Designing Fashion's Future: Present Practice and Tactics for Sustainable Change

Description

How do fashion designers design? How does design function within the industry? How can design practices open up sustainable pathways for fashion's future? Designing Fashion's Future responds to these questions to offer a fresh understanding of design practices within the sprawling, shifting fashion system. Fashion design is typically viewed as the rarefied practice of elite professionals, or else as a single stage within the apparel value chain. Alice Payne shows how design needn't be reduced to a set of decisions by a designer or design team, but can instead be examined as a process, object, or agent that shapes fashion's material and symbolic worlds. Designing Fashion's Future draws on more than 50 interviews with industry professionals based in Australia, Asia, North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. These diverse perspectives from multinational retailers, independent and experimental contexts ground the discussion in contemporary industry practices.

Alice Payne is Professor and Dean of the School of Fashion and Textiles, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include the fashion design process and the problem of design for sustainability within the fashion context. Alice is also an award-winning designer, investigating design for sustainability in fashion via practice-led research.

Clear-sighted, rich and enlightening: this is a book for our times of change. * Professor Kate Fletcher, Centre for Sustainable Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK * Starting with the question, "can fashion ever be truly sustainable?", Payne offers a thought-provoking, engaging, and comprehensive examination of today's fashion systems, sub-systems, and networks and the tactics and practices necessary for system changes. A must-read for all who aspire to fashion themselves and others for a sustainable future. * Leslie Davis Burns, Oregon State University, USA * Dr Alice Payne expands the discourse in fashion and sustainability by articulating exciting concepts such as taming and rewilding fashion. The book takes on the critical task of redefining fashion and fashion design to better empower us to face the challenges in the global fashion system today. * Dr Timo Rissanen, Associate Professor, University of Technology Sydney, Australia * Designing Fashion's Future is a must to read for all interested in the future of fashion. A comprehensive fashion system is laid out to help us think about the challenges ahead. Fashion must be navigated, disrupted, and modified within the larger world system to evolve into a more sustainable model. * Marilyn DeLong, University of Minnesota, USA *