Network for heritage and innovation for the future of WOOL
The hiWOOL project – Network for heritage and innovation for the future of WOOL– was an initiative by “Save the Portuguese Wool” Association, launched in 2015 with the aim of promoting the sustainability of wool and safeguarding of the culture and heritage traditions in Portugal.
Funded by the Bilateral Relations Fund, hiWOOL aimed to share knowledge between Portugal and Norway concerning the sustainability of wool and the exploitation of wool products for small producers of indigenous sheep breeds, based on studying similarities and differences between the two countries.
On 12th may, 2021, the project started with the first meeting gathering all partners, with a brief presentation of the activities to be developed, made by the proposing team, a discussion on the parameters that should be selected for the characterization of wool fibers was conducted.
The start of the project was also celebrated with the Shearing Day, at Quinta da Fonte Santa, in Caneças-Portugal, on which 150 sheep of the Bordaleira Serra da Estrela breed, belonging to shepherd Virgílio Ricardo were shorn.
During the project, field work was carried out in both countries, including workshops on the development of wool products and investigation on the wool tradition in museums and archives (click here for more information). The main achievements and results has been presented on the partners’ web pages and in social media, during the project timeline, and a final seminar.
The hiWOOL project features the collaboration of the Selbu Spinneri AS (Norway) and Multilãs, Unipessoal, Lda (Portugal) companies, the research centers Consumption Research Norway SIFO, Oslo Metropolitan University and the D_TEX Lab – Textile Development Laboratory of the Architecture school from the Lisbon University and the local support of the Wool Museum in Covilhã and the Folk Museum in Oslo.
Both teams are now analyzing and characterizing the national wools, and results from that work will be shared on the partners web pages and social networks.
Participants Norway (SIFO)
Ingun Grimstad Klepp
Lisbeth Løvbak Berg
Other participants Norway
Tone Skårdal Tobiasson Selbu Spinneri
From the WPE Lab
Textile Development Laboratory of the Architecture school from the Lisbon University
The IMAGINE project invites you to its end conference and exhibition!
When: December 10th – 15th 2024 Where: Litteraturhuset, Oslo
Join us to explore visions of the future through the lens of eating, dressing and moving in inspiring talks, works and conversations on December 10th.
And visit the exhibition from December 10th – 15th.
For tickets for December 10th, follow the link here.
Program December 10th
08:30 Doors open
09:00 Velkommen // Mads Bruun Høy
Nye måter å forholde seg til fremtiden på // Nina Heidenstrøm
Mellom katastrofe og utopi. Norske dagdrømmer om livet i fremtiden // Audun Kjus
Forsvinningspunkter – fortellinger om fremtider // Heidi Dahlsveen
The power of imaginaries: imagining futures of consumption // Dan Welch
Dyr i byen – En forfattersamtale om klimaromanen Dyr i byen // Marte Wulff
Future Imaginaries in Art, Policy, and Business: The Dominant and Marginal Voices // Justyna Jakubiec, Rick Dolphijn, Virginie Amilien, Lisbeth Løvbak Berg
11:30 – 12:30 LUNSJ
A story of human and technological coming togetherness // Märtha Rehnberg
Velkommen til utstilling og workshop // Marie Hebrok, Dan Lockton, Femke Coops
The Wool museum and universitty in Covilhã, Portugal hosted the Designa conference, where Clothing Research’s Ingun Grimstad Klepp and Kate Fletcher were both key note speakers. Here is their report:
Kate and I felt very honoured and privileged to be able to open this conference together. Both the importance of the environmental crisis and of textiles was taken as read in the conference, and this made it easy to talk to this diverse group of designers representing a range of disciplines from all over the world.
The overarching theme was citizenship, a challenging one in a time of decline of democracy and increasing differences and distrust. The first Designa conference took place in 2011 and the themes have always been important and challenging. It also felt special to be able to attend an in-person conference in the heart of Covilhã.
