Inclusive Fashion

I have previously written about the concept of designing things to be sustainably short-lived. And in this article I will explore that thought further, which is also a part of my plea for democratic sustainability.

Sustainable living and consumption should be affordable and accessible, as well as the norm. And hence, when designing to encourage sustainable, resilient living, one must focus on mass-encouragement, and not only on creating sustainable solutions for the fortunate few.

Encouraging an elite of well-informed, well-off people to live sustainably and to invest in long-lasting, aesthetically sustainable products simply won’t be enough to turn around the disastrous direction we are headed environmentally at the moment, and only adds to increasing inequality and discrimination.

Inclusion is needed!

Sustainable short-lived products should be created to perish after a short period of usage by mimicking the patterns of a natural ecosystem. Such products dissolve without “help”: without the usage of complex take-back or recycling systems that convert waste into new materials or by reprocessing using chemical processes or heat. They deteriorate when a person is done consuming them.

Sustainable short-lived products are materialisations of planned obsolescence, only in a sustainable manner! Such objects are made to become obsolete after a short period of usage — and hence they make well planned perceived obsolescence “legal.”

I have previously discussed planned and perceived obsolescence as well as anti-trendy perceived obsolescence and have expressed the view that these mechanisms are the reason for the immense overconsumption that is partly guilty of the ecological disaster that we are currently facing worldwide.

If planned and perceived obsolescence are infused into things that are not created to naturally alternate or deteriorate this has devastating consequences.

However, what if objects were planned to become obsolete in a sustainable manner? If designed or planned to be obsolete after a short period of usage — if created to naturally and sustainably vanish after consumption — then perceived obsolescence would no longer pose a threat to our environment.

Short-lived objects could then be justifiably made to be trendy, fashionable, and fleeting.

Short-lived objects could be things that are not made to be used in various milieus and environments or for many different occasions, but that are made to be situational and transitory.

Instead of pointing fingers at consumers who purchase trend-based items, one should nudge consumers into doing so in a more positive way. If all trend-based, fleeting things were made out of quickly and safely biodegradable materials, trend-shopping wouldn’t be a problem at all.

In a late-modern society, wearing trend-based items is a way of communicating and reflecting one’s identity, especially for teenagers. The problem herewith is actually not this mechanism itself, but that this mechanism is based on the (over)production of items made from unsustainable, polluting materials, and that such items are often produced in an unethical way.

The design of sustainable short-lived objects could be inspired by nature: a beautiful, aromatic frangipani flower that looks and smells amazing for a short period of time and then falls off the tree, withers, and deteriorates. A single-use as well as a trend-based item should be exactly like that: made to be functional or to decorate, enhance, and seduce for a short period of time, and then disappear.

Such a product would embrace the cycles and natural changes of life, and would embrace and celebrate our inherent need for change and flexibility and for expressing ourselves and communicating our identity and our belonging to our “tribe” or peers. Such short-lived fashions could spice up our long-lived belongings, and by doing so maybe also increase their perceived lifespan.

I magine clothes that are predestined to never get washed, which in relation to environmental preservation would make good sense since washing clothes can be very pollutive—it releases soap and fabric softener into groundwater and might even shed microplastic—as well as resource demanding using large quantities of water.

Trendy clothes could be designed to be worn only a few times and there would be no need for them to be made to endure washing, or wear and tear. If clothes weren’t meant to last for a long time, it would be possible to innovate usable fabrics radically, as they wouldn’t have to be hard-wearing.

Very few natural materials that are currently commonly used for clothes-production—cotton, viscose, hemp, or silk—are organically biodegradable because they contain chemicals in order to increase their lifespan.

However, if clothes were made to naturally deteriorate after a short period of usage, increasing resilience wouldn’t be an issue, and adding chemicals to natural materials in order to prolong their lifespan would be unnecessary. The issue would then be to make use of materials that aren’t resource demanding or increasing the deforestation of the world by removing more areas with natural biodiversity and replacing these with farmed land.

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I will continue this discussion in my forthcoming article with concrete material options and solution scenarios. Thank you for reading.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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