Holistically embracing mindfulness: Enriching slow fashion for enhanced well-being

Abstract

This research explores slow fashion in relation to its capacity to holistically embrace mindfulness in order to enrich the sustainable approach to fashion for enhanced well-being. Slow fashion seems to embrace a concept at the heart of mindfulness practice: awareness. Mindfulness is a state of awareness that involves accepting a clear focus on present realities. The emerging phenomenon of mindfulness is developing as a potential force for cultural change. The current predominant fashion system supports growth-focused, fast fashion, which has been destructive to environmental and human well-being. Existing scholarly discourse has identified the urgency for a significant cultural shift to alternative approaches, resulting in the emergence of a sustainable and ethical fashion space. Slow fashion, within this space, is considered through a lens of mindfulness as a conceptual framework for both practices within a fashion context. The research aims to examine key components of the two movements and discuss how the practices unite or vary and the implications of their union within the fashion system. A close examination revealed a further intertwined relationship, identifying select components of mindfulness that contradict elements of slow fashion and other components theoretically congruent with slow fashion criteria. Slow fashion has the capacity for a more conscious and holistic embrace involving the theory and practice of mindfulness. In doing so, an enriched slow fashion approach, encompassing design, production and consumption, would be enabled within the current fashion system to improve outcomes for the environment and human well-being amongst the wider community. Critically, an alignment between slowness and mindfulness intrinsically guides us towards a collective consciousness of each other, our interconnection with the environment and our internal and external realities, signifying strength in connecting interdisciplinary theories that unite in methods and mindsets that may allow thriving within natural limits.