Letter from the Editors

This Special Issue of Fashion Studies originated in 2021 as a conference proposal written by Alex Nora Esculapio, who was then a postgraduate student representative at the Centre for Design History at the University of Brighton. Based on insights from her doctoral research, which led her to examine both overlooked fashion design strategies in museum archives and creative work about everyday ‘quiet’ sustainable practices, the proposal evolved into an online conference, co-organized with University of Brighton colleagues Annebella Pollen and Dani Trew in January 2022. Most contributions to this issue were originally papers presented at the conference, supplemented by newly developed works. We are very proud to gather them all in Fashion Studies, whose commitment to open-access fashion scholarship aligns with our desire to foster accessible discussions about the kinds of futures we want to sustain, both inside and outside of academia. 

We see this Special Issue as an addition to a growing body of scholarship which, broadly speaking, asks the question: what roles can fashion and dress historical knowledge play in shaping sustainable futures? This is, of course, a question that designers and design historians have been asking for at least a couple of decades, as our reference to Tony Fry’s work in the title of the Special Issue shows. In fashion studies, at least in industrialized Western countries, formal investigations are more recent and have largely been spearheaded by fashion design educators and museum professionals rather than fashion and dress historians. The 2023 volume Historical Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion by Amy Twigger Holroyd, Jennifer Farley Gordon, and Colleen Hill is a good example of this approach, and it highlights the urgency and action-orientated goals of this kind of research. An earlier example is Holly McQuillan and Timo Rissanen’s book Zero Waste Fashion Design (2015), which includes a section examining historical precedents for contemporary zero-waste strategies, including Ancient Greek dress, Japanese kimono design, and the work of Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell, and Zandra Rhodes, to name a few. 

Meanwhile, historians from different fields have provided insightful research on alternative systems of clothing consumption, reuse, and provision. Many have focused on histories of second-hand consumption in contexts that span from Middle Age Europe (Staples 2010, 2015) to Victorian England (Cockayne 2020), and from Zambia in the 1980s and 1990s (Tranberg Hansen 2000) to contemporary North America (Le Zotte 2017). Other scholars have focused on histories of material recycling in areas such as India (Norris 2010), the UK (Shell 2020) and Japan (Sugiura 2019). More recently, work that sits at the intersection of fashion history and the history of technology has also emerged, often with the support of cultural institutions who house relevant collections, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London (Auerbach George et al. 2022, 2023).

This is the context in which we situate ourselves as scholars and practitioners, and it is therefore no coincidence that you will find some of the names mentioned above in this special issue of Fashion Studies. Among them is Amy Twigger Holroyd who, in conversation with co-editor Annebella Pollen, discusses how and why historical knowledge can help shape sustainable fashion futures; and Hannah Auerbach George, whose essay examines two historical collections housed at the V&A to investigate Victorian attitudes towards waste management and material reuse, specifically the textile known as shoddy. Each of these contributions considers historical examples that have implications for the present. How fashion practices might make use of earlier examples of material resourcefulness operates as a standing challenge. What might we retain and learn from? What belongs in the past? 

Additionally, Bethan Bide’s article interrogates popular myths surrounding the ‘Make Do and Mend’ scheme enacted by the British government during the Second World War and, through a careful historical analysis that focuses on class, gender, labour, and consumption, demonstrates how the scheme provides a poor historical model for contemporary sustainable fashion. Mending is frequently championed as an individualized solution for supporting garment longevity but Bide shows how repair practices are necessarily enmeshed in wider structural systems and networks that need to be considered in the round. Still on the topic of mending and repair, Iryna Kucher’s essay compares post-war Italian and Soviet housekeeping encyclopaedias to explore how competing political ideologies and economic systems framed historical attitudes towards consumption and mending practices and ideals. Kucher considers how these can provide a point of departure for thinking about the role of public education when it comes to sustainability in fashion more broadly. 

Using the historical textile mending practice of boro in Japan as a case study, Eric Larsen’s article is a critical reflection on shifting attitudes towards the ethics and aesthetics of visible mending in contemporary global fashion landscapes and their implications for culturally specific practices. Larsen examines how wear and use can become productive (and disruptive) philosophical concepts for thinking about the changing meanings of marked textiles as they move through space and time. The importance of place to cultural production is also central to Alice Payne and Judith Hickson’s contribution, which uses three ‘boundary objects’ from the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia, to explore alternative fashion systems that centre the notion of care within the local community throughout the twentieth century. Payne and Hickson’s focus on a diverse range of museum garments, as well as the affective stories of their makers and donors, opens us to alternative perspectives on how we might do fashion differently. 

Together, these contributions demonstrate some of the incredibly exciting and valuable work that is emerging in this area of research from a range of voices including leading experts and newer scholars. It is our hope that this issue will encourage and sustain further inquiry, and that this kind of work will continue to be made accessible beyond academia, producing impact in the wider world. We are very grateful to the Fashion Studies team for believing in the importance of this subject and for their unwavering support throughout the process of putting this Special Issue together. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the peer reviewers who engaged with the contributors’ work with generosity of spirit and intellectual rigour. Thank you as well to all those who contributed to the original conference, Fashioning Sustainment, in 2022, and those who attended the event and asked thought-provoking questions. Finally, we want to thank all the authors for trusting us with your work, for your patience, and for all the hard work you put into making this issue a reality. We hope our paths cross again in the future. 

Alex & Annebella

Special Issue Co-Editors