Practicing sustainability : illuminating ‘use’Â in wearing clothes

This article explores examples of creative practices of wearing and maintaining clothes, and is centred around one account of laundering that constructs the commonplace maintenance of clothing as an activity for learning. This account is placed in dialogue with sustainable design research about the transition toward sustainable ways of living such as the development of ‘slow fashion’. For instance, ‘slowness’ leverages time to rethink the value of what we already do and have, to generate alternative temporal patterns, material flows and imaginings that are more attuned with the pace and rhythms of living day by day. With a fashion system that endorses regular updates and short-lived looks, the logic to its renewal is that as clothes are worn they depreciate in value, as the patina of use moves them further away from newness. However, when wearing and maintaining clothes are centrally positioned as everyday practices, the life and meaning that clothes come to have as worn can be appreciated as a mass participation in positive value creation. Specifically, it is possible to see this value in terms of practicing sustainabilities and related positive signs of a more sustainable material culture.