The town is characterized by its steep hills and lies tucked into the mountainside, and is a tourist destination, made clear by the pictures of skiers in our hotel lobby. The hotel’s name was Solneve (sun snow in Portuguese) and it felt an apt choice in which to host researchers from Norway! It is also the main urban hub for the region with a long industrial tradition, a place where textile history is embedded in every house and stone. The university and the wool museum hosting the conference are interwoven, making this a unique place for a conference. Kate was told, time and again, how Covilhã was the Manchester of Portugal. However, in Norwegian eyes, it is more reminiscent of Lillehammer. The closeness to the mountains with rich pasture landscapes, wool (not cotton as would have been the case with Manchester) and water for dyeing and power, all had more in common with Lillehammer – and possibly Leeds (sans mountains).
Nonetheless, the textile industry has been important to the development of the local university, similarly to Manchester and Leeds. Lillehammer lacks that aspect.
The building in which the conference took place was part of the wool museum and was originally the site of the Royal Textile Factory from the 1760s. The museum and the university have brought new life to the old industrial buildings. The new institutions are literally building on old textile production locations, layering on top on old terrasses, and wells previously used for dyeing and scouring, and all the other stages of production.
After a formal welcome, Kate’s and my keynotes opened the conference. The session was led by the director of the wool museum, Rita Salvado. In her talk, Kate explored design themes and actions of nature relations, extending the ideas of citizenship to include the greater-than-human world. I followed up with “Clothing consumers as citizens, and the role of design” where I ended with wool as an example of design for and by citizens, with the example of Tingvoll ull. It was a fitting and soft place to land in this wool-town.
While Kate lifts and expands on concepts, my perspectives are often rooted in the technical and practical realm, as well as including material and political aspects. We were both able to respond to the many questions that followed our key notes, a both felt this was rare moment for us and our clothing research colleagues in the audience, Irene Maldini and Ana Neto.
Other conference-goers included fashion and design students from the local university and researchers from many other corners of the world, including a group from NTNU, representing Norway and brought with them warm greetings from Mari Bjerk, in addition to many excellent thoughts and reflections on the presented material. The themes that were discussed were broad, with a lot of emphasis on AI and different forms of design of systems and social relations. This was made possible by a responsive and positive audience, who were given ample time to ask their many questions.
In between we were also able to tour the wool museum, which impresses with its size, content and engagement with the town’s citizens and visitors, adding to the interesting discussions between Rita, Irene, Kate and myself. Rita’s background as a textile engineer, paired with an openness and curiosity about how wool’s history can come more to the forefront in understanding the places geographically and for tourist development, made it easy to find common ground.
The last keynote speaker, Nuno Jardim Nunes, represented the impressive initiative, the New European Bauhaus, with the talk “Bauhaus of the Seas”, in which he emphasized the importance of interviewing non-humans, and with that made a nice connection to Kate’s keynote. Nuno spoke on how they feed sounds from sea dwellers through AI.
It felt like it was not the last time our paths will cross the warm and sometimes snowy Portuguese wool town: Covilhã.
Join us for a thematic session at PLATE conference in Denmark (July 2025).
2025 is the last year for the CHANGE project and one of the closing activities is a thematic session at the Product Lifetimes and the Environment (PLATE) conference. The thematic session on “Rebound effects and critical views on product durability”, co-chaired by Irene Maldini, Ingun Klepp, Kirsi Laitala, Eléonore Maitre-Ekern, Harald Wieser welcomes contributions until November 29th, 2024. The conference will be held at Aalborg University in Denmark from the 2nd to the 4th of July, 2025, and you can read more here.
With this session we would like the PLATE community to press pause for a couple of days and reconsider: Are we moving in the right direction? What are the assumptions that underlie the claimed benefits of durability? Are our efforts really helping to reduce material depletion at a significant rate? What are the material and behavioural conditions that need to be met for durability to have the desired effect? And are these conditions present in real product lifetimes and in our everyday lives? What new ways of thinking can help us in advancing the field for more significant impact? These are questions that we (co-chairs of this session) find very relevant today and would love to address together with the presenting authors, while building on the quality research that we know this community can deliver.
The European Sociological Association’s main biennial event this year took the clothing researchers to Porto!
When: 27th – 30th August 2024 Where: University of Porto, Portugal
Set on the beautiful backdrop of Porto, the main themes of the 16th ESA conference were “Tension, Trust and Transformation”. About 20 researchers from Consumption Research Norway SIFO participated in the conference this time around, which for a long time has been a very important arena for the institute, in particular, through the Sociology of Consumption Research Network.
