A conversation with Kate Fletcher
Researchers Kate Fletcher and Matilda Tham want us to:
Imagine a vocabulary without consumption. Instead, we would use a diversity of words to define a diversity of practices – nurturing, stewarding, growing, mending, borrowing, relating, sharing.
Imagine a dictionary without the word waste, because it was no longer relevant.
Imagine watching a news report that helped you see and feel the connection between global frameworks, such as the Sustainable Development Goals and your local fashion practice.
Imagine when the words for being with fashion, are as rich and nuanced and scented as the plants of a wild meadow.
They want us to interrogate the language of fashion; it "can intervene directly in our systems," they write. They want us to ask, "How can we transform the ethics of languaging and mediation of sustainability in fashion and beyond? How can journalists, PR agents, photographers, bloggers, model agencies be invited into Earth Logic learning to avoid commodification of sustainability, greenwash, and promotion of unsustainability? How can we use processes of creating language of fashion to create agency?"
This "Earth Logic" thinking is laid out in their Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan, which is just that: an action plan. Fletcher told me, "We are really at a precipice. We can't continuously wait for more analysis of the problems before projecting for people to do stuff."
In the plan, they map out what we should do to move forward. The authors settle on the Earth Logic approach to fashion; forgoing growth logic centered on GDP growth and instead champion an earth-first stance. The way they propose we do this, in addition to finding new language, is through "landscapes for fashion action research" focusing on fostering a culture of less, focusing on the local, decolonizing fashion, sharing knowledge in new ways, and governing and organizing fashion differently.
This week I spoke to Kate about the Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan and her previous work — she has been working in the fashion and sustainability space for twenty-seven years. In that time, she has written numerous books, including the seminal Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys first published in 2008 and Craft of Use: Post Growth Fashion. She is a co-founder of the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion and is Research Professor of Sustainability, Design, Fashion at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, University of the Arts London.
What struck me when talking to Kate was the narrow framework we use to discuss clothing and fashion — especially in the media. We often focus on the practice of consumption and not the elements of how we wear what we buy. A common narrative is that high street clothing is worn a couple of times and then discarded. When Kate interviewed 500 people for her book Craft of Use she found “we frequently talk about how we imagine that there's a driver for endless newness, and people have an appetite only for what they've never had before. I think that there's lots of evidence to suggest that many of the things that people find incredibly satisfying are things they have had for a long time.”
Shonagh Marshall: What drew you to fashion? Was it something you were interested in as a young person?
Kate Fletcher: Yeah, it was. It was huge to me as a child. I should preface that by saying I'm from Liverpool, a city in the north of England that famously was put in what Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s described as "managed decline." So the city, and all of its residents, were determined as not worthy of being invested in. As a result, it was a time of real hardship and poverty, and perhaps more than anything else, there was a collective lack of hope in the city. It was pervasive. It was only when I left that I discovered that other people weren't experiencing life in the same way. I was really shocked.
There was very little in terms of money and opportunities in that period, so I started making clothes, including my school uniform. I got harangued, bullied, laughed at, and ridiculed as these items started going from long skirts to short skirts — whatever it was that I was doing. But over time, this became a forceful form of self-expression. It was also the only possible way because we just didn't have money to buy all the stuff. So it was entirely out of both necessity and also a creative edge. So that's where it started.
Shonagh: I have been thinking about the creativity we have as young people; we experiment with our clothes, we make and customize things. Do you think this is something that we need to foster in adulthood?
Kate: Analytically, I think it's part of an escalation of consumption. What we see as we grow older is that we graduate into shopping for clothes almost as a reward or as a treat. You go through an experimental phase where you shop in a charity shop, and you put together weird things, and you make a few pieces, which you run-up just before you step out to go to the club. Then you graduate because you've got enough wealth. So yes, I think it's associated with an experimental phase, but also a lack of financial capital, which you can move away from as your wherewithal grows.
