Fashioning fire hose: Design in the liminal spaces between product lives

Among the scrapheap of society’s unwanted materials lies a vast and wondrous world of fashion potential. In the liminal phase between a product’s rejection and its fate as landfill, designers are called on to create a positive alternative. The upcycling process encourages designers to consider how they might release the past social lives of products to uncover the design potential of new creations. Upcycling introduces the dimensions of time, designer knowledge and skills into the creation of a garment or accessory. This practice makes a place in fashion for challenging the hypercycle of consumption and the new by valuing fabrics that can tell stories of their past lives in other times and places. In this article I examine the appropriation of retired fire hose in the fashion industry by the company Elvis & Kresse. In the framework of Arnold van Gennep’s ritual phases of transition, namely the ‘pre-liminal’, ‘liminal’ and ‘post-liminal’, of critical interest is the second or liminal phase, in which the retired fire hose risks becoming obscure and permanently separated from reality but is instead incorporated into luxury bags and belts. This article advances the perception of the liminal as a place for collecting ‘polluting’ materials and, via design, reintroducing them into society. In my focus on this company and on fire hose as a fashion textile, I probe the liminal threshold as a place of creative experimentation and a powerful framework for understanding and structuring product transitions. The ability to change how an item is perceived by fracturing its sense of time and place highlights the importance of upcycling in tackling many of the current criticisms levelled at fashion while introducing new roles for designers as facilitators of transformation.

Harris Tweed: A glocal case study

Fast and effectively disposable fashion has seen clothing reduced to transient items, worn for a short period of time then discarded. This has pushed down prices, moving textile and clothing production to low-cost labour countries and decimating the traditional Scottish textile economy. Fast fashion drives consumer demand for newness and uses finite resources that are damaging to the environment. In 2019, the pressure to move towards a more sustainable fashion and textile industry is intense. Traditional textile manufacture using natural, renewable sources that are inherently long-lasting offers a slow fashion alternative, epitomized by the Harris Tweed handweaver community in Scotland. Fashion has embraced digital, with growing online sales and increasing focus on digital content. This presents an opportunity to redress the balance by using technology to shape a sustainable future for traditional textiles. Utilizing an interpretive paradigm and inductive approach, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded networking grant is presented as a qualitative case study, investigating how immersive technologies can be used to safeguard the future of traditional textile products, to educate contemporary, global audiences on the provenance and human hand behind manufacturing processes and to encourage consumption of products with longevity. This explanatory case study finds that fashion brands are using immersive technologies for virtual changing rooms or creative customer experiences but are not exploiting the possibilities of immersive technologies in engendering a sense of place or people behind the product. Findings also reveal that the Harris Tweed Authority and Harris Tweed Hebrides brand successfully use landscape to convey a sense of place, but are under-utilizing the handwoven value and sustainable, slow fashion credentials of Harris Tweed. China is identified as a potential place for Harris Tweed to gain valuable market share, with increasingly wealthy Chinese Generation Z consumers seeking individual exclusivity and sustainability in their clothing purchases, criteria that embody Harris Tweed.

Fashion systems of earth logic and transition for this time and place

Time and place are central concepts to the dynamic system and phenomenon of fashion. Yet, perhaps for the first time in history, fashion seems to be out of sync with the values, mindsets and wisdom of this time and this place. Despite fashion’s claim to be situated in the ‘now’ or an idealized future, much of what we think and know about clothing from production, design, aesthetics, use and disposal speaks to, and is from, another time and place ‐ the past ‐ when our relationship with and understanding of our place in nature and the earth was markedly different. Western exceptionalism has led to a superiority of thought and action, as we have deemed ourselves to be above and apart from nature. We behave like the planet’s resources and capacity are infinite and limitless, ours for the taking. An anthropocentric, reductionist, modernist, colonial, capitalist, materialistic growth logic has ruled our thinking, actions and conception of time and place. It is clear that the construction of this ‘place’ or system does not consider planetary boundaries or a multiplicity of voices, particularly Indigenous voices. This exploratory design article was conducted through the lens and methodology of Transition Design, and builds on the work of the Earth Logic Fashion Action Research Plan, to acquire new insights to develop a roadmap for change through recommendations for new models, methods and mindsets. As the models of the past have abruptly stopped or been put on hold by the COVID-19 pandemic, this article seizes this moment and this place to open new entry points for change. It asks us to deeply examine and reimagine the fashion system as part of nature, a ‘whole place’ that honours and is conscious of all worldviews and different modalities of time.

