A new LASTING report by Kate Fletcher and Anna Fitzpatrick opens the understanding of clothing durability from outside the Euro-American contexts.
Decentring Durability introduces 14 features of clothing durability as aspects of decentred action and understanding of long-lasting clothes. Decentring Durability diverges from the typical western understandings of durability and the ways in which they are framed. Its starting point is that clothing durability is diverse, heterogeneous and constantly changing. It offers plural ideas of clothing durability interconnection and multiple threads of thinking and practice, including, among others: different durability cosmologies, diverse practical actions and many-tentacled durability relationships, like those with bodies, things, land and time.
This exciting new way of thinking offers plural points of departure for durability investigations that unfold in directions different to technological and/or market-driven starting points and which specifically recognise and give space to difference as powerful but overlooked drivers for environmental change. The project’s fieldwork was conducted using semi-structured interviews, with participants selected for diversity from outside Euro-American contexts.
The report is the first deliverable from LASTING work package 4.
Download the summary report here or project note with more details from here.
Authors
References
Fletcher, K. and Fitzpatrick, A. (2021) Decentring Durability: Plural Ideas and Actions of Long Lasting Clothes, Research Project Note, London: Centre for Sustainable Fashion. Available at: https://lasting.world/wp-content/uploads/sites/548/2021/11/Decentring_Durability_project_note.pdf.
Fletcher, K. and Fitzpatrick, A. (2021) Decentring Durability: Plural Ideas and Actions of Long Lasting Clothes (Summary report), London: Centre for Sustainable Fashion. Available at: https://lasting.world/wp-content/uploads/sites/548/2021/11/Decentring_Durability_Summary.pdf.