Rethinking Wardrobes: The Sharing Economy and the Fashion Imagination

In sustainable design, the creative strategy of ‘product lifetime extension’ is well established in many product fields to technically strengthen a product’s durability and stimulate enduring use lives and relationships through emotional affordances and symbolic resilience.(Chapman; Cooper) A collective investment in the idea of weightless fashion de-tethered from the purchase of new clothing, even a disposition for improvisation and a creative styling practice, would mean that fashionable looks could be refashioned endlessly and ‘re-cut’ from this extensive, communal cloth. WRAP estimates that “[i]f clothes stayed in active use for nine months longer (extending the average garment life to around three years), this could save ￡5 billion a year from the costs of resources used in clothing supply, laundry and disposal”; a 5–10% reduction in resource and waste footprints.(WRAP, 3) The premise behind extending active use is that it disrupts the production and demand for new products, with the requirement that clothes need to be built to last longer and that the energy and resource implications of maintaining clothes for longer does not cancel out the benefits of off-setting new production. In terms of generating a shared resource with many lives, this strategy indicates that as active citizens we will learn to recognise clothing that is designed for durability and be rewarded for resourcefulness and acquiring clothes that can sustain many wears, as ongoing creative contributors to the ‘communal wardrobe’, or commons.