Authors: Katia Vladimirova, Yassie Samie, Irene Maldini, Samira Iran, Kirsi Laitala, Claudia E. Henninger, Sarah Ibrahim Alosaimi, Kelly Drennan, Hannah Lam, Ana-Luisa Teixeira, Iva Jestratijevic & Sabine Weber
Abstract
Wealthy cities are the primary hubs for excessive consumption and disposal of fashion and textiles. As such, cities have the power to support urban transitions toward more circular and sufficient consumption patterns. However, there is a lack of research and data around the topic of post-consumer textiles, which results in lagging policy and action at a city level. Here we aim to address this knowledge gap and offer a deeper understanding of what happens to clothes and textiles after consumers no longer want them, across nine Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development cities. Based on the analysis of policy documents, interviews and scientific and gray literature, the study finds similarities in terms of how the flows are managed across wealthy cities. The findings suggest that directing unwanted textiles toward exports makes the problem of growing post-consumer textile waste, a direct result of fashion overproduction and overconsumption, invisible to the public and to municipalities. This Article offers an important and timely analysis to inform action on post-consumer textiles and proposes a list of actionable policy recommendations for city governments to support the transition toward circular and sufficient urban textile systems.
Chalmers University In the heart of Gothenburg hosted the defense for Erik Klint on September 6th. Klint’s PhD, consisting of 5 published articles and some additional published material, was discussed with professional curiosity and benevolence, and the atmosphere was positive throughout.
Author: Ingun Grimstad Klepp
It is not easy to work interdisciplinary, but as the head of the Grading committee Professor Michael Zwicky Hauschild, Denmark’s Technical University summed up: Here we have well-defined research questions, identified knowledge gaps and an exciting journey between the two different academic traditions, a travel from environmental impact to psychology and then back again to Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs).
Functional unit must define a function
The work’s most important conclusion is that what people do – and what psychologists call behavior – must be included in LCAs. The functional unit cannot be kilos of laundry, but rather what the function is or can be. The most important function of clean clothes is to make us feel socially safe. This is the functional unit that Klint argues for and was supported by the LCA expert from the Technical University of Denmark. A FU must be a function, something the product or test is used for in order to achieve an outcome.
There was a lot of discussion about this point during the defense, both from the opponent, Professor Wencke Gwozdz, Justus Liebig University of Giessen, and from the audience. Because: Doesn’t laundry also have other functions? And can this be a function or functions that is or are actually difficult to measure? Yes, but as Klint demonstrates, it is this (that is, what is needed to perceive something as clean) that has changed the most and also has the greatest impact on the environmental footprint of laundering.
Both during the discussion and in the thesis, Klint draws in clothes and their functions, and I took the opportunity to point out that the use of LCAs is much more problematic for clothing than for laundry, and that his work will thus possibly have greater consequences for this field.
Better data
After the defense, the supervisors and the committee took part in a tour of the Living Lab, flats inside the Chalmers campus area that has been trialing new solutions and more community-based services. A shared laundry room was located centrally in the building by the entrance, and together with a pleasant living room that included tools for repairing clothes, exercising, or a space just for hanging out. The Living Lab has student housing and apartments, and those who live there must approve that data from their laundering is included in research.
Greg Peters explains how data was collected from the washing machines. He holds up a chip similar to those sewn into the clothes to provide data on washing frequency. Not surprisingly, the ethical aspects of this type of data collection were also discussed during the defense.
Supervisor Gregory Peters Professor, Environmental Systems Analysis, Technology Management and Economics, proudly showed off how they had modified the machines to collect data and also the chips they had sewn into the clothes to collect details about washing frequency – among other things. In his work, Klint contrasts what people say and what they do. And the difference is big! Not least, this applies to washing “full machines”, where the result shows that that what people think is a full machine, varies greatly. This has major consequences for the environmental impact of laundry, which easily becomes more than twice as high if the filling rate drops to half capacity. In the comparison of self-reported data and data from the Living Lab, Klint also used pictures to illustrate what the machine looked like when it was fully loaded. This gave a clear picture closer to the actual degree of filling, than words alone.