But I think it's more insidious than that. It's part of a very narrow agenda of fashion, which is only ever represented in terms of shop-bought items. That's the image put forward, and it's challenging to imagine what fashion is outside this very narrow band. All of the stories point back to that through media, exhibitions, and consumerism, etc., and it all collides. It's almost like some convergence of technology and politics, which all come together to force people into the high street, or online, to buy clothes. Any alternatives look a bit clunky and aesthetically a bit odd, they can be expensive sometimes, or maybe they can look cheap — too cheap. Generally, they're seen as unattractive. The whole of the fashion industry's success is based on making the alternatives seem less attractive. In this case, it's worked really, really well.
Image by Kenyon Anderson
Shonagh: You have been working in the fashion and sustainability space for 27 years. What changes have you seen over the last few years? And what impact has this mainstream interest had?
Kate: I feel more hopeful now. But it's not an uncomplicated feeling that I have. Certainly, there's so much more interest in the field; there are column inches everywhere. Compared to before, the area has grown massively. Yet, it seems to me that the big system questions are still not being addressed. While there's lots more activity going on, it's all just the same level of activity, which is perhaps not dealing with the big question. So maybe there's something that's blocking stuff from happening. It's not that I'm ungrateful. It's just that it's like the pond has grown, but the water and all of the creatures in it are just the same. We've not updated our knowledge.
There's a tremendous amount of confusion, misleading claims, misconceptions. So much of it falters on quite simplistic notions of what this subject is. I'm not in any way advocating that everyone needs to know all of the details. But in terms of bringing a critical question to bear, both in the journalists and the people reading it, that seems to be the most important thing that we can do. There's almost a mindlessness to it — well, some of it anyway — and that's just not helping. Today, I saw a piece written in a magazine that said, It's Earth Day; these are the most important things you need to know. Effectively it said that natural materials are better than synthetics. You just can't say that. I'm not saying that they aren't. It's just that it isn't that simple, and it's just not helpful.
As long as people are going to think in those sorts of ways, we're never actively going to deal with the really interesting stuff that makes your heart begin to race. The stuff that makes you excited and gets to the sorts of questions about fashion and dress. They're the sorts of things that really take you towards what it is to be human and connected to the world in which we live, which we're never going to approach if we only see it as something that we can buy.
Shonagh: It's now or never. So what are these things, the ones that make your heart race?
Kate: There was an amazing systems thinker called Donella Meadows. She did several brilliant projects with the UN and other groups during her life. But one of the things that she left us was a simple list of places to intervene in a system to affect change. It's called Places to Intervene in a System. She offered us a list and numbered the list. When you look at it, you notice something odd. It starts at the top with the number nine and goes down to number one. At the top, it says "constants, parameters, numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards)," and at the bottom, it's about the paradigm or the purpose of a system and the source of ideas.
The lesson is that people usually start at the top of this list. But she called it to number nine because she said it's the place that's least likely to deliver significant change. It's the least effective place to start, yet we always start there anyway. Instead, if you can, look down the list and start with number one. Think about the purpose of the system we're operating in. What do we want from this system? What are the goals of what we're aiming for? She argued that if we can work here, at the level of the system's purpose, that we can affect everything else. It's also the case that starting there doesn't take resources and isn't particularly time-consuming. All it takes is a click in the mind — a new way of thinking. Compared to all of the other things, it's the least resource-intensive way of doing things. With that knowledge, you can put it in your pocket, and you begin to see the limitations of all of these other ways of doing things.
For example, if you're only going to tweak a product and put it out there in a conventional system, what you'll see is that a slightly improved outcome in a traditional approach does not change behavior. Repeatedly we keep coming up against the limits of these interventions we're making; we see that they're not leading to any significant change. All the evidence suggests that despite our best efforts for more than 30 years in the fashion sector to improve things, things are getting worse, not better. The collective size of the sector, which is growing year on year, is getting bigger and bigger. So with it, our problems are getting bigger and bigger. Unless we're going to follow Donella Meadows' advice and tackle the first point on the list, the system purpose question, it's never going to change. If we're serious about change, we have to have that conversation. It isn't easy, I get a lot of friction, a lot of awkwardness, and, you know, some potentially difficult conversations, but we can do it.
