Sustainability, living labs and repair : approaches to climate change mitigation

The year 2020 started with a massive bushfire crisis in south eastern Australia, resulting in disruption to many communities, the loss of lives and businesses, an estimated loss of a billion animals and the dirtiest air on the planet in the cities of Sydney, Newcastle and Canberra. With record-high temperatures and a punishing drought lasting several years, the Australian bush was primed to explode into flames. With lightning strikes in national parks, the spontaneous eruptions of bushfire spread from the north coast to the south and inland towards the alpine regions of New South Wales and Victoria. With the very hot year of 2019 affecting other parts of the planet in 2020, the Antarctic Peninsula reached a record 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The chapter that follows reflects the new progressive politics of climate change that emerged in 2019 with large mass demonstrations taking place in Australia and around the world and examines the critical role of universities in the mitigation of climate catastrophe. The following interventions are variably focused on the concept of ‘Living Labs’ where thinking is developed within a problem-solving ethos. The three contributions here offer ways to think about sustainability with specific reference to waste recovery, environmental awareness in urban settings and the contribution that a ‘repair’ mentality can make to a shared and re-cycled economy. With a clear-eyed recommendation that mitigation of climate change starts locally, the premise of the paper is that people can work with what is available as local solutions to specific problems. The impact of this approach can be essential to people who sense the impending catastrophe and who may have experienced the crisis directly through compromises in their health outcomes, the experience of trauma and the loss of property and livelihoods, though through no fault of their own. The links through the Western Sydney University campus, common ground to the authors to both its small bushland outpost and further to the local community it serves, suggest that the boundaries of the campus are permeable—and that Living Labs are both a means and metaphor for thinking about how the campus opens learning and knowledge creation about sustainability for its students, staff and community constituents

Australian-Japanese fashion : the folds and wrappings of cultural exchange and sustainable practices

Fashion is a global concern but its current forms and values are unsustainable. The cultural exchange underpinning Australian-Japanese fashion is a different order of global fashion, and incorporates promising practices for the future of a more sustainable fashion industry. The paper will outline the scope of a new research project on the design, manufacturing, and retail of Australian-Japanese fashion designers, in the context of increasing accountability for sustainable and ethical clothing provenance. The project maps Australian based designers’ motivations and practices who incorporate traditional and contemporary Japanese design techniques to fuse an East/West aesthetic and design sensibility: it seeks to gain a clearer picture of designers with Japanese heritage and/or training, their successes and failures in a tough Australian industry. Akira Isogawa is an internationally celebrated Australian fashion designer who speak so penly about his bi-cultural heritage and the influences of traditional and contemporary Japanese design principles and fabrics on a unique fused aesthetic, and Yoshi Jones has developed a loyal following for her hand-crafted garments that incorporate Japanese graphics, fabrics and striking re-workings of vintage kimonos. In spite of media attention surrounding the 2018 Isogawa retrospective at MAAS, there is little research on his enduring aesthetic and independent business success in a very tough Australian fashion industry where many brands have closed their local businesses such as Lisa Ho, Zimmerman, Collette Dinnigan, David Lawrence, and Marcs. Australian fashion businesses face challenges including the high-cost of local manufacturing, reduced import quotas under tariff agreements, competition from international fast fashion chains and online retailers, and fluctuating customer interest in shopping mall and online retail. The project investigates these businesses and their customers’ experiences for insights to share with an Australian fashion industry searching for more ethical and sustainable models of a design, production, and use, and alignment with the principles of a circular economy

Jacques Derrida : fashion under erasure

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is probably most renowned for confirming the popular notion that philosophical thought is slippery, difficult to pin down. Derrida is known for having a difficult style that destabilizes and unravels language and arguments to show that the meaning of a word, or a voice in a literary or philosophical text, is undecidable. John McCumber accounts for Derrida's reputation as a difficult philosopher who performs 'guerrilla raids on the French language': 'The best way to read him, as with any highly original writer, is first just to relax and let it wash over you' (McCumber, 2011: 333). I would add that one wash is often not adequate and one needs to rinse and repeat, that is, read Derrida again, to develop an awareness of the questions he poses and how they might be useful to the fashion student. As with many continental philosophers his writing is complex, original in style, and has been translated for English readers from a Romance language, French

