Post-growth fashion

Katia Dayan Vladimirova is a former researcher with fifteen years of academic experience in climate ethics and politics and a special focus on social change and fashion consumption. She is the Chief Research Officer at Post Growth Fashion Agency and the author of Post Growth Fashion substack, which bridges research to action, among other things, through monthly Curated Research Briefs for Busy People. Katia is also the Founder of the International research network on Sustainable Fashion Consumption, a community of 150+ researchers working on the topics of fashion consumption and social change hosted by Yale University.

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Vlad Bunea: The fast fashion industry has been identified as one of the top polluting industries. The mountains of discarded clothes in Ghana, for example, are now legendary. Can you tell us how the Post Growth Fashion Agency positions itself in this landscape?

Katia Dayan: I started Post Growth Fashion Agency after exiting the academic research track last year. Jobs are scarce in academia today, and working on the topics of sufficiency and degrowth in fashion did not help with funding. As I wrote on my Substack last year, fashion is still treated by many as a “fun” or “cute” topic for women to work on – and this research field is systemically underfunded, across geographies.

I know this first-hand, as the founder of the International research network on Sustainable Fashion Consumption – a community of 150+ researchers from around the world, hosted by Yale University. Our members are mostly women who have to “sneak in” consumption research into their agendas of fashion design, marketing or merchandising, as side projects rather than the main focus.

Lack of public funding results in major blank spots in understanding the state and impacts of fashion. Our knowledge about the fashion system is based primarily on industry-sponsored research and empirical evidence gathered by advocacy groups, like the Or Foundation’s work in Ghana. The first kind of research, done by well-known and expensive consulting firms, tends to present narratives that are convenient for the industry, while the second kind of research is often discredited by powerful industry players on the basis of poor scientific rigor.

Realising the need for better data and analysis for the fashion system, I also felt during my university years that academics are not heard by the right stakeholders when it comes to sharing their findings. In 2023, I showed up at the EU Parliament at the hearings for the Amendments to the EU Strategy on Sustainable and Circular Textiles and raised my hand. I spoke about research that I was involved in previously, which found that we needed to reduce volumes of fashion production. To my surprise, a few months later, the Amendments came out, and they included a passage to develop targets for reducing volumes of production.

Few academics have such luck and find themselves at the right place at the right time to make a difference in a policy document of such scale. The majority do not get involved, they publish behind paywall and expect policy makers or advocacy groups or business stakeholders to pick up their message. In my experience, it does not happen this way in fashion, and we really need to strengthen the link between academic research, policy and business stakeholders.

That is the raison-d’etre for Post Growth Fashion Agency. I am trying, at my own small scale, to make a difference and to make research on fashion more visible outside of academic circles – through Curated Research Briefs for Busy People, Post Growth (?) Fashion Futures webinars with prominent research voices, and (upcoming) invited contributions from junior researchers to Post Growth Fashion’s Substack.

VB: How can fashion be both about aesthetics and personal identity, while also be compatible with notions of sufficiency and wellbeing?

KD: Fashion – as clothing – is something that touches every single one of us, literally. We express ourselves through how we dress, set ourselves apart from others or as part of a subculture, signal our status, interests, and aspirations. Pardon this generalisation but even “men who do not care” at all about what they wear still have a position on clothing – that being that they do not care and that they are, perhaps, focused on higher plains of thought (or video games).

Like most other material objects in life, clothing has long reflected people’s personal aesthetics, their way of life. However, in the past twenty years, material arrangements in our homes came under attack. Overproduction of all sorts of objects that generally fill up our storage space, including clothing, created clutter of epic proportions. The crisis of “too much stuff” is profound and has direct implications on how we feel inside our homes, inside our lives. It made one Japanese home organising expert very rich simply for offering a step-by-step guidance on how to get rid of stuff.

Overconsumption by the wealthiest 40% in the Global North drives up carbon emissions from fashion. Hot or Cool’s 2022 report, Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable, found that in order to stay within the 1.5 degree limit of the Paris Agreement, we shouldn’t buy more than 5 new garments per year. That is a big change from 42 garments per year on average bought by Europeans and 60+ garments per year bought by Australians.

