Material assets

MATERIAL ASSETS Fashion’s material form – fibre, fabric, clothing – reproduce connections, or the lack of them, to place. Material assets are tell-tales of system priorities: are textile fibres and fabric commodities of capital exchange or opportunities for community and ecosystem exchange? In Macclesfield, place…

Local food and fashion

LEARNING FROM LOCAL FOOD The principles and practices of local food set a course to change what we eat. As a movement, local food iswell developed; a fusion of small-scale regional producers, distinctive gastronomy, celebrated seasonal availability, farmers’ markets, foraging skills, celebrity chefs, among others.…

Haberdashemergency

HABERDASHEMERGENCY Location: Hurdsfield Launderette, Macclesfield, SK10 2RD, UK Open Monday – Saturday, 10-6pm. Closed Wednesdays. Installation of an open access public sewing kit in a popular and friendly launderette in Macclesfield. Everything happens somewhere. The fashion industry is often described as a global sector. Yet…

Micro design projects

MICRO DESIGN PROJECTS The Fashion Ecologies work raises many questions. Not least if scales of activity need to reduce in order to affect change, then who, in a fashion system focused on growth and increase, will lead the charge?  Through four small design projects all…

Methods

METHODS The task of recording place-based fashion interactions, relationships and related resource flows is a highly unusual one – a hybrid anthropological-scientific investigation – that few conventional textiles and clothing research methods are set up to deal with. So the Fashion Ecologies project needed new…

Localism

LOCALISM Localism is recognised as a central tenet of sustainability that will, it is claimed, ‘solve at root many of society’s theoretical and practical problems’. Its promise arises from two main sources: the different way that power is divided when the scale of living is…

The project

INTRODUCING FASHION ECOLOGIES The aim of Fashion Ecologies is to develop new knowledge and practice around localism as a route to sustainability change in the fashion context. It does this by understanding localism not as a materials and supply chain issue or as single items,…