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CAN THESE PRODUCTS AND IDEAS HAVE MORE PRACTICAL VALUE BUT ALSO BE AFFORDABLE FOR ALL GROUPS IN SOCIETY?

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CAN THESE PRODUCTS AND IDEAS HAVE MORE PRACTICAL VALUE BUT ALSO BE AFFORDABLE FOR ALL GROUPS IN SOCIETY?

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Can fashion ever be sustainable? | BBC Ideas

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Whilst researching, most sources that i have found completely ignore the idea of accessibility and education for disadvantaged people. Sustainability may be ‘trendy’ but is it practical and inclusive of all parts of society?

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A Beginner's Guide to Sustainable Fashion

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INNOVATIVE CLOTHING DESIGN FOR WOMEN DURING PREGNANCY

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INNOVATIVE CLOTHING DESIGN FOR WOMEN DURING PREGNANCY

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POPESCU Georgeta ; MOCENCO Alexandra ; OLARU Sabina

Annals of the University of Oradea: Fascicle of Textiles, Leatherwork, 2015-05-01, Vol.XVI (2), p.67-72

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Skirts for Men!: Elizabeth Hawes and Challenging Fashion's Gender Binary

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Skirts for Men!: Elizabeth Hawes and Challenging Fashion's Gender Binary

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Woodard, Jennie

Journal of popular culture, 2017-12, Vol.50 (6), p.1276-1292

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Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes and Practices of Use

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Durability, Fashion, Sustainability: The Processes and Practices of Use

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Fletcher, Kate

Fashion Practice, 2015-04-27, Vol.4 (2), p.221-238

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Fast Fashion, Sustainability, and the Ethical Appeal of Luxury Brands

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Fast Fashion, Sustainability, and the Ethical Appeal of Luxury Brands

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Joy, Annamma ; Sherry, John F ; Venkatesh, Alladi ; Wang, Jeff ; Chan, Ricky

Fashion theory, 2015-04-21, Vol.16 (3), p.273-295

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FASHION AND SUSTAINABILITY- DESIGN FOR CHANGE

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FASHION AND SUSTAINABILITY- DESIGN FOR CHANGE

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Fletcher, Kate ; Grose, Lynda

2012

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Social class division in the UK and implications of the appropriation of working class culture

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Social class division in the UK and implications of the appropriation of working class culture

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Lucy Wilkinson
Dissertation

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Classism and Class Appropriation at Art School 

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Classism and Class Appropriation at Art School 

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I Asked people on my instagram about their experience of classism in Art School and get some interesting and relatable responses

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WHY IS ARE SLOW FASHION SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS IN THE LUXURY PRICE BRACKET?

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WHY IS ARE SLOW FASHION SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS IN THE LUXURY PRICE BRACKET?

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HOW CAN WE MAKE SUSTAINABLE FASHION AFFORDABLE FOR LOW INCOME HOUSEHOLDS?

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HOW CAN WE MAKE SUSTAINABLE FASHION AFFORDABLE FOR LOW INCOME HOUSEHOLDS?

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See relevant content for calvertjournal.com

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Why Can’t Sustainable Fashion Brands Be More Affordable? - Fibre2Fashion

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Read article about Affordable fashion. The cost of buying sustainable fashion apparel is seemingly high. For this reason, sustainable fashion has been classified into the luxury category. In essence, fashion is considered to be ethical and sustainable if it’s environmentally friendly. Indeed, its production and use should be safe for the environment. and more articles about Textile industary at Fibre2Fashion

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Sashiko is a Japanese form of repair and translates directly as little stabs. It is typically carried out with a white cotton thread on indigo fabric. This visible mending technique has been practised in Japan for thousands of years.

Molly Martin has been mending old garments in TOAST Shops for the past two months, using the Sashiko technique. Here she details how to do it yourself, should you have any small holes or tears that need repairing.
Sashiko Repair
What You Need

1 - Needle

2 - Thread (I just use sewing machine cotton or embroidery thread, but you can buy proper Sashiko thread online)

3 - Pins

4 - Iron

5 - Scissors

6 - Fabric for patch

Helpful tips :

* For patching fabric, try and find the same type of fabric to match the original piece - or as close as you can get. Eg - Silk should be patched with silk and linen should be patched with linen or a light cotton. (Jeans are more versatile but it's best to patch them with something hard wearing).