Between sessions, we also had time to visit the city, eat some Francesinha and get acquainted with the chickens living on campus.
Four presentations from the SIFO Clothing Researchers
Vilde presenting at ESAAnna presenting at ESA
In the session ‘Clothing consumption 1: Fashion’, Vilde Haugrønning presented the paper ‘Gender Dynamics in Clothing Consumption: Examining the Inflow and Outflow of Clothing from a Practice Oriented Perspective’ based on results from the wardrobe studies of her PhD project in the CHANGE project.
In the session ‘Clothing consumption 2: Identity’, Anna Schytte Sigaard presented her paper ‘Social Practices and Identity-Work: Life Course Changes as Drivers for Textile Disposal’ based on results from the wardrobe studies of her PhD project in the Wasted Textiles project.
Kirsi presenting at ESALisbeth Presenting ar ESA
In the session, Imaginaries of Consumption, Lisbeth Løvbak Berg presented a paper from the IMAGINE project, “Futures Literacy: Norwegian imaginaries of food and clothing consumption”, co-written with Justyna Jakubiec and Atle Wehn Hegnes. The paper explores how futures literacy of food and clothing consumption is exhibited in the material collected in the project, across the three stakeholder groups, consumers, businesses and policymakers.
In the session ‘Clothing consumption 3: Sustainability’, chaired by Anna, Kirsi presented the paper ‘Wardrobe Revelations: Rethinking Repair Practices and Clothing Consumption’. The paper is based on survey data collected in the CHANGE project.
In the same session, our research friend, Réka Tölg, PhD Candidate at Lund University, also presented the paper ‘Caring Circularities: Enacting Circular Consumption by Caring for and with Clothes’, co-authored with Christian Fuentes.
UNESCO has championed futures literacy since 2012, highlighting its importance in the context of imagining alternative futures and directing change towards desirable futures. It follows that futures literacy allows people to actively engage with the plurality of images of the future and relate them to their own choices and ideas of (un)desirable futures. While this includes understanding the role of the future also in people’s everyday consumption practices, which inevitably play a major role in the green transition, efforts are largely focused on policy planning, business innovation and higher education. We, therefore, ask what level of futures literacy Norwegian stakeholders exhibit related to food and clothing consumption. Based on stories collected from 137 Norwegian consumers, advertisements, and business strategy and policy documents, we highlight the different stakeholders’ narratives of food and clothing consumption to compare their engagement with present imaginaries of future consumption. We find that businesses and policymakers display a higher level of future literacy than consumers. In general, the narratives of food consumption are richer and more well-developed than those of clothing consumption: business and policy documents’ narratives of sustainable clothing futures are limited to the repeating narrative of ‘repair, reuse, recycle’, whereas food consumption narratives range from self-sufficiency to alternative protein sources. The latter suggests a higher level of future literacy, which may reflect a more mature discussion of food futures: adversely, the lack of attention to alternative forms of clothing consumption decreases the likelihood of a larger transformation of clothing consumption patterns.
Gender Dynamics in Clothing Consumption: Examining the Inflow and Outflow of Clothing from a Practice Oriented Perspective
Vilde Haugrønning
The present-day consumption of clothing is marked by excessive production and consumption, leading to issues of water scarcity, microplastic pollution, chemical contamination, CO2 emissions, and textile waste. In order to mitigate the environmental impact of clothing, there is an urgent need to examine the factors influencing the high volume of garments in wardrobes. This study explores the influence of gender and age on clothing consumption based on a qualitative and quantitative wardrobe study of 15 households in Norway from a practice oriented perspective. Each household had a man and a woman living together as partners to enable a gendered comparison between couples that take part in many of the same practices and share the everyday life. In the wardrobe study, the participants conducted a counting exercise of all the garments they owned, including underwear, socks and accessories. Following this, each participant was asked to register all inflow and outflow of clothing for 6 months. The analysis focus on the turnover rate of clothing and employs Evan’s (2019) six moments of consumption that focus on processes of acquiring and disposing in relation to practices. Preliminary findings show that female participants acquired a higher quantity of clothing compared to male participants. However, age also play a significant role in determining the turnover rate of clothing. The study highlights the social mechanisms and gender dynamics that shape clothing consumption patterns and challenges the prevailing studies on clothing and fashion that often overlook the nuanced practices and actions that influence clothing volumes.
