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.

As awareness has grown of the detrimental, often lethal, aspects of fashion production and use, so too has a global movement to diminish its environmental harms and mediate its social exploitation. In all types of commercial, academic, and popular discourse about fashion, words such as eco-friendly, green, ethical, fair, and slow -- the last being a catch-all term for all things “not fast fashion”-- are ubiquitous. These terms are meant to represent an array of ways of producing and using that are said or hoped to be sustainable.

This research is primarily concerned with the social sustainability, or human development aspects, of artisan fashion, in the context of textile management. Artisan fashion is defined here as both product (such as a handwoven shawl), and as an evolving contemporary fashion system that typically employs rural artisans in the “developing world” to make products that are generally sold to urban, “developed world” consumers. Artisan fashion, which attempts to bridge old ways of producing with new ways of consuming, is positioned in this research as it has come to be viewed in the fashion marketplace: a subset of so-called slow and sustainable fashion. Though artisan fashion is emblematic of many slow and sustainable ideals, there is little academic questioning or understanding of how “slow” and how “sustainable” the stuff and the system that makes it actually are.

This case study centers on WomenWeave, a medium-sized handloomed- textile making social enterprise in a quickly-changing small town in rural India. This producer, employing about 200 individuals, mostly women with low-education and little privilege, specializes in naya khadi, a type of apparel or furnishings fabric whose antecedent, khadi, is an integral part of the grand narrative of India’s independence movement. Founded by a “social entrepreneur” with deep and privileged roots in the community, the case is idiosyncratic, yet representative of a common market-based ideological approach to human development.

A narrative, ethnographic methodology was used that included multiple field visits, observations, interviews, and participatory interactions with the case’s leadership, management, artisans, product designers, partners and experts, among others. The empirical experiences are presented, analyzed, and discussed through the lenses of Activity Theory, and an adaptation of Osterwalder and Pingeur’s Business Model Canvas.

While the nomenclature of “slow and sustainable fashion” is, at least for the time being, rejected, the research shows that with professional management, the adoption of “global design” sensibilities, and other fast modernisms, the system achieves its local mission of providing incomes and fostering social inclusion.