* For silk and fine fabric, I like to use beading needles, which are very fine and long. They're the perfect length for making multiple running stitches and they pass through the fabric seamlessly as they are so thin.

Step by Step

Fig 1 - Prepare your broken garment. Cut any stray threads so that it's nice and clean.

Fig 2 - Prep your patching fabric. Fold and iron down all four sides flat to avoid any fraying.

Fig 3 - Turn your garment inside out and pin the patch the right way up onto the hole / damage.

Fig 4 - With a different coloured thread, loosely tack the patch down onto the garment - making a square border.

Fig 5 - Turn your garment the right way round again - you can now use the tacked square you've made as a guide.

Fig 6 - With your chosen thread sew a small running stitch up and down across the hole / damage.

(Sashiko' translates into little stabs'. Try and see your needle as a miniature sword, securing the broken fabric down like tiny teeth as you go.)

Fig 7 - Continue the Sashiko stitching over the damage. You want the stitches to be small and close together to reinforce the fabric surrounding the damage as well as the hole itself. Like mowing a lawn up and down.

Fig 8 - Once you have completed the stitches across the square - you can do the same thing again, but in the opposite direction. This is to make sure that the hole won't stretch or tear any further and reinforces the fabric into a quilted patch.

Fid 9 - Lastly, unpick the tacking thread from the back, and you're finished!

Note from Molly:

"I have always loved repair, and the ethos around it. I remember my mother teaching me how to darn a pair of socks a long time ago, and I really loved the slow process of fixing something broken, and giving it new life. I found it very meditative and went on to discover the art of Japanese Sashiko repair, which I fell in love with.

In traditional Japanese thinking, 'wabi-sabi' is a world view centred on the acceptance of imperfection - 'Nothing lasts, nothing is perfect and nothing is finished'. In this way, the idea is to look at an imperfect bowl, chair or piece of worn clothing and embrace the flaws and cracks. It seems that most of us have a precious jumper, dress or pair of jeans that we treasure, no matter how baggy and worn they might be. For me, it's the breaks and tears that make our favourite clothes special. I recently repaired a cardigan for someone that had 136 moth holes! The lovely thing was, that the lady who gave it to me didn't care how much it cost her or how long it took, for her it was irreplaceable."
Illustrations by Molly Martin. Film by Rory Gibson. At TOAST we are always seeking to find conscious solutions that increase the longevity of our garments and reduce waste. TOAST Repair is our free mending service that brings new life to your worn TOAST garments. Bring any TOAST clothing item in need of repair to one of our shops and discuss mending options with a TOAST Shop colleague.

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A step by step guide to Sashiko Repair with TOAST. Find out how to do this ancient Japanese technique of visible mending.

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Instead of hiding rips and tears, the visible mending movement turns them into art

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Born from the Japanese art of sashiko, visible mending enables crafters to eschew fast fashion and make mistakes beautiful.

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In scenes similar to the earlier days of Twitter, users yesterday found a new bête noire in the form of Hetty Douglas, an artist living in Peckham, who shared a photo of four men in construction gear with the caption: "These guys look like they got one GCSE."

The snobbery, and similar poor taste slogans in some of her artwork such as "you're peng but your English is shit", led to intense mockery. Douglas began trending on Twitter and deleted her Instagram after people shared photos of her posing with her Jobcentre work plan, and complaining about the lack of water coolers in the building when she went to sign on.

Douglas's background is only presumed, but most people read her as "a spoiled little rich girl gentrifying south London" because her behaviour is symptomatic of a trend in London and beyond: of embracing working class cultural signifiers while struggling to conceal your visceral hatred of actual working class people.