Shonagh: It feels like capitalist might is in the way, stopping progress. You wrote a book called Craft of Use: Post Growth Fashion which told a very different story about how we interact with our clothes. How is growth logic getting in the way, and what could post-growth or degrowth fashion look like?
Kate: Growth logic is probably the biggest barrier to effecting deep and lasting change in the fashion system and probably pretty much every other system. It is extremely difficult to imagine past growth logic; that said, it's not impossible. There are several different projects where I've done that.
In the Craft of Use, I tried to sidle up to what fashion beyond consumerism or post-growth fashion might be like, by asking a very simple question. What if we gave as much attention to maintaining, caring for, and using things to create them in the first place? With that simple question, I asked people to shift the emphasis to think about use, the practices of use and maintenance, and what it might mean to live with things through time — rather than only thinking about design and production. In doing this, space opened up where garments — clothing or fashion — aren't only driven by the politics and practices of economics alone. Instead, it's caused by something else, which is perhaps linked to satisfaction, expression to usefulness. To lives lived in ordinary places: kitchen tables and bedrooms; instead of thinking of it in terms of balance sheets and boardrooms.
I simply started by setting up what I called community photoshoots. I put up some adverts in the newsagent's windows, on social media and in local newspapers inviting people to come along and to share with me how they use their clothes. The focus wasn't on how you buy stuff; it was on how people are active with the things they already have. I gathered nearly 500 examples in three continents over around five years. What was remarkable is that it suddenly began to grow in people's imagination with that attention being paid to use. In the beginning, people were like, use? What do you mean, how do I use my stuff? So with a bit of explaining, suddenly, people were like, Oh, yeah. With the proper attention, we can begin to open the possibilities in people's minds about what clothes are. They're not only delivering some sort of benefits at the bottom line.
It's a space that already existed, but I just found a way to shine a light on it. Because it's not driven by growth economics, where other sorts of needs and vectors cause it, it becomes a space that maybe gives us a glimpse of what wearing clothes, dressing, fashion might be like, when consumerism isn't the single most important driving force.
Image by Kenyon Anderson
Shonagh: You are also interested in the psychological elements of dressing. What did you find about why we love the clothes we have? Why are we drawn to them?
Kate: In nearly 500 interviews, every time I walked away, I thought, Oh, my gosh, I don't know anything. There are many different experiences, emotions, drivers, or behaviors, so many more than you can imagine. You begin to understand that there's so much one could say about what is driving this space.
Specifically, we frequently talk about how we imagine that there's a driver for endless newness, and people have an appetite only for what they've never had before. I think that there's lots of evidence to suggest that many of the things that people find incredibly satisfying are things they have had for a long time. So it begins to break apart some of these myths or associations that people have with newness. Many of the things that are driving new rounds of fashion consumption are linked, of course, to psychological values associated with materialism — of re-expressing who you are. Yet, we begin to see that we're really in a social trap because psychological research tells us that the more materialistic mindset you have, the fewer friends you tend to have, and the more antidepressants you consume, for example. Plus, this research shows us that each additional garment or object of any sort that you consume doesn't contribute positively to happiness levels. We are duped into thinking that we need to buy this because it will somehow fulfill us or make us happier. We discovered that it doesn't. And also, having that sort of materialistic mindset indicates your lower status in terms of friendships and other things. But when you talk to people, what's significant is they will tell you things that don't fit into those categories at all.
Shonagh: In 2019, you wrote the Earth Logic Fashion Action Research Plan with Matilda Tham. Did you choose Earth Logic for the title as a counter to growth logic?
Kate: Absolutely. It is Mathilda Tham, my wonderful co-author, and I's firm view that the logic of economic growth is the chief limiting factor to great and lasting change in the fashion sector. We recognized that fashion is a system of growth logic, and we can design a new system if we so choose. From there, we evolved a new logic, which we called Earth Logic, which puts us and the health of all species, including humans, first. It allowed us to use that as the point of departure to begin to investigate opportunities for fashion.
