Recrafting textile futures: Caring and repairing as a way to design

Abstract

Textiles and clothing, are produced through a global supply chain that is both extractive and linear, embedded in an economic model leading to exponential growth in waste across every stage in the supply chain. Often sustainable textile solutions and innovations are coupled with economic development, making the movement from linear to circular appear as a descending spiral to waste that plunders the earth. Eco-modern solutions meant to reverse the damage caused by the mass production of clothing need a repositioning toward a longer horizon. This paper explores ways to transition toward reparative practices through craft and recrafting processes, reflection on the experience of the recrafting of existing and underutilized textiles, connecting to the long horizon to explore the potential for new design practices contributing to design for repair that may cross scales, from personal, and local consumer level to global and systemic to extend the temporal nature of textiles and clothing toward one aligned with natures cycle and to repair the wrongs of fashion past. This mixed method approach is meant to counteract the fast-paced waste stream of clothing design cycles and seeks answers to questions such as our relationship with the clothing in need of repair, our limits toward their brokenness, and how capturing reflections through autoethnographic journaling can bring about transitions through practices of care and repair needed in stopping the flow of textiles as waste feed. This work seeks ways of transitioning from broken relationships with textiles through recrafting materials combined with a reflective experiential approach to develop an intergenerational clothing design method toward a sustainable and just future.

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