People behave stupidly in their youth, but there's a difference between vomiting outside a bar, and feeling you have a right to publicly mock perfect strangers and make assumptions about their intelligence based on their workwear. Previously, Douglas had joked about the horror of finding a homeless person attractive - imagine discovering someone sleeping rough could be anything less than a figure of contempt for you! But the McDonalds Instagram post was a perfect metaphor for this tendency: entering spaces you deem working class to show how real and down to earth you are, but retaining a sense of disgust at the people who are in the same space for reasons other than irony.

It's a phenomenon I first encountered at university. At a drinks reception on the first day of term, students were asked to meet their lecturers and each other over wine and crisps. I was ushered over to some lecturers with the handful of fellow scholarship kids to meet some senior members of faculty. One asked me a few questions about my background, then said "A word of advice - lose the accent, it'll only hold you back."

Minutes later, other students were introducing themselves to me: all from London, they claimed to be from Brixton, Peckham and Hackney. Later I learned that was code for, respectively, Herne Hill, East Dulwich and Stoke Newington.

While I was being told to shake off any vestige of my background, my classmates were confidently asserting they were far less middle class than the actuality, as if faking working class identity was a progressive form of dressing up.

This continued through university: endless bores bent my ear about their "working class roots" (usually their grandfather had seen a coal miner on a train once) and I quickly learnt the most middle class conversation of all is over whether you are "truly" middle class, and oh - isn't it just so complex? People who went to schools that cost far more than my large family lived on in a year earnestly argued that they couldn't truly be middle class because their mother was a teacher not a magistrate, or other minor quibbles. For these people, reading Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier showed how open minded they were.

Orwell's approach, adopting the dress and lifestyle of the working classes to report on them is still endemic today. The poverty safari approach - where a middle class person goes "undercover" as a member of the underclass to expose the realities of low paid life - is still regarded as the height of investigative work on social issues. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickeled and Dimed has spawned dozens of copycat books, each less valuable than the original. The idea that you could simply ask, or commission, people in these jobs what their life is like and listen to them seems ludicrous to many journalists, failing as it does to provide them with any kudos for fleetingly enduring hardship and sacrifice themselves.

There are thousands of privileged young people in Britain though who spend their days eulogising about going to Greggs and Wetherspoons as if it shows how grounded and open-minded they are. No working class person I know does the same, because for most people going to McDonalds isn't a notable event in which they're deviating in what is acceptable for their class. They're buying food or ordering a pint, not going on a class-crossing field trip to an alien territory in which they feel comfortable because being middle class affords you the confidence to feel entitled to enter any space you wish.

Instagramming photos from your Wetherspoons crawl seems exciting and exotic when you have the privilege to adopt any class signifier you like. But being working class hasn't ever meant people treat me or friends with any wide-eyed respect. Instead I'm spoken to as if I'm stupid, have scorn poured on the fact I decided against going to Oxford, have people make openly scornful jokes about the areas we come from especially post-Brexit, or slag off "benefit scroungers" even after pointing out you grew up on benefits.

Playing class dress up is so irritating because it doesn't erode discrimination and snobbery based on class. Common People by Pulp was a criticism, not an instruction manual. Tweeting and effusing about working class signifiers grates because middle class people have the cultural privilege to do so without reprisals, while working class people are still discriminated against openly day in and day out.

If you went to boarding school and are bankrolled by your parents, own it, and be honest about your privilege: don't think donning an Adidas tracksuit and tweeting about going to Greggs for lunch is anything other than offensive and embarrassing.

Dawn Foster is a journalist based in London. Follow her on Twitter.

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Privileged kids need to stop fetishising working class culture

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Sure, these guys embrace working class culture when it's en vogue, but while retaining their contempt for working class people, explains Dawn Foster.

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A DHL courier unloads clothing for the Marcel Ostertag Spring 2017 collection in New York City. Photo by Lars Niki via Getty Images for IMG Fashion.

My mother works as a technician in the psychiatric unit of a New Jersey emergency room, and for a while, she and her coworkers wore blue scrubs: the result of a small campaign she mounted in 2016 to switch from the standard black and green. She has turquoise cotton pants and a royal blue V-neck shirt with two welt pockets. Last week, I sent her a photo from Prada's Spring 2011 collection: a cobalt V-neck with a large breast pocket, a facsimile of a scrub top, part of a collection of saturated primary colors and chubby colorblocked furs that Miuccia Prada described as "minimal baroque." The skew designers add to everyday items can be funny or frustrating to the people who were already wearing those items, but when I asked if the Prada top annoyed her, she said it didn't. Instead, she said that she was bemused.