Deconstruction fashion : the making of unfinished, decomposing and re-assembled clothes

In this chapter I wish to outline the complexities of using the name “deconstruction” to describe a style of clothing fashion, while at the same time enabling its association with fashion. In doing so, I am using the very terms of a glib or facile nomenclature – “deconstruction fashion” – to seek a serious relation of fashion and its debt to philosophy. The article will remain obedient to the topic under consideration, in that any form that I introduce like “deconstruction fashion” and “deconstruction philosophy” can only end in an unravelling and decomposition peculiar to deconstructive thinking

Dress code : are you playing fashion?

A visit to Kyoto in September offered a unique opportunity to study the exhibition of ninety iconic design pieces from the Kyoto Costume Institute (KCI) collection, where the attendees compete with fashion on display. The exhibition Dress Code: Are You Playing Fashion? (August 2019–February 2020) is a collaboration between KCI, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto. It brings together historical and contemporary fashion including eighteenth century court dress and current street culture, alongside fashion’s depiction in art, photography, film, and manga to examine how clothing communicates in contemporary society and the era of social media

Sneakers

A sullied, worn, very-much-alive object to be left on the front step or coveted dead-stock to be kept in a climate controlled vault? This contrasting view of the sneaker divides the collecting community down the middle, as there are those that wear their shoes and those that do not. As a ubiquitous object of avid consumer spending, the physical, emotional and sociocultural impact of the sneaker clearly exceeds its presence as a collectable

Wearing matters : engaging ‘users’ and changing relationships with clothes

A practice oriented view of sustainable fashion design proposes that contributing to a sustainable material culture is just as much about changing relationships with the things we use, as it is about designing and making new things sustainably. The concept of sustainable fashion immediately declares a paradox. It represents the necessary reconciliation of the incompatible temporalities of long lasting, low impact engagements with clothes and systemic impulses to update fashionably. This has represented a barrier to changing relationships and patterns of use, as the massive material detritus of post-consumer textile waste indicates short product lifespans due to material or fleeting fashion value, and the prevalence of short-term disposable, relationships. Inspired by the popularity of user-centred design approaches in various fields of design and the imperative of sustainable design theory to foster enduring product engagements, this paper proposes to look at what user-centred design might mean in fashion design research and pedagogy

Invocation of uncertainty

I engage with uncertainty by imagining a visual culture that might look very different from what it is now. My imagining of the not-yet made starts with a series of questions: What would visual culture look like without the predictable rhetoric of advertising that envisions appliances and devices as integral to today’s ubiquitous product environments? What would visual culture look like without the fetishisation of new products and the aversion to depicting wear and tear? What might alternatives to current advertising look like if they encapsulated the expertise or experiences of sustained use and faithful product service

Deconstruction fashion: the making of unfinished, decomposing and re-assembled clothes

From its beginnings in the fifteenth century, intensified interest in fashion and the study of fashion over the last thirty years has led to a vast and varied literature on the subject. This collection of essays surveys and contextualizes the ways in which a wide range of disciplines have used a variety of theoretical approaches to explain, and sometimes to explain away, the astonishing variety, complexity and beauty of fashion. Themes covered include individual, social and gender identity, the erotic, consumption and communication. By collecting together some of the most influential and important writers on fashion and exposing the ideas and theories behind what they say, this unique collection of extracts and essays brings to light the presuppositions involved in the things we think and say about fashion

Connecting, shaping and communicating repair cultures

The Heurist platform enabled the conversion of a list of repair organisations into a live database and map to connect users/consumers with expert repairers. And connect researchers of repair with communities of practice, policies/legislative instruments, interviews, key people and organisations in the ‘Right to Repair’ movement. The enabling platform has raised a series of conceptual questions about the roles of the database, public facing information and research commons