Invent Your Own Fashion Economy: Post-Growth Cultures

Abstract

This paper responds to a flux of transitional movements happening in fashion, questioning its current role within industry and society. Alternatives are being sought that provide sustainable solutions and choices within the practice of fashion. A move towards post-growth cultures can help create new functions, roles and responses for designers, educators and communities - highlighting a need for development of fashion experiences outside of market-led products and profits. This paper introduces The Ripple Effect Tool, created by combining alternative economies, sustainable cultures and lifestyle habits across social movements. The tool is designed as a responsive tool for interaction, evolving processes for designers and communities to re-define values, and stimulate new approaches towards fashion economies and cultures as lived experiences. The paper discusses testing-in-action research to explore how the tool can be applied as interventions in the design process and daily action of fashion practice. A workshop was designed to test the tool’s ability to be personalized and used in collaboration with industry professionals. This helped investigate how future versions of the tool could be shared back in an open source loop, encouraging alternative combinations of elements to continually evolve in use and sustain practices. In conclusion, moving fashion forward using methods that design with audiences, rather than upon them, encourages fashion agency, to take back fashion practice and build sustainable communities. The Ripple Effect Tool aims to provide both autonomous and collaborative routes that empower designers’ and audiences’ choices, so each can be enabled to participate through inventing their own fashion economy and in turn create a ripple effect of fashion sustainability.