Global Fashion, via the logic of high-speed, large-scale industrial production and anachronistic high-volume consumption habits, causes significant social and environmental damage. Local Fashion is understood as part of the Slow Fashion movement that aims to change the functions of fashion so that they support or lead the quest to flourish within known human and planetary boundaries. This Licentiate thesis examines, through an exploratory narrative based on new and existing research, two Local Fashionalities. Växbo Lin is a small linen manufacturer/brand in Hälsingland, Sweden, producing new heritage home textiles. WomenWeave is a handloom social enterprise in Madhya Pradesh, India, making naya khadi. Their approaches and practices are presented and discussed vis-à-vis notions of “globality”, “locality”, design management, and the quest for sustainability. The narrative aims to improve understandings of what Local Fashion is, and contribute to the effort to design new fashion systems grounded in logic relevant to contemporary human needs and aspirations.

This narrative focuses on one aspect of the growing phenomenon of textile recycling: the act of “getting rid of” one’s no longer wanted clothing. The story here derives from many visits to Wearable Collections, a business that collects apparel (as well as towels, sheets, shoes, and other textiles) with an “inlet” at the popular Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan. Over several months, I watched hundreds of individuals drop off thousands of kilos of materials for recycling and talked with many of them about what they were doing and why they were doing it. This investigation was undertaken for two purposes. On one hand, it was a device for practicing a variety of ethnographic field methods to support my current Ph.D. action research with enterprises aiming to build more sustainable fashion systems. On the other hand, it was a means to gain knowledge of what is happening with textile recycling in New York City. The pages that follow have been excerpted from a longer and broader account. The term textile recycling is used here broadly. It encompasses upcycling (for example, making a dress from old dresses, or producing yarn from trimmings from garment manufacturing); downcycling (such as shredding worn out textiles for insulation); practices such as selling, swapping, or giving away; and any other ways of reusing or repurposing that saves — or at least delays — textiles from being buried in landfills or otherwise wasted.