Search

Fashion, like all ecosystems, is complex and dynamic. The fashion system comprises intangible, and tangible aspects, all of which have significant consequences. The linear structure of this system, used throughout the twentieth century—referred to as ‘take, make and waste’—has set artificial boundaries and driven a wedge between players in this system. This has led to the global fashion, and textiles industry being one of the world’s most polluting industries, and overshadows the potential of the fashion system as a powerful vehicle for social and environmental change. Design can be key to reorienting the fashion system and bringing the disparate parts together. Design research, and practice can generate new ways of understanding, being, and doing ‘fashion’ that acknowledges the complexities and the varieties of fashion(s) in an authentic twenty-first-century context. This exploratory design paper incorporates a multidisciplinary mixed methods approach, and a systems lens to the fashion system to examine the boundaries of conventional fashion practice, to encourage more complex interrelationships between, and around garments. The theoretical framework is informed by systems thinking, and a critique of the paradigm of growth, in conjunction with the ‘four orders of design’. It invites us to ask, through design research, what a holistic, flourishing, responsible fashion and textiles system for the twenty-first century might look like, by widening the parameters of the fashion system in order to critically examine the tension between analytical and systematic thinking for fashion. This study acts as a catalyst for a conceptual model showing how the fashion system can reconnect, and fashion design can engage with a higher order of design to encompass sustainable practices.