Sustainable Fashion in the Digital Era

“WE NEED TO REARRANGE THINGS DRASTICALLY!”

The soft-spoken Otto von Busch, Professor at Parsons School of Design in New York City is an avid critic of the fashion industry, but finds in the figure of the designer a crucial potential for change. Not least by changing comsumer psychology, Mr. von Busch discovers ways to remodel our relationship to our clothes and their production. Interview: Lennart Laberenz

Professor Otto von Busch, to what degree can we actually speak of sustainability in the fashion industry? Is it a real concept that is already re-organizing garment production or is it a mere sales pitch?

Otto von Busch: The tricky part of the question is – what do we want to sustain? Too often we treat the existing way of producing and consuming fashion as a fixed form. If we then only reduce the environmental impact and pay living wages overseas, we proclaim to have an ideal system. The current concept of sustainability aims at sustaining what is already in place, at the most optimizing it a bit.

You imply that the question of sustainability does not go far enough?

We have to ask if we actually want to maintain a system of extremely cheap consumerism in which a garment costs as much as a coffee. And I probably know more about where my coffee is sourced, than about where and how my clothes are produced.

Indeed.

And even if I want to know more about my garment, should we support a system in which clothes are comparable to coffee? Should we organize a system in which I consume clothes, because I need caffeine? To a large degree, the fashion industry works like this: I work a long day, I feel a bit exhausted and on my way home I pass by a store to buy something cheap in order to get a quick ego-boost. And I basically forget about what I even bought once I am back home.

You don’t see sustainability as being at the forefront of our decisions as consumers?

Not only as consumers. We need to imagine a much richer cultural interface by which we engage with clothing. Do we want to sustain a celebrity culture, the type of elitism the system fosters, the implicit system of winners and losers? Do we want to sustain the distinction between designer, producer and consumer? Are there other ways to blur these roles, so I can have a richer freedom in the way I engage with clothing? Ultimately it is a matter of imagination: what would a more fulfilling way of engaging with clothing look like, other than through ready-made, pre-packaged garments somebody far away has produced for me? We must rethink what it is we sustain in fashion, so we can better question and reimagine more of the fashion industry.

That sounds like a fundamentally different understanding of fashion and clothing!

Indeed it could be. At the moment we have a very narrow understanding of it. Asking these questions and systematically thinking about alternatives could open up a completely different way to design, produce, and engage with clothing. It could open up issues of sharing clothes and other types of circulation. How much do we want to consume? Is fashion necessarily a part of a cycle of continuous achievement and the continuous re-representation of ourselves? It is be important for companies to find out how it would be possible to serve their customers in a deeper and richer way.

So you understand the term sustainability as a form of sugar-coating of industry practices?

It is essentially the same as for air travel – we make aiplanes more environmentally friendly. Fantastic! But we continuously increase our travel habits. Patching up the paradigm of travel, or simply mitigating some of the damages caused by the way we consume garments will not solve the problem. We need to take a step back and think about how to rearrange things drastically. At the moment we treat fashion like a fast food experience, leaving our engagement with clothes unsatisfying, commonplace and utterly forgettable. Similar to fast food snacks.

Sustainability then is simply about selling more clothes?

Yes. Right now the idea of sustainability means to sustain the existing business-model. A perpetual flow of ever more garments. To increase the flow we have even gotten rid of seasons. Let’s imagine an ideal state of the current model, where garment production does no environmental harm. Still, the rest of the consumption that fashion is entangled with is completely unsustainable: transport, strip-malls, garment washing. The system is also currently based on the need for a customer to continuously earn more money than the person who produces the garment. Otherwise I would have to make the clothes myself. Can we not imagine other ways of arranging the relationships between production and consumption?

What would that look like? It sounds like a complete change of our consuming habits.

I think there are other ways for designers to reach and serve customers. Take for example the classic answer: we should consume less and be more frugal. For example, Vivienne Westwood postulates ‘Buy fewer pieces, more valuable ones, you pay more and buy less often.’ Yet Vivienne Westwood and similar brands do not offer a payment model by which I and many other people can actually access these clothes.

Do you want to discover more about this topic? You can read through the book above.