Revaluing commodity fetishism to facilitate fashion sustainability

Abstract

Despite the environmental and humanitarian costs of the clothing system in this industrial age, sustainability plays a minor role in design education, commercial practice and the industry. This situation has resulted in the fashion industry becoming the least sustainable industry, second only to oil. Part of the problem lies in the contemporary system of advertising and related cultural practices, which promise customer satisfaction by encouraging the consumption of “fast” seemingly disposable fashion. However, the products of the fashion industry are not designed to promote true customer satisfaction, but rather to meet company’s sales goals in the capitalist society, therefore the customer has to procure again and again in an attempt to construct their cultural identities through fashion. The central concern is the loss of positive agency resulting from consumerism and the lack of values in a fashion system. Consequently, profit based fetishes are used as a substitute for the lack of more synergistic need satisfiers, such as belonging, nurturing and connection. How can a model for strategic intervention be conceptualised in order to address the deficit between the production-value and the perceived added-value of commodities in the fashion industry, by using the notion of the fetish to engage with the quintuple helix innovation model and Kaiser’s circuit of style-fashion-dress model? Positive agency is precluded from the conventional model of sustainability, so an alternative ‘agent model’ is presented in which agency is central. This aspect opens up potentialities to insert positive agency agendas within the theoretical argument. Additionally, the generalised universal ethics within the helix innovation model are not in-depth enough to effectively consider aspects oriented to feminist ethics of care. Therefore, ethics of care, Chapman’s concept of ‘emotionally durable design’ as well as Maslow and Max-Neef’s theories on needs, are used as a moral foundation to determine consumption versus ethical approaches. A grounded theory study is undertaken with critical analysis and synthesis of theoretical data as the methods of investigation. By contrasting the processes in Kaiser’s circuit of style-fashion-dress within the concerns of ethics of care, a strategic framework is developed. Sustainable intervention routes towards positive agency are identified by exploiting the gap between wants and needs through the lens of Marxist, Freudian and Baudrillardian notions of the fetish. Conceptualising a strategy to address these dilemmas provides recommendations for more sustainable and ethical practices in the fashion industry, and thereby aims to promote agency towards human flourishing.