The clothing industry employs 25 million people globally contributing to many livelihoods and the prosperity of communities, to women’s independence, and the establishment of significant infrastructures in poorer countries. Yet the fashion industry is also a significant contributor to the degradation of natural systems, with the associated environmental footprint of clothing high in comparison with other products. Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion recognizes the complexity of aligning fashion with sustainability. It explores fashion and sustainability at the levels of products, processes, and paradigms and takes a truly multi-disciplinary approach to critically question and suggest creative responses to issues of: • Fashion in a post-growth society • Fashion, diversity and equity • Fashion, fluidity and balance across natural, social and economic systems This handbook is a unique resource for a wide range of scholars and students in the social sciences, arts and humanities interested in sustainability and fashion.

This book examines how sustainability has the potential to transform both the fashion system and the innovators who work within it. Sustainability is arguably the defining theme of the twenty-first century. The issues in fashion are broad-ranging and include labour abuses, toxic chemicals use and conspicuous consumption, giving rise to an undeniable tension between fashion and sustainability. The book is organized in three parts. The first part is concerned with transforming fashion products across the garment's lifecycle and includes innovation in materials, manufacture, distribution, use and re-use. The second part looks at ideas that are transforming the fashion system at root into something more sustainable, including new business models that reduce material throughput. The third section is concerned with transforming the role of fashion designers and looks to examples where the designer changes from a stylist or creator into a communicator, activist or facilitator.

The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design considers the design, not only of artifacts, but of structures, systems, and interactions that bear our decisions and identities in the context of sustaining our shared planet. In addressing issues of design for global impact, behavior change, systems and strategy, ethics and values, this handbook presents a unique and powerful design perspective. Just as there are multiple definitions of design, so there are several definitions of sustainability, making it difficult to find unity. The term can sometimes be seen as a goal to achieve, or a characteristic to check off on a list of criteria. In actuality, we will never finish being sustainable. We must instead always strive to design, work, and live sustainably. The voices throughout this handbook present many different characteristics, layers, approaches, and perspectives in this journey of sustaining. This handbook divides into five sections, which together present a holistic approach to understanding the many facets of sustainable design: Part 1: Systems and Design Part 2: Global Impact Part 3: Values, Ethics, and Identity Part 4: Design for Behavior Change Part 5: Moving Forward This handbook will be invaluable to those wishing to broaden their understanding of sustainable design and students and practitioners of Environmental Studies, Architecture, Product Design and the Visual Arts.

As a cultivated form of invention, product design is a deeply human phenomenon that enables us to shape, modify and alter the world around us – for better or worse. The recent emergence of the sustainability imperative in product design compels us to recalibrate the parameters of good design in an unsustainable age. Written by designers, for designers, the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design presents the first systematic overview of the burgeoning field of sustainable product design. Brimming with intelligent viewpoints, critical propositions, practical examples and rich theoretical analyses, this book provides an essential point of reference for scholars and practitioners at the intersection of product design and sustainability. The book takes readers to the depth of our engagements with the designed world to advance the social and ecological purpose of product design as a critical twenty-first-century practice. Comprising 35 chapters across 6 thematic parts, the book’s contributors include the most significant international thinkers in this dynamic and evolving field.

Praise for the previous edition: "[A] fascinating book." John Thackara, Doors of Perception "Provides the foundations for a radical new perspective." Ethical Pulse "At last a book that dispels the idea that fashion is only interested in trend-driven fluff: not only does it have a brain, but it could be a sustainable one." Lucy Siegle, Crafts Magazine Fully revised and updated, the second edition of Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys continues to define the field of design in fashion and textiles. Arranged in two sections, the first four chapters represent key stages of the lifecycle: material cultivation/extraction, production, use and disposal. The remaining four chapters explore design approaches for altering the scale and nature of consumption, including service design, localism, speed and user involvement. While each chapter is complete in and of itself, their real value comes from what they represent together: innovative ways of thinking about textiles and garments based on sustainability values and an interconnected approach to design. Including a new preface, updated content and a new conclusion reflecting and critiquing developments in the field, as well as discussing future developments, the second edition promises to provide further impetus for future change, sealing Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys as the must-buy book for fashion and textiles professionals and students interested in sustainability.

Fashion Ethics provides a comprehensive overview of the ethical issues in the fashion industry, from collection design concept to upcycling and closed loop production. This book answers an urgent need for a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental ethics of the fashion industry. Sue Thomas goes beyond the usual contentious issues of environmental impact and human rights, taking the reader deeper into the endemic issues including sizeism, ageism, animal rights, and the lack of diversity in models and in the media. The book lays out the significant ethical issues within the fashion supply chain by mapping the lifecycle of a garment and exploring key topics such as deep ecology, cultural copyright speciesism, the role of the customer, and technology in future ethics. It also features current international industry information and industry-relevant case studies from brands, media and mobile technology, and NGOs including Oxfam (UK), Redress (Hong Kong), Nimany (US), Labor Link (US), People Tree (UK), and Peppermint (Australia). Fashion Ethics provides much-needed information for fashion students, industry professionals, and customers.

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.