Practicing Sustainability: Illuminating ‘Use’ in Wearing Clothes

Abstract

Aspects of the ordinary in everyday dressing remain elusive to fashion studies, meaning the life of what Judy Attfield calls ‘design in the lower case’ escapes notice. In this article, the authors assemble a practice-oriented perspective to illuminate ‘wearing’ as an outcome of sets of commonplace and routine practices related to dressing, that wear a garment in and out over time, and enhance the visibility of clothing use. The central example is a research project that tests the theory of loosening the meaning of clean by trialling alternative laundering techniques to understand the transition to sustain-ability, or less resource-intensive competencies in the spectrum of clothing use. The promise of an interdisciplinary conceptual framework that draws from ‘theories of practice’ at the intersection of cultural studies, sociology and design is also tested as appropriate for the analysis of the quotidian realm of wearing and laundering; the analysis is particularly assisted with sustainable design research about the transition toward sustainable ways of living such as the development of ‘slow fashion’.