Numbers and culture
The work done by Klint is based on quantitative analyzes and a lot of number crunching – as is expected in a thesis that seeks to improve an LCA tool. But Klint himself found that the cultural aspects of cleanliness and changes in these, alongside that there are so many different ways of thinking about how things should be sorted and what can be washed together with what, were a very interesting aspect to explore. It was thus with great respect for the nuances of human nature that his analyzes were made. He found that attitudes towards the environment played no role in washing frequency, but that other variables could explain quite a bit. Another nail in the coffin for the idea of ”enlightenment” as important for changing people’s actions.
Increased sensitivity to disgust, shame, or cleanliness norms were associated with a higher washing frequency per person. Thus, most important were shame and disgust – i.e. the discomfort perceived in what dirt and smell causes in social settings.
Both concepts were discussed based on psychological theories and literature on these feelings. Klint argued that people do not load a load of laundry to use (or not use) energy, but to have clean clothes, or because the laundry basket is full. This is obvious – but as long as LCAs are developed with a technical starting point, e.g. how efficient a machine is – it is necessary to point this out and change the LCAs so that what people actually do, is taken into account.
Changes in technology and infrastructure also change habits, and this interaction disappears if only kilograms of laundry are studied, not the need for clean clothes. This then immediately raises bigger questions because what is really a need? And how is it that what is perceived as necessary, common, decent, etc. changes? Klint couldn’t answer everything, and this was not expected. Nevertheless, we couldn’t help ourselves – because his work opens up big questions that will probably become even more urgent if we transfer the discussion from laundry to clothing.
Despite the fact that we at SIFO is neither an LCA expert, nor a strong psychological approach, the conclusions was just as much what we have – or could have – done a lot. The will to find better data than what people themselves report, and not least the combination of technical and social science approaches, made the work familiar in a certain sense. There were also plenty of SIFO references in all the articles.
Cheers for Chalmers
It was fun to take part in this defense, everything from small technical details and information, to the big questions, were handled quickly and professionally. There was a good mix of friendly conviviality and academic celebration over the ceremony.
In the back, from the left, supervisor Greg Peters, Professor of Quantitative Sustainability Assessment, Scientific Director Swedish Life Cycle Center, Division of Environmental Systems Analysis, Department of Technology Management and Economics, Chalmers University of Technology, Professor Lars-Olof Johansson University of Gothenburg, Department of Psychology, Grading committee member Dr Alessio Mastrucci, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Next row: Grading committee members Professor Michael Zwicky Hauschild, Denmark’s Technical University and Professor Ingun Grimstad Klepp, Oslo Metropolitan University, Opponent Professor Wencke Gwozdz, Justus Liebig University of Giessen. In front Erik Klint.
For me, this was an educational trip that shows that other subjects and traditions have a lot to contribute, but also that ideas and traditions we have advocated for decades, such as the importance of the use phase, are indeed supported in other subjects and methodologies.
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).
As the Woolume project comes to an end after three and a half fruitful years, a new project note has been published.
Economics and scale are important themes, especially for moving forward with better use of local wool. As identified in other projects, things need to happen in the right order and there must be an economic fundament that ensures a professionalism and not that what one does is done on a hobby basis. The skills gap is an important issue if there is to be a future for the wool industry in Europe, and this must be addressed at national and EU level, this is not something a project or industry can fix on their own.
WOOLUME has been a bilateral project with only two countries involved, and few project-partner institutions. Usually projects involve more countries, many more institutions and therefore also are ’messier’ in the way that one needs to involve all actors in several research questions and WPs. On the other hand, the research in more complexly structured projects is often more limited and must stick to one problem-definition in order to make the project doable.
If we are going to be scaling textile industry in Europe, based on our local resources and better use of them, many things must happen at the same time. One is that those who grant money for research must be aligned with the planetary boundaries and with making a positive impact for planet, people and animals. The zealots also must have room to ‘play’ outside the strict confinements of complex EU funding, which most probably must be backed by national governments, who see the value of being self-sufficient not only when it comes to food, but also for textiles.
