Unsustainable Fashion

Context: The Myth of Sustainable Fashion

…and not, as it turns out, an isolated instance of an industry and integrated economic culture being so profoundly shaped by and oriented towards cultivating obsolescence and waste that it could hardly continue to exist in any kind of recognisable form without it.

In one regard, this is a singular issue of consumerism and its implicit bias towards material churn. In another, it’s a component microcosm of the distributed, largely unacknowledged and generally unquestioned tendency of large-scale socioeconomic (as much as technological or geopolitical) systems to inadvertently depend for systemic continuity upon precisely the very worst forms of short-term planning, organisation and haunted hubris.

Notice, for instance, the many and varied ways in which a cultivation of psychological desire for new consumer items and experiences is both mirror of and significant causal factor in the invocation of subjective selves for which no amount of novelty or saturating spectacle can ever provide closure, certainty or – significantly – meaning. We have cultivated insatiable selves and anchored our words and worlds upon the transient, contingent narratives that flow from them as though this were all truth, not fragile systems of reflexivity.