The Sustainable Fashion Handbook

A definitive guide to the complex issues surrounding modern clothing production, use, and disposal

The clothing industry employs 25 million people globally contributing to many livelihoods and the prosperity of communities, to women’s independence, and the establishment of significant infrastructures in poorer countries. Yet the fashion industry is also a significant contributor to the degradation of natural systems, with the associated environmental footprint of clothing high in comparison with other products. Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion recognizes the complexity of aligning fashion with sustainability. It explores fashion and sustainability at the levels of products, processes, and paradigms and takes a truly multi-disciplinary approach to critically question and suggest creative responses to issues of: • Fashion in a post-growth society • Fashion, diversity and equity • Fashion, fluidity and balance across natural, social and economic systems This handbook is a unique resource for a wide range of scholars and students in the social sciences, arts and humanities interested in sustainability and fashion.

This book examines how sustainability has the potential to transform both the fashion system and the innovators who work within it. Sustainability is arguably the defining theme of the twenty-first century. The issues in fashion are broad-ranging and include labour abuses, toxic chemicals use and conspicuous consumption, giving rise to an undeniable tension between fashion and sustainability. The book is organized in three parts. The first part is concerned with transforming fashion products across the garment's lifecycle and includes innovation in materials, manufacture, distribution, use and re-use. The second part looks at ideas that are transforming the fashion system at root into something more sustainable, including new business models that reduce material throughput. The third section is concerned with transforming the role of fashion designers and looks to examples where the designer changes from a stylist or creator into a communicator, activist or facilitator.

From journalist, fashionista, and clothing resale expert Elizabeth L. Cline, “the Michael Pollan of fashion,”* comes the definitive guide to building an ethical, sustainable wardrobe you'll love. Clothing is one of the most personal expressions of who we are. In her landmark investigation Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth L. Cline first revealed fast fashion’s hidden toll on the environment, garment workers, and even our own satisfaction with our clothes. The Conscious Closet shows exactly what we can do about it. Whether your goal is to build an effortless capsule wardrobe, keep up with trends without harming the environment, buy better quality, seek out ethical brands, or all of the above, The Conscious Closet is packed with the vital tools you need. Elizabeth delves into fresh research on fashion’s impacts and shows how we can leverage our everyday fashion choices to change the world through style. Inspired by her own revelatory journey getting off the fast-fashion treadmill, Elizabeth shares exactly how to build a more ethical wardrobe, starting with a mindful closet clean-out and donating, swapping, or selling the clothes you don't love to make way for the closet of your dreams. The Conscious Closet is not just a style guide. It is a call to action to transform one of the most polluting industries on earth—fashion—into a force for good. Readers will learn where our clothes are made and how they’re made, before connecting to a global and impassioned community of stylish fashion revolutionaries. In The Conscious Closet, Elizabeth shows us how we can start to truly love and understand our clothes again—without sacrificing the environment, our morals, or our style in the process. *Michelle Goldberg, Newsweek/The Daily Beast

Packed with examples from groundbreaking designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Stella McCartney, Edun and People Tree, A Practical Guide to Sustainable Fashion is a much-needed overview of current models of fashion design and production. Alison Gwilt introduces the key issues associated with the production, use and disposal of fashion clothing and gives step-by-step guidance on how to identify and evaluate the potential impacts of a garment during the design process. With innovative examples of best practice from international designers and brands, the chapters follow each key stage in the life cycle of a fashion garment and explores approaches such as low-impact textiles techniques, mono-materiality, zero waste techniques, upcycling, repair and maintenance techniques and closed-loop design systems. New to this edition: More in-depth coverage of design thinking, materials manufacture, practical techniques for creating 'faster' recyclable fashion and new ways forward for fashion, such as including the circular economy and the Sustainable Development Goals.

This book provides a critical insight into sustainability and fashion in a retailing and marketing context. Examining a truly global industry, Sustainability in Fashion offers international application with a view to contextualising important developments within the industry. Contributors use their diverse backgrounds and expertise to provide a contemporary approach in examining key theoretical concepts, constructs and developments. Topics include consumer behaviour, communications, circular economy and supply chain management. The individual chapters focus on sustainability and provide a range of fashion sector examples from high street to luxury apparel.

Praise for the previous edition: "[A] fascinating book." John Thackara, Doors of Perception "Provides the foundations for a radical new perspective." Ethical Pulse "At last a book that dispels the idea that fashion is only interested in trend-driven fluff: not only does it have a brain, but it could be a sustainable one." Lucy Siegle, Crafts Magazine Fully revised and updated, the second edition of Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys continues to define the field of design in fashion and textiles. Arranged in two sections, the first four chapters represent key stages of the lifecycle: material cultivation/extraction, production, use and disposal. The remaining four chapters explore design approaches for altering the scale and nature of consumption, including service design, localism, speed and user involvement. While each chapter is complete in and of itself, their real value comes from what they represent together: innovative ways of thinking about textiles and garments based on sustainability values and an interconnected approach to design. Including a new preface, updated content and a new conclusion reflecting and critiquing developments in the field, as well as discussing future developments, the second edition promises to provide further impetus for future change, sealing Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys as the must-buy book for fashion and textiles professionals and students interested in sustainability.

The Handbook of Fashion Studies identifies an innovative spectrum of thematic approaches, key strands and interdisciplinary concepts that continue to push forward the boundaries of fashion studies. The book is divided into seven sections: Fashion, Identity and Difference; Spaces of Fashion; Fashion and Materiality; Fashion, Agency and Policy; Science, Technology and New fashion; Fashion and Time and, Sustainable Fashion in a Globalised world. Each section consists of approximately four essays authored by established researchers in the field from the UK, USA, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada and Australia. The essays are written by international subject specialists who each engage with their section's theme in the light of their own discipline and provide clear case-studies to further knowledge on fashion. This consistency provides clarity and permits comparative analysis. The handbook will be essential reading for students of fashion as well as professionals in the industry.

Creating sustainable fashion has never been more important. Circular Fashion provides an accessible, practical, and holistic approach to this key topic for anyone studying fashion. This introductory text to sustainability in fashion includes best practice case studies and profiles of key companies such as Patagonia, Veja, Christopher Raeburn, and Stella McCartney. It begins with an overview of the fashion business, tackling the issues of the linear production model of make, use, dispose, before introducing the idea of the circular supply chain. Circular Fashion is the must-have book for fashion students, creatives and anyone passionate about sustainability and fashion.