Sustainability and the Fashion Media: Micro-Utopia, Social Dreaming and Hope in the Margins

Abstract

In the current media landscape, communication about sustainable fashion is so pervasive that it risks becoming background noise: a sea of “studium” that fails to “prick” the reader, despite the enormity of the stakes (Barthes 2000). This article asks how we might tell better stories when it comes to sustainability in the fashion media, drawing upon insights from fashion studies and environmental communication. The practices of fashion and dreaming are closely connected but this alliance does not always marry well with discourses on sustainability, which can elicit feelings of “green fatigue”. In light of this, the following article asks how fashion media might be used as a vehicle for social dreaming, rather than consumerist dreaming, in order to make sustainable fashion more desirable. Fashion media is about storytelling and so, too, is utopia, with this article theorizing independent media as a micro-utopian network through which radical narratives can be explored (building on Wood 2007). The focus here is on English-language content produced by independent magazines, not-for-profit organizations and academics. Taken collectively, these marginal forms of media represent a space where social dreaming is already taking place, with reference to discourses on utopia, slow fashion, and green consciousness.