Sustainable by design, a possible approach towards innovation in fashion.

Particularly because most of my conversations lately have been with small business owners, I’m constantly coming up against the pressure business owners feel to first offset their negative impact. I believe this is due to the ease in communicating this to consumers - it’s widely used as a sustainability function of a company (granted, that enables some companies to call their products sustainable without actually changing anything about their operations), and easily understood by consumers.

But the power designers have to transform supply chains, the impact of their product and the industry as a whole, is to look first at the fundaments of their enterprise. More specifically, to reflect on whether their systems of production are aligned with best practice. I offer designers this: rather than clinging to long held ways of improving situations by taking them apart after the fact, together, we can develop the kind of thinking you need in-house to nurture change through the action of actually putting them together. As engineers of our material goods, designers are arguably the best placed to do this.

Sustainability as an exercise in innovation

I’ve developed this sort of thinking not from working in government or as an ethnographer, but rather, using skills I developed in both spaces in my conversations with actual designers running small businesses of their own. Sustainability from a designers perspective is a powerful lens.

Designing fashion in the context of ecological responsibility or with a lens towards social justice, requires that those actually designing (i.e. shaping things, bringing ideas into material products) also become promoters of social change. And that, in their creative practice, they develop approaches that reduce resource use.