Social Practices and Identity-Work: Life Course Changes as Drivers for Textile Disposal
Anna Schytte Sigaard
In this contribution, the complex interconnections between social practices and textile consumption are explored. Based on wardrobe interviews in 28 Norwegian households, investigation is carried out of the influence of two major life course changes, cohabitation, and parenthood, on disposal of clothing and other textile items. In the transition from living alone to cohabitation, it is found that the disposal of clothing and textiles emerges not only as a functional act but as a symbolic act of divestment. Spatially and temporally separated practices, such as pre-move closet purges and post-move decoration, underscore the profound identity-work involved in this transition where discarded items come to symbolize remnants of single life. Parenthood introduces a challenging balance between environmentally conscious practices and time constraints, unveiling compromises made in sustainable practices amidst the demands of parenting. The disposal of impractical gifts and inherited baby clothes reflects the negotiation of a new parental identity. In this contribution, the importance of individual reflexivity in the negotiation of identities during major life transitions is emphasized. Thereby, it contributes to expanding the understanding of clothing and textile consumption as both routinized and mundane practices at the same time as involving intentional and reflexive discursive activities.
Wardrobe Revelations: Rethinking Repair Practices and Clothing Consumption
Kirsi Laitala
Global clothing production and consumption pose significant challenges to environmental, social, and economic sustainability, particularly driven by the fast-fashion business model linking the global North and South. This study, based on a Norwegian consumer survey (N=1200), investigates factors influencing volumes of clothing consumption. Analyzing acquisition, ownership (wardrobe size), and disposal volumes, principal component analysis (PCA) factor extraction was used to identify key constructs related to respondents’ preferences and perceptions of clothing acquisition, use and repair practices. Gender and age emerge as pivotal determinants, with women reporting higher acquisition, ownership, and disposal levels than men. Those in their 50s possess the largest wardrobes, while younger individuals exhibited a higher frequency of clothing acquisition and disposal, and thus higher turnover rates of their wardrobe contents. Surprisingly, the study reveals that higher repair intentions or focus on quality do not correspond to reduced consumption. These counterintuitive results challenge conventional assumptions about the relationship between these practices and overall consumption. Similarly, factors such as the allure of sales, impulse buying, and the desire to appear well-dressed contributed to increased consumption levels, emphasizing the influence of psychological and social factors. The lack of correlation between reduced consumption and the intention to focus on buying fewer quality items and repairing more implies a need for alternative strategies that consumers can apply to address their consumption levels and related sustainability challenges in the fashion industry. This research emphasizes the urgency of reevaluating current practices and fostering a more sustainable and conscientious approach to clothing consumption.
A new initiative from Sweden has surfaced, The Good Wool Collective, started by Lisa Bergstrand. As part of their inaugural webinar, Australian Wool Innovation’s Angus Ireland and I gave talks.
The theme was the shortcomings of EU’s Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and how it disadvantages natural fibers. The audience was mainly Nordic brands, but also some from further afield.
Lisa Bergstrand is a wonderful Swedish woman with an extensive design background who has embraced wool and its benefits, while Angus Ireland has been an important driver in the PEF process, and for wool’s sustainability credentials, and part of the ongoing work in PEFCRs. He is Program Manager for Fibre Advocacy and Eco Credentials at AWI, with extensive experience in wool’s environmental impact and advocacy in EU sustainability initiatives.
During the hour and a half long webinar with breakout-rooms towards the end, Angus Ireland first described the role of the wool industry in the PEF process, but also the work outside ‘the box’ in Make The Label Count (click here), and who are key players in this landscape. Next, he went on to PEF’s 16 parameters, with details about shortcomings and how plastic waste and microplastic release are not accounted for. With recent publications from Nature (click here for access) and from Changing Markets Foundation, have more or less upended the arguments that we do not have enough knowledge on microplastic release during laundering (a main argument from industry), as the Precautionary Principle is now being called into action, as laundering only represents a microscopic percentage of the total release over time, according to the Nature study.
