Abstract
This dissertation employs qualitative inductive research methods to address the ‘problem of global fast fashion’. Currently the global production of garments is 62 million tonnes per annum with the majority of production occurring in the world’s poorest countries with limited human rights and labour and environmental protections. From 1994 to 2018 following the easing of trade protections in Developing countries and internationally, there has been a 400% increase in the tonnage of clothing produced internationally. This figure is only escalating. As the level of global clothing waste grows following global clothing consumption rates, the drive to expand the market is fueling the production of vast amounts of poor-quality textiles and resultant textile waste. In Developed countries 67% of textile waste is commercially on-sold as second-hand clothing to mostly Developing countries. The need for ever cheaper fashion production processes creates ethical concerns for global garment workers and those who sort and dispose of garment waste. Garment workers are 80% women and often women of colour living in Developing countries with few employment options.
Meanwhile, textile practitioners and clothing designers in Westernised countries such as New Zealand, are experiencing heightened job precarity and an increasingly diminished space to exercise creativity, sustainable innovation, and social critique. The research interviews local Otago (Ōtākou) textile practitioners who upcycle clothing within their practice assessing how these localised creative actions connect to the larger global ‘slow fashion’ movement, including the ‘clothing upcycling’ movement. This method involves the reutilization of discarded textiles and clothes to make items of a higher value than the original materials. The slow fashion movement uses a systems-based theory to illustrate the global ‘fast fashion’ network demonstrating that constructive input is needed from all players; industry, government, practitioners, and the public/consumer to develop a more sustainable fashion system.
This research takes a practitioner-focused angle to situating the issue of fast fashion viewing clothing upcycling as a form of ‘creative social enterprise’ and a ‘designer/activist’ role necessary in shifting the current fashion consumption and textile waste paradigm. Participants are employing a form of politics through their expression of difference. This politic can also be viewed as a post-human approach to fashion in that it is a movement responding to its time. This also links textile upcycling to historic Western fashion movements responding to Industrialism through a return to crafting.
The reasons the participants upcycle textiles, the textile and design methods they employ, the organising principles within their practice and the ideas they convey through their work all speak to the global fast fashion system and possible sustainable and more equitable fashion alternatives.
As an integral feature of the research design, a public Clothing Upcycling Seminar was held on April 24th, 2019. This day marked the anniversary of the Rana Plaza Disaster. This decision demonstrated support for the Fashion Revolution’s political stance and coordinated approach to critically examine the social and economic inequalities and human and environmental dangers of the global fashion system while celebrating and encouraging international localised slow fashion actions.