The truth is, though, (shocker) – we don’t need as many clothes, shoes and bags as we are programmed to buy today. That was something that I demonstrated in my own research and other researchers confirm as well – people are happier living with fewer but better-fitting, better-quality garments in their closets. Living with 33 garments over 3 months (as Project 333 proposes), as opposed to 170+ garments in an average wardrobe today, is not only possible but enjoyable.

Sufficiency and resource constraints in the past brough major outbursts of creativity: “Need is the mother of invention.” In the Soviet Union, when fabric options were scarce, women became expert pattern makers. Style was defined in terms of complexity of their garments as opposed to the fabric’s colour or type. Today, all that is left to “consumers” in terms of creativity when it comes to fashion is how to mix-and-match almost identical garments from a range of commercial platforms.

An experiment called 5x5 challenge that proposes participants to use only 5 garments for 5 days has been proving over and over that with fewer garments at their disposal, clothing users come up with unexpected, creative ways to combine and style them. This experiment tends to leave participants happy and inspired with what they already own rather than craving for more things.

VB: How, and most importantly why, has capitalism used the fashion industry specifically to promote large scale consumerism?

KD: The majority of fashion overconsumers are middle- and upper-income women in the Global North. Buying clothes—shopping—has been equated with having a good time, replacing satisfaction of core needs (e.g. need to actually buy a new item, a need to connect with a friend or a family member, a need to be consoled or rewarded) with satisfying artificially-created desires. While needs are finite, desires are infinite. Conditioning women to go shopping to feel better has been the biggest success of capitalism in gaining power over them, second maybe only to equating success with what we wear.

When it comes to downsizing, it requires work—work to understand what fits you, how to match garments and style them; work on which materials to buy and how to recognize poor quality construction; work to take good care of your garments, repaire them; and work to sort through your wardrobe to remove things you’ve outgrown, worn out or simply do not wear anymore. It is much easier to go with the flow and simply buy new on impulse every time we see an attractive, FOMO-generating fashion ad.

VB: Should we ration the production or the consumption of fashion, or both, to address the problem of waste?

KD: This question cuts into the core of sufficiency and degrowth debate in fashion. Rationing has been applied to textiles during wars or difficult economic times in many countries. Interestingly, in the UK during the Second World War, annual ration of clothing was limited to five garments – the same number as recommended by the Hot or Cool report today.

However, rationing consumption has really a negative connotation, being associated with limiting consumer autonomy and hard times. So to me, this is not a realistic instrument to use in a world where the climate crisis is still viewed as something remote – and definitely not linked to what we wear. Having aspirational, voluntary targets for consumers (to buy no more than 5 garments per year) is the best we can do at the moment, I think, in terms of personal restrictions.

We do need to set limits and ration fashion production though – and there is a major challenge on the practical side of things here, like with any other industry, in terms of fair share distribution. If we are to limit volumes of production, how do we define fair share of reductions within the industry? Should all businesses reduce the number of units they produce, proportionally? How would this affect small and medium enterprises (SMEs)? Why not focus on the largest producers today? If so, what if certain brands today produce things that do not even need to exist in the future at all?

We have total carbon budget estimates and some idea of the material throughput but there is a deep divide between overall allowances and practical implementation. (We have a very vague idea of the actual material throughout of the system today. Brands are not obliged to report on their volumes of production, and estimates vary from 80 to 150 billion garments per year. Here, the free market mentality clashes with our planetary boundaries.) Without important, democratic, and planned government interventions, limiting (and rationing) overproduction will remain wishful thinking.

VB: What do you hope for the future of fashion by 2050?

KD: I hope that we leave behind us the era of fast fashion and re-orient back towards localized businesses and humaine connections around fashion use. We’ll step away from the notion that “buying” is the only act of creative choice available to us in fashion and look at experiences, crafting, community activities, and non-monetary exchanges to fulfil our needs rather than shopping for clothes. I do believe that we as citizens, as moms and daughters, as neighbours, have the power to build our own realities where we can unite around our love for textiles and fashion without abusing the planet.

Thumbnail photo source: Katia Dayan.