The endemic bad quality of data and questionable parameters were Angus Ireland’s main focus. He also brought into play Consumption Research Norway’s research that relates to duration of service, that France’s Ecobalyse has been sniffing around, alongside the natural fiber sector seeing a ‘French opening’ with ADEME’s approach (sorry, only Scandinavians will see the humor in a French opening).
There is hope, as Angus Ireland described, even though the new LCA commissioned and peer-reviewed, still has not been accepted un GaBi – the database used by the EU – a process that has taken close to two years with no results so far. The Holistic Durability Working Group in PEF for apparel and footwear will hopefully succeed in their work to make for a more even playing-field.
Next up was myself, questioning whether natural fibers will ever get a fair rating in LCAs. I did a historic backtrack to the Made-By assessment tool in 2011 (wool labelled as ‘red’, recycled polyester as ‘green’) and fast forwarded to the Pulse of Fashion Report in 2017, where recycled polyester is what consumers should be ‘enhanced’ to choose. Certainly, over cotton, but obviously over all natural fibers. Amazing Grazing and other wool projects, such as the Textile farmer were introduced to the audience.
Alternative thinking needed
Changing Markets Foundation recent report Fashion’s Plastic Paralysis: How brands resist change and fuel microplastic pollution, was also something I came back to, especially the implications for our health related to microplastics. This is, as Angus talked about, something that should enter under the precautionary principle, not be continually dragged out in endless debates and delaying tactics.
Talking about “durability” and the general misunderstanding that ‘more durable products’ are going to save the world, when we are drowning in products, I went on to talk about TPR and work by the OR Foundation, which has been inspired by the waste audit approach.
My talk then turned to the functional unit, and pointed to a new PhD (click here to access) that has raised the million-dollar question not addressed in PEF; what is actually the functional unit for apparel? Is it number of wears, really? I used the example of my bunad and my daughter’s imminent marriage (wedding dresses are worn once, at least by the first owner), and my national costume’s 50 years of service, while my daughter’s is inherited from my mom, so the functional unit and duration of service will be exponential. I chose my bunad for the event (first part) and another not-enough-worn for the second disco-dancing part, and the functional unit of feeling worthy, safe, socially acceptable and dressed for the occasion – delivered!
Summing up, it all comes down to common sense, which is currently lacking in the whole shebang, and that the small ray of hope is that France has understood that solutions and how one evaluates companies and products needs to address the business model that underpins everything, not the product-specific criteria. This was followed by passionate and very good questions and engaging break-out discussions, showing that once one gains insight into the process surrounding PEF, people in the industry understand that the EU is currently headed on a fast track in the wrong direction.
Some more thoughts on this theme can be accessed here, if you’re on LinkedIn.
Clothing researchers Ingun Grimstad Klepp and Kate Fletcher will be part of opening the DESIGNA – CITIZENSHIP International Conference on Design Research in Covilhã Portugal the 24th and 25th October by presenting in the first plenary session at 10:30. Their talks are outlined below.
Multispecies citizens, clothing, design and nature – Professor Kate Fletcher
Ecological emergencies are intensifying to the point of earth system collapse. Fashion clothes and the systems that create them are deeply implicated in these emergencies. Garments are entangled with consumerist ideologies, with individualism, excess and wastefulness. They are also predicated – in the Modern West – on the notion that humans are separate from, and above, nature and that nature and its resources are for human’s unlimited use. Breaking with this approach, in this talk I will explore design themes and actions of nature relations, drawing on stories from my work with clothing. I will explore extending ideas of citizenship to include the greater-than-human world, the role of limits and direct sensory experience of the body in design.
