuff that I already have.

Dublin, Ireland, 2012

Utility cashmere

This is a coat that my grandfather purchased at the department store Lord and Tailor, in New York City in 1957. And it is made of long staple royal imperial cashmere.

My grandfather wore it to John F. Kennedy's inauguration. And stood out in the cold, to watch John F. Kennedy be sworn in as president of the United States. And then my father wore it, thirty, forty, almost fifty years later, to president Obama's inauguration and stood out in the cold and watched it. So it doesn't fit me ... but I'm sure as I age, I will fill it out, as we all do ...

It was seen as an investment piece of course. And you had few of them ... He was a financially successful man, but he opened up his car with pliers ... he just believed in utility ...

Vancouver, Canada, 2013

Introduction

For more than five years I have been gathering stories and images from the public, like those above, exploring how people use clothes. I started because of an insistent belief that the use of fashion matters. And I continued as my understanding of the practices of garment use – and the ideas, skills and capabilities they invoke – began to grow into a new vision for the fashion sector in the era of resource scarcity, climate change and consumerism. This new view, and the stories of which it is a part, make up this book. At its heart it proposes a very simple idea of change: to give attention to tending and wearing garments; to favour their use as much as their creation. And in so doing to adopt a more ecological idea of fashion that recognises what happens beyond design and production as rich, powerful, valuable.

Pay attention to the practices of use, and we pay attention to fashion in larger contexts: the 'life world' of people who wear clothes, their actions, their ideas, how they configure materials, how their choices combine to affect the whole. Notice the context of use and we acknowledge fashion values and actions that fall outside the normal terms of reference of the market, we exercise our fashion intelligence in a broader field. Hone our attention on using garments and we may start to question the legitimacy of the assumption, firmly lodged in global understandings of success and development, that continuous growth in sales is essential, that more is better, that it leads to life.

These pages feature and reference much of the material gathered by the Local Wisdom project,¹ research that both documented how people use clothes with stories and portrait photography and explored ways in which design practice might develop with exposure to ideas and practices of use. The recording process spanned 16 locations in nine countries across three continents, and collected almost 500 tales of practices of garment use. The design work took place in seven universities and over 80 design projects (of various sizes and formats) were completed. They reveal a set of little noticed or prized practical skills, knowledge and ideas associated with using clothes; practices which quickly became dubbed the 'craft of use'.

In the course of talking to people about how they use garments, it soon became apparent that the lens of use changes our ideas about fashion provision and experience with unprecedented and profound effects. For what the craft of use represents is compelling possibilities and practicalities for fashion mainly within the clothes we already have. Using things is not dependent on producing and consuming more, and yet it fulfils many of the needs we try to meet when we buy new goods. It takes its bearings from the practices and ideas of tending and wearing, in the context of real lives. It is a diversified view of fashion beyond the market and the market's purpose, trading in the economies of time, creativity and community. Quietly–practically–directly, a focus on the practices of use is a focus on fashion not driven by the exigencies and resource impacts of rising consumption alone. It is an unnerving, refreshing and revolutionary view: a glimpse of fashion provision and expression beyond consumerism.

That such a view doesn't fit within conventional industry-sponsored ideas of change, that it doesn't reinforce an absolute loyalty to a consumerist way of life on which corporate power depends, gives the craft of use rare and disruptive influence. I should say at the outset that this book is an eclectic gathering of work in this area, a collection of starting points, and it is essential that it is adapted, improved – for these ideas hold little power without input and extension. A bold voice in this bigger conversation is yours; my fellow user, designer, producer of clothes. For the message of these pages exists only in relation to what happens in your business context, your home, your wardrobe, your life. What I have come to realise is that to use is to act, to forge a more engaged future of our own choosing and, in so doing, to provide us with an opportunity to develop the capacity and skills to navigate our own route not just through our fashion choices, but also through life. It is as the Spanish proverb s...