Summary
This note looks at knowledge transference between a country of high wool utilisation (Norway) and a country of low wool utilisation (Poland). The findings that are presented here, are collected through semi-structured interviews, via Zoom, in person and also with one written response. All interviewees were project partners. Economics and scale are important themes, especially for moving forward with better use of local wool. As identified in other projects, things need to happen in the right order and there must be an economic fundament that ensures a professionalism and not that what one does is done on a hobby basis. The skills gap is an important issue if there is to be a future for the wool industry in Europe, and this must be addressed at national and EU level, this is not something a project or industry can fix on their own.
On 17th April 2024, UCRF (Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion) hosted a Wardrobe Methods Event in conjunction with the CHANGE research project to explore a way of researching the contents and dynamics of wardrobes.
78 had registered for the event, and 41 attended the webinar on Wardrobe Methods, which is about the use phase in the lives of clothing and the practices that go on there. This has long been seen as a way to break apart the monolithic understanding of ‘use’ and ‘consumption’ that industry and sustainability initiatives often promote. In the attendees at the live meeting, at least 15 different mother tongues spoken: Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Dutch, Hungarian, English, Portuguese, Swiss German, Danish, Turkish, Hindi, Italian, German, Polish, Norwegian.
The event hosted by Professor Kate Fletcher and Karishma Kelsey from the UCRF Board was facilitated by a talk from Professor Ingun Grimstad Klepp which gave a round-up of the history of the set of methods, along with current uses, also in policy-work. Here Klepp briefly touched on the new method developed by Consumption Research Norway SIFO called Waste Audit Interviews. This is part of SIFO’s ongoing work on addressing the short-comings of EU’s Textile Strategy, where ‘durability’ and ‘repairability’ are seen as the beacons of a long life for apparel.
The event’s goal was to explore ways to extend wardrobe methods further, including in more diverse ways. The talk was followed by a lively discussion and breakout-sessions. See the whole webinar by clicking here.
The discussions raised many intriguing propositions and development for Wardrobe Methods, a selection from the break-out rooms is summarized here:
Using wardrobe methods to help show the variety of understandings about key terminology related to textile qualities and descriptions, e.g. ‘quality’.
Potential ethnographic study of indigenous Mayan textile artisans in Guatemala, who traditionally weave their own capsule wardrobe but now supplement it with western clothing items.
Using wardrobe studies to investigate ageing and clothing. Look at how the studies can be a guide and pathway to other ways of being.
Taking a lifecycle perspective: look at the wardrobe as history.
Deploying wardrobe methods to investigate identity and identity change: for example, gender, sexuality, everyday life, menopause, pregnancy, biopolitics and non-conforming men.
Investigating how digital apps can go beyond quantification of wardrobe – learn about user preferences, emotional durability, reasons for why clothes fall out of use.
Exploring the assumption that fit translates into longevity of use.
Using wardrobe methods as a way to create behaviour change – increasing engagement and awareness among people for example in power positions and politics.
Qualitative and quantitative data are important. Using hybrid wardrobe methods to investigate items sent for repair or taken to clothing swaps at work places, are good ways to follow their story and give valuable data for the use phase.
Awareness raising power of wardrobe studies, how can we use wardrobe studies in developing new business methods that are not growth oriented?
Comparing with post-Soviet countries, specifically in smaller villages in the country-side to open up bigger cultural context.
The participants were encouraged to contribute with their own related research, and we are looking forward to seeing these and adding them to the Wardrobe Studies Library.
Join us for an exciting discussion about Wardrobe Methods in research with a talk by Professor Ingun Grimstad Klepp and then a sharing of experiences from across UCRF of doing research about the use and disposal of clothing. It will be facilitated by UCRF board members Kate Fletcher and Karishma Kelsey.
The aim is to:
deepen understanding about wardrobe methods; and
extend use of wardrobe methods and build greater diversity in their ideas and applications.
You can register here. The event will take place over Zoom.
Join us on 17th April!
Participation is free, but booking is essential to help us organise the event.