People always ask, What is the business case for Environmental Action? They ask this to justify why businesses should get involved with it. What we're doing here is twisting that on its head. We ask, What's the environmental case for your business activity or fashion activity at all? When that space opens, you begin to see that fashion activity is present; it's based in communities, and it's based in business — but perhaps not in as many ways as we'd imagined it. Fashion activity is found in all different places, patterns, shapes, and forms. They're thriving, and they're beginning to improve the areas in which we live and do many other things besides.
So using this is the starting point, what we describe as landscapes — places in which to act — we flesh out sites with lots of activities and certain qualities about them. In the action plan, you can journey within these landscapes of new ideas for what fashion might be like when we follow Earth Logic.
Image by Kenyon Anderson
Shonagh: The report is an "action plan." Why was it necessary to write something that inspired action?
Kate: Quite simply, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave us a decade to change things substantially to avert catastrophic climate change. That was in 2018, so we have seven years left. Then more latterly, the UN has produced several reports around the sixth mass extinction in terms of biodiversity loss. We are really at a precipice. We can't continuously wait for more analysis of the problems before projecting for people to do stuff. It's called an action plan because it's time for us to both take action and do research about what we need to do — simultaneously. We can't do research and then wait for it to be published to act. We need to be researching and acting because this is the only way that we're going to be able to do this fast enough.
Shonagh: One way we can do this, you write, is by "staying with the trouble." What does this mean?
Kate: This comes from Donna Haraway, the legendary techno future feminist who coined the phrase "staying with the trouble" as a way to say that we have not to turn away when things get tricky or uncomfortable. When there's friction or awkwardness or hard work, we have to commit to the true purpose of changing things. Much of this requires a new type of care. Both more extensive care for the planet, enabling us to put that first, but also a respect for ourselves. Because there's a lot of loss and some grief involved in much of this work, we're moving away from lifestyles that maybe we thought we were committed to, perhaps we thought we were entitled.
Shonagh: It will be hard, and one of the ways it has been pitched is to find technological solutions that will mean we can still consume in the same way. In the Earth Logic report, you say that these "win-win" scenarios will not work. Why won't they work?
Kate: Show us the evidence for the eco-efficiency or the techno-fixes delivering change. As I said earlier, evidence suggests that the impact of the fashion sector is growing year on year, not lessening, and all of these techno-fixes have been employed. The problem is they're not working deep enough at the level of the system and the paradigm. They're never going to change fundamentally, or outrun the endless continuous exponential growth of the sector, or outrun the adverse effects of that growing system. They are limited; it's not that they're not of value; they are of importance, in addition to a more extensive systems shift. Then it recognizes that these things are part of a new earth logic future, but it's essential that we direct them to the place where they're effective. At the moment, they're being used as the only idea. What we have to do is recognize where they will deliver change.
We also have to recognize that we can't rely on many things as we move forward into an earth logic future. One of these things is these old myths that someone else, somewhere else, will take care of this. That's not true. It's up to us. Generally, that person that we're hoping will take care of it is on the other side of the planet somewhere. It is our responsibility.
When we look at techno solutions, other things come up like a one size fits all, which is not valid. It's going to be quite messy. The sorts of solutions that emerge will be bespoke. Some of them will be hyperlocal, maybe some of them will be repeatable in other places, but it isn't going to be like it's been before.
Technology isn't going to save us. I remember a workshop I went to at Cambridge University with some of the most distinguished engineers. They described how eco-efficiency, or the ability of technology to be made more efficient, has extremely tight limits. It can't keep on going and making things more efficient, yet this myth still exists — that technology will save us. It won't. We have to begin to think about other things. In the conclusion to that workshop, they said that the only way to change things is less stuff. That is the only option, even though it's challenging.
Shonagh: What are some of the other key takeaways in addition to producing less that you put forward in the Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan?
Kate: Earth Logic has these territories, or landscapes, which we invite people to explore. One of them is thinking through what a fashion system in a smaller, more resource-constrained system of less might be like. Another one is localizing. Another is plural, recognizing that we need diversity in all shapes or forms. Up to this point, the monoculture of ideas within fashion and also representation is perilously violent towards fostering change.
