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The literature on sustainable clothing covers five key thematic areas: problems associated with fast fashion; sustainable fibre production; sustainable design protocols; corporate responsibility; sociological and social–psychological understandings; and pro-environmental behaviour changes. This article interweaves these approaches in a study that assesses the potential of experiential learning in clothes making, mending, and modifying workshops to help generate new social practices. The workshop design drew on the five key thematic areas and purposively provided participants with infrastructures and equipment, facilitators, and peer-to-peer support and dialogue as means to help them collaboratively generate new skills, new senses of meaning, and more sustainable ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in relation to clothes. This article reveals that our social practices approach encouraged research participants to positively uptake pro-environmental clothing choices. Thematic qualitative analysis of a small sample of participants’ wardrobe audit interviews, informal discussions, reflective videos, and reflective diaries illustrates nuanced and dynamic individual responses to the workshops and other project interventions. Nuances are contingent on factors including styles, creativity, habits, and budgets. We argue that, in order to mainstream the benefits of our approach, it is necessary to normalise approaches to clothing and style that sit outside of, or adjacent to, mainstream fashion, including clothes making, mending, and modifying practices.

Many commentators recognise the need to make clothing more sustainable due to its deleterious environmental and social ramifications. However, it is challenging to change the consumer behaviour that drives fast fashion markets because people have complex relationships with clothing. In this study, we illustrate how the relationships that people have with clothing can be shaped by workshops that immerse them in making, mending, and modifying garments. Such experiential learning can encourage adoption of more sustainable clothing choices, such as reducing consumption of new garments and prolonging the life of already owned items of clothing. We present findings on a strand of work from the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded S4S: Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing project, which explored the affective economy around clothing, and considered how emotive affects around garments operate as a conduit to self-sustain particular practices. Our significant contribution brings political analysis firmly into the debate about sustainable clothing by merging literatures on behaviour change and affect, through exploration of a novel longitudinal (9-months) qualitative data set. At the start of the project, participants generally thought of clothes as being low-cost (and therefore disposable) items. The workshops, in contrast, presented garments and the materials from which they are made as precious, complex and fluid – in a process of continual possibility. For pro-environmental behavioural change, we find that immersion in the materiality of clothing mobilised affective processes, enabling potentially transformative affective encounters. Further, we found that group learning environments need to do more than simply teach approved normative values and behaviours. Pro-environmental behaviour change initiatives need to provide people with the space to create and situate their own knowledges, enabling affect to be mobilised, activated and supported by appropria

This collection of original essays interrogates disciplinary boundaries in fashion, gathering fashion studies research across disciplines and from around the globe.

The need to improve the sustainability of fashion has been widely noted by academics (Black 2012, Fletcher 2008, 2016), activist campaigns (Greenpeace, Fashion Revolution) and policy makers (DEFRA, EAC). While there have been creative attempts to provoke sustainable fashion, few studies have explored ways in which making fibre, using ‘waste’ fabric and modifying clothes might change individuals’ behaviour (thoughts, feelings and actions ) in relation to how they dress. This chapter will present, analyse and reflect on work-in-progress research from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project ‘Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing (S4S)’, which combines arts with social science methods to investigate how creative activities might shape a ‘sensibility’ for sustainable clothing and promote pro-environmental behaviour change. Drawing on social design thinking, the project works with communities to co-produce knowledge through ‘hands on’ making. It involves community groups in dialogic, reflexive workshops that mimic phases of the lifecycle of clothing (making fibre and fabric, purchasing, mending, modifying and making clothes, and dealing with waste fabric) and has produced a rich array of data including co-generated creative outputs, in-depth interviews, short reflective videos, wardrobe audits, clothing diaries and surveys. In collaboration with partner Fashion Revolution, the project proposes these methods as a mode of quietly affective activism that is embedded in, stems from, and is fuelled by everyday lived experience (Hackney, 2013a). Fashion industries, cultures and imaginaries are multi-faceted and complex with significant social and environmental consequences. Drawing on theories of affect (Ahmed, 2004), S4S findings suggest that participatory design and crafts practices offer an affective response to the pressing problem of fashion’s devastating environmental effects.