Fashion Practice

The Fashion & the Senses Symposium held at LCF on 27th March 2015 was an international multi-disciplinary forum for industry professionals, practitioners, academics and postgraduate students with a shared interest in this emerging field - fashion and the senses. It was co-organised by Sara Chong Kwan, Associate Lecturer in Cultural and Historical studies at LCF and a final year PhD candidate, and Bethan Alexander,  Course Director of the MA in Fashion Retail Management at LCF.

Abstract Going against the traditional productivist nature of fashion design, this practice-based Ph.D. proposes a strategy for critical fashion practices in a research context at the intersection of fashion, fine arts and film methodologies. This interdisciplinary strategy investigates fashion in the expanded field, exploring fashion practice as a form of critical thinking, questioning the fashion system itself: a practice of unmaking, the purpose of this research is to develop a practice-based method of producing an essay film as an artistic reflection critically discussing the problems of the fashion system, providing new insights into the way a fashion designer develops new approaches that can expand the action spaces available for fashion. Since the etymology of the word ‘fashion’ relates it to the Latin factio, meaning ‘making’ or ‘doing,’ to ‘unmake’ fashion carries in itself a paradox; it is both a metaphorical undoing and a methodological one, a practice of fashion resistance by not producing clothing, a deconstruction of fashion in order to understand what it’s made of – like unpicking the seams of a jacket in order to analyse its construction. It de-constructs underlying assumptions regarding a transition to post-productivism, exposing the limitations of current market-driven fashion design processes. Drawing on Rosalind Krauss’s notion of sculpture in the expanded field (1979),  as used in the discourse on cinema (Bardon et al., 2015), this research documents the development of experimental fashion films since the 1980s and the interdisciplinary fashion practices that stand at the edge of the fashion discipline. It investigates how thought experiments can steer the creative process towards a critique of fashion, drawing from modernist conceptual and de-materialised art practices towards the development of a conceptual fashion. The research methodology developed within the practice extends the potential of communicating through the essay-film format in order to critique fashion within the contemporary context of heightened concerns about climate change and environmental issues induced by mass-production, fast-fashion, and global fashion distribution and consumption. This is developed through a juxtaposition of allegorical images resembling a thought process: the fashion image is used as a thinking-form for constructing a critique of its own systems. The thesis emphasises the importance of taking a critical stance to fashion due to the lack of self-reflection within current fashion practices, synthesising a body of knowledge to inform practitioners of experimental, critical fashion while revealing complexities within the communication of these concerns, proposing fashion as the representation of a deconstructive thought where dress itself becomes ‘immaterial’.

The author documents and discusses the independent books, magazines, and print projects produced by fashion designers since the 1980s when fashion and art aligned and fashion publishing transformed. Significant collaboration among fashion designers, graphic designers, photographers, and artists developed in the 1980s and continues in the twenty-first century. Self-published zines and lookbooks, small-press photobooks, and independent magazines point away from the fashion industry and towards the febrile and conceptual world of artists’ books and magazines. Fashion designers’ practices have expanded, and book making and publishing, rooted in art and graphic design, have become significant and symbolic multidisciplinary activities within specific networks of distribution.

In this review, I critically examine the fashion and art exhibition "fashion after Fashion," April 7-Aug 27, 2017 at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, curated by Hazel Clark and Ilari Laamanen. The exhibition design was commissioned work by six interdisciplinary artists/designers who incorporated a mix of sculpture, performance, and audiovisual material into their installations. The different installations, taken together and experienced together, acted back and upon each other in interesting ways in the exhibition, which was a strength of the curators' method; the use of commissions exclusively acted as a kind of artistic method in itself. The first and most notable thing about the exhibit was that there were no clothes on mannequins. While the exhibition's premise was on fashion, the intentional absence of clothing was a risky strategy the curators pursued to intervene in how viewers think about fashion. The installations were purposely amorphous and abstract as well to inspire a broader consideration of what fashion can be and what bodies can do. Though the relationship between fashion and the body has been a constant topic in fashion scholarship, this exhibition offered a new perspective through commissioning and showcasing the category-defying work of recent fashion and art school graduates and performance artists.