Please note: the event will be recorded and made available on the UCRF YouTube channel for later viewing. Also note: an edited book of 50 wardrobe methods, ‘Opening Up the Wardrobe: A Methods Book’ (2017) co-edited by Kate Fletcher and Ingun Grimstad Klepp is now available as a free e-book, find it here. And a link to a library of new Wardrobe Studies is here.
Author: Joshua M. Bluteau, UK, Coventry University, Social Anthropologist, @anthrodandy
Aim of study
This method was developed as part of a broader research project catalogued in the book ‘Dressing Up’ (Bluteau, 2022). During this period, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with bespoke tailors in London and the network of Instagram sartorialists that grew up around them. As part of this process, I developed a digital ethnographic method termed ‘immersive cohabitation’ (Bluteau, 2021) that centred around doing as my digital interlocutors did, dressing up, taking selfies and posting them to Instagram as part of a reciprocal social and sartorial practice. To take part in this I had to acquire similar garments to wear and photograph, which were mostly purchased from online auction websites and grew into a considerable collection.
These garments were not merely ethnographic artefacts but became part of my everyday wardrobe as I sought to foreground participation, over observation (following Wacquant, 2004) as part of my research praxis. ‘Ethnographic Wearing’, as part of this broader study became a way of engaging with the acquired garments themselves and using the wearing of them as a research process to learn more about them.
The objective of the study
To answer what it is like to wear certain clothes. Incorporating both the process of acquiring, storing, and living with them to gain insight into the lived experience of their owner/wearer, and to understand what impact these garments had on them.
The method
Simply, this method began by purchasing garments akin to those that my interlocutors were wearing and then using them to dress myself to take self-portrait style images which were uploaded to Instagram to construct a digital self that could be used for digital ethnographic research. However, this metamorphosed into an everyday practice of wearing these garments as they became part of how I dressed habitually on and offline during this period of fieldwork.
As a result I began to reflect on the process of wearing, taking thickly descriptive fieldnotes and digital photographs to catalogue the sensorial, haptic, emotional and phenomenological aspects of wearing these clothes. This in itself became a kind of thick wearing and became central to my ethnographic engagement with garments as an object of anthropological study.
Then what?
After the study, the wardrobe remained. The fieldwork which allowed the inception of this method of Wearing Ethnography was over, but the wardrobe remained dynamic. The doors to this personal collection were not closed although some rails became less visited – gathering dust – while others had new garments added to them and were still frequently worn. In this sense, the study is still ongoing and this longitudinal engagement with Wearing Ethnography promises to generate further research data for future analysis.
How this specific method could be used by others
This method is not bound by geographical location, garment type or research focus and can be either the primary mode of study or a supplementary line on enquiry. As such it has the potential to be utilized by a large number of researchers both in the field of fashion/garment studies, as well as a wide range of qualitative researchers in the social sciences and beyond. It may be of interest to those who wish to investigate garments in isolation, or those who wish to engage with garments that have a specific bearing on their research site. It also offers a starting point for discussions about collecting garments from the field and wearing not only to reflect on the process but as a mode of access to and rapport building with new informants. The primary limitation is whether garments fit or not, which may present a substantial barrier in some cases.
How the results could be used by others
The results of this study form part of an emerging subdiscipline of anthropology which could be termed fashion anthropology or the anthropology of clothing and adornment. Specific anthropological investigations of clothing are disparate and fragmented, with much of the prior scholarship collated by Luvaas and Eicher (2019) in their fantastic reader. However, methodological tools for engaging with specific garments are less well defined, with research often focusing on the relationship between informant and garment (see for example, Miller and Woodward, 2012) rather than the garment and researcher. As a result, this method of ‘ethnographic wearing’ challenges the current narrative, and offers a way for researchers to engage with clothing that can provide rich ethnographic data.
All photos by the author.
What insight does this method generate?
Whilst a range of methods have been used by other scholars to engage with garments held in collections, this method offers the researcher the opportunity to wear the garments in and out of the wardrobe. This allows considerable insight into how the garments feels on the body, how it moves and shapes the experience of the wearer and how differing notions of expense and quality can be tactilely experienced. This method joins artefact to researcher slipping one inside the other like two jigsaw pieces to give a bigger picture. These insights can be small from how a particular maker cuts a garment through to practical considerations of movement, temperature control, and how a garment performs in different environments, as well as how the garment shapes other’s perception of the wearer. All the qualitative insights can help to produce a more holistic and rigorous depiction of the garment.
