How do we build artistic practices for sustainable fashion?
A creative opportunity (and challenge) in sustainable fashion is to think about how we can reduce harm across the life cycle while creating an economic/cultural system that works for us.
If you are an individual artist, you cannot control your whole supply chain, so the simplest way to start is look for ways to buy less, stop buying new, and go local. The more money flowing through your business, the more responsibility you have to change how clothes are made, distributed, and disposed of.
People
Pay people fair wages and keep working conditions safe. We adopt MJN's principles of justice, loving care, and solidarity, and aspire to a flat pay rate, recognizing that our team today is mostly volunteer.
Bigger companies have the responsibility to make sure every business they source from also respects workers, even if their values may not be exactly the same.
Materials
Prioritize materials that don’t trigger new production. Work with textiles already in circulation, like secondhand, vintage, production offcuts, unsold surplus (deadstock), or donations. These avoid signaling companies to extract more raw materials and manufacture more goods.
Work with materials made in your region.
Choose lower-impact fabrics if it really needs to be new, like 100% recycled, no chemicals.
Design
Reduce waste. Optimize pattern layouts, use small fabric pieces creatively, and plan around available material sizes.
Make it adaptable, repairable, resizeable, modular, or easy to transform, so fewer new pieces need to be made, and one piece can be many things.
Make it last longer, with durable fabrics and strong construction.
Sale/Distribution
Prioritize local distribution, like selling nearby.
Experiment with direct-to-consumer or community sales to reduce inventory and storage.
Think about smaller-batch, to avoid deadstock and reduce inventory and storage.
Culture
Create events for swaps, resale, rental, and sharing to keep materials in circulation.
Teach classes on how to repair, style, and reuse.
Amplify practices that will lead us to a new fashion era.
Advocacy
Things won’t change without better policies and regulation. Large companies, investors, and wealthy institutions have the resources to reshape the rules of the game, so they have the greatest responsibility to fund and support policy work.
We can still contribute by joining coalitions, amplifying campaigns, signing petitions, attending public hearings, supporting worker organizing, and voting for representatives who prioritize labor rights and environmental protections.
Artists can do this is by working as groups, like Street Works, to join coalitions who specialize in advocacy issues we care about. By being in close relationship with them, we can grow to trust their expertise while also building our own, so that we can shape the policies over time.