This article presents and introduces a new approach for researching into fashion, textile and clothing design. Following Christopher Alexander's understanding of a pattern language the aim is to present and propose a pattern language which assists with the visualisations and designs of garments that use narrative, non-visual forms as forms of inspiration. To visualise the descriptions of the Slovenian mythological creatures, a guided method for designing the garments was developed, based on fashion design practice and different proposed mythological patterns. Furthermore, the design components during the drawing process were defined and analysed. The above-mentioned type of research is important in order to better understand the phases in the design process during drawing. On the basis of the gained results it can be concluded that the proposed pattern language and the guided method have great potential for creating new interdisciplinary knowledge. This developed method for visualising gar-ments' forms was tested on Slovenian mythological creatures but it could be used with any written texts. Moreover the method can also be used for educational purposes and further research into fashion design processes because it provides a classified environment that can be easily observed, analysed, and discussed.

With the utterly linear way of production, distribution, and consumption, today’s fashion industry has become the second most polluting industry globally. During the conventional garment production process, considerable offcuts waste has been generated, which has led to a detrimental impact on the environment. How to minimize fabric waste during the design process has become an urgent requirement for fashion designers. Fashion practitioners have proposed plenty of sustainable examples; however, how to bring these practices into classroom teaching and create an unfettered environment for fashion design students to develop their own solutions is still a domain to be explored. Many practitioners and researchers have already addressed the necessity to evoke an alternative teaching and learning approach in sustainable fashion design education. In this article, the author set out her cross-cultural experience of conducting a fashion design workshop adopting the studio-based approach. By outlining the holistic teaching and learning process, proposing testing questions and critical reflections around pedagogy, activities, and projects, the author wishes to provide a reflective educational example on educating future designers as agents of in-depth change to contribute to the sustainable fashion industry.

The fashion industry is experiencing rapid structural change as new manufacturing and distribution technologies emerge. Simultaneously, the environmental impact of garment production and the sector’s record on workers’ rights provokes increasing disquiet. This article explores how new technologies for distributing and making clothes interact with a shifting industrial policy agenda as neoclassical and neoliberal economic paradigms lose their dominance, and state intervention becomes fashionable again.

Contemporary ready-to-wear production, which relies on manufacturing goods speculatively in hope that they will meet consumers’ needs, is massively wasteful, and the sector has experienced a series of shocks as established brands fail to correctly anticipate demand. Online-bespoke ¬– in which garments are made to the specifications of the customer ¬– has emerged as a promising sector. In changing how we buy and produce garments, can we transform how we value our clothes, the resources from which they are composed, and how we value the people who make them?

This article argues that in order to reap the benefits of new and disruptive technologies, national governments and multilateral organizations must develop industrial strategies to shift current market incentives. Protections for fledgling sustainable and technologically innovative fashion brands, along with Pigovian taxation (taxation targeting negative externalities like pollution), are required to transform the industry.

Value streams for collected post-consumer textiles continue to be analyzed within the global challenge to develop and employ commercially viable, yet ethical and sustainable strategies within the fashion industry. Upcycling is an existing strategy applicable to fashion production, with discarded materials used to design and create higher value products, keeping them in productive use for longer. A number of very small, niche upcycling enterprises have emerged in the UK. These brands have succeeded in creating stylistically relevant and commercially successful fashion styles utilizing waste textile materials. The advantages of scaling these enterprises up are not only environmental, but also economic and social, thereby creating a sustainable and innovative business model for UK-led fashion production. Due to high levels of three key metrics of carbon, water and waste, UK government agency WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) has identified textile products as prior- ity materia...

pursued a PhD at Loughborough Design School, exploring how service design can be used to activate textile artisan communities to transition towards a sustainable future. Currently, Francesco is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF), sponsored by Neal's Yard Remedies, investigating ways in which design activism can create counter-narratives towards sustainability in fashion.

This issue of Fashion Practice is the first to appear since the coronavirus pandemic emergedpermanently changing lives, livelihoods and societies, and impacting local, national and international industries worldwide. The fashion sector was disastrously affected by loss of sales, resulting in many cancelled orders, store closures, job losses, and the consequent suffering of garment workers and suppliers. The important economic and cultural role of fashion in society has been brought sharply into focus for all, whether consumers, retailers, designers, producers, industry commentators or general public.

pursued a PhD at Loughborough Design School, exploring how service design can be used to activate textile artisan communities to transition towards a sustainable future. Currently, Francesco is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF), sponsored by Neal's Yard Remedies, investigating ways in which design activism can create counter-narratives towards sustainability in fashion.