Clothing consumers as citizens, and the role of design – Professor Ingun Grimstad Klepp
The image of consumers is far from the one of citizens, but all of us are both. In this paper I will explain how I as a consumer researcher understand the deep conflicts in this image and how it impacts the possibility of finding more sustainable solutions. As an guest in the design family I will explore the challenges at the border between consumer research and sustainable design and with that acknowledge both the great potential – and limitation of designing clothes for citizens
This study is about mining the past to better understand how we imagine and shape the future. The present report is a deliverable from Work Package 1: “Mine” in the research project IMAGINE: Contested Futures of Sustainability. WP1 aimed to construct a conceptual framework based on Paul Ricoeur’s study of the concept of imagination and to gather data about the imaginaries of the past. To identify dominant imaginaries, WP1 highlighted the diachronic nature of imaginaries to understand better how past, present and future times are interlinked and restrict or enable ways of thinking about the future. The Ricoeurian approach of imagination is the Ariadne’s thread of the conceptual part, while the empirical data follows the threefold consumption approach of IMAGINE focused on eating, dressing and moving. By combining theoretical and empirical perspectives, we developed a framework for the analysis of the data material, where self-reflection, reciprocity, dialogue, and re-figuration play a central role.
The study presents imaginaries found in at least 10 well-known movies, 10 renowned novels and cartoons, and 10 advertisements over the past generation, explicitly dealing with the sustainable future (30 in total). Furthermore, the report provides an analogous analysis of policy documents (white papers, strategy papers, policy reports) and business strategy documents from three time periods (1980-2000-2020) for each of our three cases of eating, dressing and moving (30 in total).
In the recently published report, What Fuels Fashion?, issued by Fashion Revolution, Consumption Research Norway SIFO’s suggestion for a Targeted Producer Responsibility method has received substantial attention alongside the Plastic Elephant report. In addition, the ruling by the Norwegian Consumer Authority against the Higg consumer-facing label also is brought forward.
All in all, What Fuels Fashion? gives much attention to the research from Oslo Metropolitan university, which is an important part of the Wasted Textiles project. What Fuels Fashion? is a single-issue, special edition of Fashion Revolution’s annual Fashion Transparency Index. They have reviewed 250 of the world’s largest fashion brands and retailers and ranked them according to their level of disclosure on climate and energy-related data in their own operations but primarily in their supply chains.
A key finding is that there is hardly any transparency around over-production. “The fashion industry wants to have its cake and eat it too. Most big fashion brands (89%) do not disclose how many clothes they make annually. Alarmingly, nearly half (45%) fail to disclose neither how much they make nor the raw material emissions footprint of what is produced, signalling the industry prioritises resource exploitation whilst avoiding accountability for environmental harms linked to production.”
On page 36 in the report, we can read: “Governments are now cracking down on greenwashing. In addition to investigations into several brands’ environmental claims taking place in the UK and Australia, the Norwegian Consumer Authority ruled the Higg Materials Sustainability Index (Higg MSI) unlawful to support such claims from retailers. These actions, which have resulted in accountability, illustrate why transparency is crucial to enable change. Nonetheless, the need for robust evidence-backed claims remains a persistent issue.”
Furthermore, on page 38, we find this quote: “Already we are seeing that overestimating the importance of garment durability and underestimating the environmental impact of overproduction is shaping the policy landscape. Research by Oslo Met University reveals the “Plastic Elephant in the Room” – which critiques the EU’s Sustainable Textiles Strategy, particularly its focus on durability. The research argues that the most effective way to reduce the fashion industry’s environmental impact is to cut production volumes rather than merely extending product lifespans (and that focusing on durability unintentionally supports synthetic fossil fuel-derived fibres).” Let’s hope someone from DG ENVI and DG GROW actually read this report!
On page 39, the report has a full-fledged explanation of TPR as a viable alternative to EPR (see illustration). Which is good news for the on-going discussion on how we can make fast fashion actually ‘out of fashion’ with regulatory instruments, and halt business as usual. Being taken seriously in such an important report, will hopefully garner further attention to SIFO’s research.
Increasing product longevity is seen as an effective way to reduce consumption within the circular economy. This paper explores narratives of product longevity, focusing on textiles, household appliances, and furniture as expressed by Norwegian business representatives and consumers. The study reveals dominant narratives of physical and emotional durability among businesses. Conversely, consumers emphasise managing consumption volumes and their relationship with products based on use contexts and life events. While both groups recognise the importance of physical durability, there’s a disconnect regarding how emotional attachment can be created between user and product, and the significance of production volumes. The study suggests that narratives of product longevity, shift focus from production to consumption, distancing from questions of volume and growth and that efforts should take ‘life durability’ of products into account when designing strategies and interventions aimed at extending product lifespans, including business models and policy directly targeting lower production volumes.