References
Bluteau, J.M. (2021). Legitimising digital anthropology through immersive cohabitation: Becoming an observing participant in a blended digital landscape. Ethnography 22(2): 267-285.
Bluteau, J.M. (2022). Dressing Up: Menswear in the age of Social Media. New York: Berghahn.
Luvaas, B., and Eicher, J.B. (2019). The Anthropology of Dress and Fashion: A Reader. London: Bloomsbury.
Miller, D., and Woodward, S. (2012) Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wacquant, L. (2004). Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clothes must not only suit the user and the occasion but also be clean for us to be well dressed. The meaning of cleanliness and the methods to achieve this goal has changed throughout history, but it has been central in our clothing practices. In this chapter, we will show how the understanding of dirty and clean clothes and the work of keeping them clean has changed in the last 200 years. The starting point will be the laundry in Norway, but when we discuss the more current times, the global washing practices will be included. As important as these technical and aesthetic questions are the cultural aspect. How have the perceptions of what is clean and what is dirty changed, and what consequences does this have for being well-dressed and for the work with the laundry? We discuss the growth in the amount of laundry, and after the 1970s also the decline in finishing work, especially related to removing the wrinkles. The technical and aesthetic aspects are important, such as whiteness, stains, and not least, odors. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the environmental impacts of laundry, including consumption of water, chemicals, and energy, and spreading of microplastics.
Authors: Tone Rasch, Ingrid Haugsrud, Kirsi Laitala and Atle Wehn Hegnes
Abstract
Consumer practices related to how we use and take care of products have changed throughout history. Especially within clothing consumption, the changes have accelerated in the Twentieth Century. In this paper, we use thin nylon stockings for women as an example product to see how their value, use, care, and lifetimes have evolved. The material is based on a literature review on nylon stockings from 1940 to today, accompanied by an analysis of consumers’ written narratives from 1990 where people were asked to describe their use and memories of stockings and pantyhose. Our contemporary data is based on consumer focus groups on product lifetimes and plastic materials conducted in 2021 and 2022. The tight-fitting nylon stockings for women were launched around World War II by the American company DuPont. Cheap nylon substituted luxurious silk stockings and increased their popularity throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Around 1970, synthetic substances were devalued when fashion changed from elegance to more casual styles, and the political opposition to plastic as environmental damage and a symbol of the established society permeated the growing youth culture. Consequently, nylon stockings went out of fashion. Today, thin pantyhose is seen as disposable consumables with low value. Thin stockings represent a good example of how we value and take care of delicate items has a significant contribution to their lifetimes. Looking into the historical context is beneficial for learning about the points in time when changes occurred and how they contribute to consumer practices.
Authors: Irene Maldini, Vilde Haugrønning and Lucrecia de León
Abstract
This paper introduces the relevance of volume-centric research in studies of clothing use. The global production of garments has grown dramatically in recent decades, bringing along significant environmental challenges. However, knowledge is lacking about why people deal with clothing quantities in such varied ways, and what leads some of them to overconsumption. A review of wardrobe research methods shows that there are various approaches to studying garments going in, around, and out of wardrobes. Gathering qualitative insights about specific garments, such as favorite garments, has been quite common. However, in order to advance knowledge about clothing consumption volumes, it is important to look at the wardrobe as a whole and include quantitative aspects. This paper reflects on what approaches and techniques can be used to that end. The reflections are combined with lessons learned from a pilot wardrobe study conducted in Uruguay, Portugal and Norway in 2022 with 20 respondents, concluding with recommendations for volume-centric methods in future wardrobe studies. Rigorous accounts of all garments owned should be combined with registration of items going in and out of the wardrobe over time in order to link accumulation to production and waste volumes. Methods connecting garment quantities with practices of daily use are particularly valuable. One example that has proven successful is piling exercises, a technique where participants are invited to categorize garments in groups according to specific criteria.