Value streams for collected post-consumer textiles continue be analyzed within the global challenge to develop and employ commercially viable, yet ethical and sustainable strategies within the fashion industry. Upcycling is an existing strategy applicable to fashion production, with discarded materials used to design and create higher value products, keeping them in productive use for longer. A number of very small, niche upcycling enterprises have emerged in the UK. These brands have succeeded in creating stylistically relevant and commercially successful fashion styles utilizing waste textile materials. The advantages of scaling these enterprises up are not only environmental, but also economic and social, thereby creating a sustainable and innovative business model for UK led fashion production. Due to high levels of three key metrics of carbon, water and waste, UK government agency WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) has identified textile products as priority materials for reuse and recycling. Upcycling enables a sustainable design option for reuse techniques to be employed for greatest economic and environmental benefit, in which used clothing and textiles are sourced for the production of newly designed fashion products. This paper identifies the key differences between standard fashion design and production processes and upcycled fashion design and production processes, in order to aid the development of large-scale fashion upcycling in the UK, and contribute to a circular economy.

As a movement, local food is well developed and its principles and practices widely appreciated. By contrast, the concepts and activity of fashion localism are far less understood. This essay looks to transfer local food experiences to the fashion context by reviewing a number of food-related initiatives and deliberating about ways in which the insights they contain may lead to smaller-scale and more diverse fashion practices. The article starts with a comparison of some of the similarities and differences between food and fashion and concludes with speculations about knowledge transfer about localism for both eating and dressing.

The general editors of Fashion Practice, Sandy Black and Marilyn Delong, would like to thank our guest editors Kate Fletcher and Ingun Grimstad Klepp for their work in developing this Special Issue on Localism and Fashion. With its focus on localism as a movement concerned with generating knowledge for change, we see an emerging concept for fashion. This reaches beyond a more familiar territory, where the notion of localism may be concentrated on marketing a place, country or region through the fiber and garments made there-for example, see the previous special issue "Fashion Made in Italy" (2014, Volume 6 Issue 2). We view this current edition as the beginning of a stimulating debate on the topic of localism

Much "Fashion thinking" is concerned with the new, the trend leading and the spectacular. Hence, much debate and theorization within this area of research focuses on fashion as a generic, institutionalized and ritualized system that continuously produces and disseminates new trends and ideals. A large body of knowledge has been developed that aims to comprehend how fashion trends emerge and connect to society and subsequently get promoted by a system of trend agencies, fashion designers, or fashion editors. In contrast to this line of thinking, other areas of research have been looking the opposite way for the last few decades, namely at the down-to-earth everyday routines of people-what is often referred to as the ordinary. In line with the development of practice theory, the area of design research has produced increasing inquiries with regard to the way people's daily practices are intertwined with time, space and objects. This paper represents a view on dress practice building on this view, with a particular focus on the issue of temporality. Based on her concept 'the biographical wardrobe' the author points to alternative understandings of dress practice that highlight how continuity rather than newness plays a vital role in the self-understanding of individual users.

This interview-article is a commentary on some of the early reverberations of Covid-19 on the fashion industry. It introduces R.i.(a)P., a work by fashion designer and professor Wowo Kraus to pull focus on some of the immediate industry reactions, and the underlying ambiguity of fashion, branding and death. Fashion evades death, just as death continues to be tabooed in global Western culture. Through its evocative aesthetic and materiality R.i.(a)P. can illuminate some of the blind spots of this industry. Here Kraus talks about the ideas and intricate making processes behind his work.

This article challenges traditional ways of understanding fashion as a social phenomenon. By considering the everyday social practice of fashion where looking, wearing, choosing, discarding, consuming, and producing fashion have central roles in understanding fashion's person-object relationships, this study advances an alternative ontological view of fashion as a volatile emotional condition and inconstant state of mind. This suggested shift in theoretical perspective is significant in understanding and stimulating change or maintaining stability in fashion phenomena and could have principal consequences for thinking and