Craft of Use

Book excerpt: This book explores the ‘craft of use’, the cultivated, ordinary and ingenious ideas and practices that promote satisfying and resourceful use of garments, presenting them as an alternative, dynamic, experiential frame with which to articulate and foster sustainability in the fashion sector. Here Kate Fletcher provides a broad imagining of sustainability in fashion that gives attention to tending and wearing garments, and favours their use as much as their creation. She offers a diversified view of fashion beyond the market and the market’s purpose and reveals fashion provision and expression in a world not dependent on continuous consumption. Framing design and use as a single whole, the book uncovers a more contingent and time-dependent role for design in sustainability, recognising that garments, while sold as a product, are lived as a process. Drawing from stories and portrait photography that document the ways in which members of the public from across three continents use their clothes, and the work of seven international design teams seeking to amplify these use practices, Craft of Use presents a changed social narrative for fashion, borne out of ideas of satisfaction and interdependence, of action, knowledge and human agency, that glimpses fashion post-growth.