Sustainable practice: The future mode of temporality in fashion

Fashion is indicative of time and, serving as the interpretive and representational forms of a society, is measured against the cyclical rhythms of trend diffusion and style adoption. This article examines the function of time within the framework of historical research, reviewing the construction and translation of contemporary fashion. The temporality of material objects is further probed by an analysis of the sociocultural development of current sustainable practices to grasp the affective nature of time and its relationship to the fashion system. With an overview of emerging sustainable design practices, the relationship between time and meaning creation is critically examined, analysed and discussed. The social production of design and its utilization of the body-as-space are presented in relation to the social construction of time, explicated as part of a subjective, embodied experience. This article presents a new modality of time in how it is articulated, imitated, reproduced and reinterpreted through material culture and future sustainable practices.

The PUSSYHAT PROJECTTM: Its form and meaning in defining women’s resistance

An item of headwear, the pussy hat, made news in 2017 when women gathered through social media and local events to create the iconic hat. The hat became a part of the Women’s March that took place in January in Washington DC as well as in cities such as St. Paul, Minnesota. This research involves participant observation of the hat-making process and the hat wearing during marches in Washington DC and Minnesota. Findings revealed the effectiveness of the pussy hat in calling attention to the events that took place prior to and during the marches in January 2017. However, examination of the pussy hat included many variations in form, i.e. colour, texture and shape and the meaning represented some but not all voices of the march.

Spirals, spikes and spinning wheels: Temporal models challenging the sustainability agenda in relation to fast fashion consumption

Fast fashion has entered the political arena with specific reference to sustainability. To date the agenda has largely been informed by an examination of production methodologies and techniques documenting the rapid turnover of trends, the speed and efficiency of the production process and the lack of socially cohesive labour practices that it consistently engenders. Whilst governments seek to raise awareness and begin to generate initiatives to tackle the environmental fall out of fast fashion, this article turns its attention to the temporal patterns of consumer behaviour and why such a high percentage of what we buy is readily discarded soon after point of purchase. All stages in this linear model of consumption, it is argued, are shaped by a very specific relationship to time that ultimately informs our buying habits. Utilizing the work of the philosopher A. N. Whitehead and adopting a more psychosocial approach to fashion consumption, this article recognizes that even when purposefully seeking to consume sustainably, a greater need to align our use of time with a results-driven mindset locates the acquisition of something new as a highly achievable goal. As a consequence, rather than positioning the rationale for fashion purchases in the context of conspicuous consumption and emulation, here it functions to mitigate a lack of temporal control in other areas of our lives. In response, it is proposed that any successful attempts at tackling the problems associated with fast fashion must also seek to understand the temporal dynamics of consumption. For whilst governments’ attention is turned to ways to reduce the environmental impact associated with the production of clothing, increasing consumer demand derived from ‘neophilia’ will negate and indeed overturn any successes achieved. The conclusion will therefore suggest that promotional culture has a duty to explore ways in which it might engender greater emotional attachments to what we own. Future research into brand messaging, exploring the consequences of placing emphasis on quality over quantity and a subsequent potential deepening of a sense of brand loyalty, is also recommended as a way forward.

Evolving ‘places’: The paradigmatic shift in the role of the fashion designer

This study examines the concept of ‘place’ in the design process and the evolving role of the fashion designer. The contemporary fashion marketplace has reached unprecedented levels of abundance. This is altering society’s relationship with design. Consumers’ basic needs are being over-met and have moved well beyond the material realm; consumers are increasingly driven by their search for meaning and emotional fulfilment through design. The result of this process is the altering of their perception of design ‘value’ from the tangible to the intangible. While the traditional values of aesthetics and function remain essential components to design, a product’s ability to deliver ‘emotional value’ to the user must increasingly become the focus for designers. To succeed, a designer must shift his/her sense of ‘place’ ‐ namely, the figurative ‘place’ from which he/she designs. Rather than creating fashion from myopic, personal biases, future designers must enter the ‘place’ of the design process by rigorously researching their consumers’ psychographics and emotional needs to ‘design emotion’. The new role of the fashion designer ‐ the ‘Designer-As-Social-Scientist’ ‐ takes a much broader view of the consumers’ needs. The evolution of the ‘place’ of the design process will result in products having greater meaning and emotional value; designers standing out in the oversaturated market; and businesses increasing consumer loyalty and resultant sales by offering only those products that are truly desired by their target audience.