Then the following three landscapes tell us a little bit about how we might achieve this. The first is to think about language. We also really need to think about how we learn, what we choose to learn, and in new ways. The last is a provocation around governance and taking care of the systems that help shape decisions. We want to make those much more equitable, fair, and representative. But we also want to use governance to begin to drive change and forge new relationships in more responsible ways.
Shonagh: Another critical factor for the success of the action plan is to connect with different communities. Have you been able to test run some of the concepts with groups?
Kate: Yeah. We started doing in-person workshops just before the pandemic hit and did three in the U.K. Then, when the pandemic began, we didn't know what would happen to the rest of the tour. After the first few weeks, of everybody thinking, Oh, my gosh, how are we going to live? We moved online, and actually, it's been an incredible boon because a community has emerged. At one workshop, a few people hung on the video call afterward. There was somebody from Paraguay, people from the U.K., someone from New Zealand, and a person from India, talking about fostering transformational change in their communities and desperate to figure out what this might be. We hadn't imagined that it would have that sort of traction. The report is free to download, and as we speak, it's being translated into Portuguese, for the Brazilian market, and into Spanish. It's been remarkable. I also gave a talk at Copenhagen Fashion Summit, and we did an event for Copenhagen Fashion Week.
It's timing, to some extent, but also, what we hear most often is people are so relieved that at last somebody has called out the thing that they knew was there but maybe didn't have the language for, particularly concerning growth logic. Now they can get on with the business of doing something, doing good work. When I say good work, I mean transformational work in this new space, which feels much freer.
Shonagh: You also set up the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion; what was the impetus behind forming that?
Kate: The Union of Concerned Scientists was set up in the 1960s by a group of scientists who were frustrated that the scientific community could not advocate for particular sorts of change. Similarly, we were frustrated at the lack of critique around systems shift in fashion. So we formed a group and wrote a radical manifesto: and invited people to sign it to join the union and begin working for change in new ways. Miraculously, loads of people joined us, and now we have a vibrant community of more than 200 members across something like 40 different countries. Our membership is explicitly trying to develop knowledge, shared and practiced, to understand how to foster change and what that means in the fashion space.
Image by Kenyon Anderson
Shonagh: You have also been engaging in a practice called life writing. You published a book called Wild Dress: Clothing and the Natural World in 2019. What is life writing, and why did you choose to write Wild Dress in this style?
Kate: Life writing is writing from finite direct experience, basically writing from my life in an autobiographical way about place, landscape, land, and nature. There are lots of people that use it; there's a significant genre of nature writing. As a way in, I used clothing — like a gateway or a key to unlock a door into a different sort of understanding of the natural world. So through describing life and bodies wearing clothes in a landscape, a new relationship between clothing and the world in which we live, which includes all of these other beings, is opened up.
I wrote a paper recently where I describe life writing as an ecological research method. It's effectively like a way to bring a microscope or a magnifying glass up to your eye to see and understand where you are. As a matter of course, the relationship between clothes and these systems becomes a new sort of focus. I have found it a remarkable tool to make change and find new connections and interdependencies with the world in which we live. Arguably, that's what environmental philosophers would say was the heart of our problem, a lack of connection. When you don't have a relationship between fashion and nature, when there's not any connection, that's when people don't care. It is about finding ways to forge connections and to place bodies in the landscape. A dressed body in the landscape is a way to make connections where none were made before.
What's fantastic about it is this new physicality that I've appreciated from garments. There is so much associated within consumerist stories about the appearance of clothes. It's not that they're not associated with that. But they're also associated with your physical body, what it feels like, and what you can then go on to do and be. And that is like an amazing gift.
I have also done another collection that's going to be out hopefully in a couple of months. And this time, I've written with a British poet called Helen Mort… watch this space.
Shonagh: Thank you so much for talking to me. My last question is, if you could wake up tomorrow in Kate's utopia, what would the world look like?
Kate: It would be a hugely convivial space — maybe I say that because of the pandemic and how starved we all are of company. It would be a place where tables were laden with conviviality. That means it would be a place of warmth and joy. It would also be a place of quiet, not all the time — noisy, but also quiet. And there would be lots of neighbors, including human ones.