Today, the richest 10 percent of Americans own 77% of the nation's wealth, a higher proportion than during the Gilded Age; manufacturing jobs in the US are disappearing, with about 25% of positions gone since the 1950s; and the top retail partner for workwear brand Dickie's is Opening Ceremony. In the past five years, references to working-class and lower middle-class jobs started to appear on runways-ID badges at Prada, firefighter jackets at Calvin Klein, the low-level office worker's business casual at Off-White- and a repurposed Carhartt work shirt sells at Barney's for about a week's worth of the median American household's income. High fashion has always liked to dress down, lifting styles from the street, the shop, and the factory. But in an era where critics have successfully held designers and editors to task for cultural appropriation and its exploitative relationship of unequal power, it's notable that fashion's references to class-an identity that intersects with race, gender, and sexuality-are getting more prevalent and, for the most part, have gone uncriticized.

"High fashion is, at least recently, obsessed with authenticity," said Andrew Luecke, a trend forecaster and the author of Cool: Style, Sound, and Subversion. "It's always fighting the sense that it's an exclusive product for an exclusive group of people." The history of fashion supports this: denim, for example, was first mentioned in Vogue in 1935 as a signifier of the hardy pioneer ("Deep down in every American's breast...is a longing for the frontier"), and was transformed by the Beats, Bing Crosby's "Canadian Tuxedo," and Calvin Klein into a shifting symbol of American leisure, rebellion, and wealth. Today's labor-influenced style traffics in the same authenticity, and the more granular, the better: a 2016 New York Times profile describes artist Pipilotti Rist wearing "a sky-blue uniform jacket and matching pants that she said were a brand manufactured for Japanese electricians." The boxy Off-White jacket Timothée Chalamet wore to this year's Independent Spirit Awards drew comparisons to a gas station attendant's uniform, an association Chalamet riffed on in a tweet.

"People in the upper classes of society feel that they can pick from anything; that everything is available to them, and that there aren't necessarily consequences."

But borrowing from the working class is about more than authenticity. "The most striking thing at play in the appropriation of working class uniforms, workwear, or service uniforms is the power dynamic," said Emma McClendon, assistant curator at the FIT Museum and curator of the museum's 2016 Uniformity exhibition. "People in the upper classes of society feel that they can pick from anything; that everything is available to them, and that there aren't necessarily consequences." One example is Chanel's little black dress, plucked from the ranks of the working class: in the late 19th century, the somber garment became a controversial, compulsory uniform for a new urban class of domestic workers and shopgirls. A few decades later, the association between the black dress and working women was firmly established enough for Chanel's little black dress to read as both prim and subversive-Chanel's customers discarded their corsets, and did it by dressing up as their maids.

Class appropriation is difficult to pin down because it needs to communicate two messages, often in contradiction: the clothing must be authentic, and the wearer must maintain their position of greater power relative to the person they're borrowing from. If your peers can't decode the outfit, it's failed: it's cool to dress like a gas station attendant, but if someone asks you to pump gas, it's gone too far. This is why the intersection of high and low fashion can sometimes seem so strained-the street version, the designer version, and the knockoff swapping places at a dizzying speed, producing bizarre artifacts like DIY videos to get the Sharpie marks on homemade knockoff Vetements Instapump sneakers just right.

One factor, as Luecke pointed out, is that the borders of class identity are blurry: "On the weekend, an upper middle-class dad who may work as a lawyer is pretty likely to put on Dickie's or beat up denim to fix up the house or mow the lawn." These porous boundaries, coupled with the contemporary fluency and eagerness to decode cultural products-songs, looks, memes-produces a kind of class dressing that aims for authenticity through a very convincing replica. Like the design of a suburban mall, it is both all-encompassing and subtle enough for its signals to feel imperceptible.

For Balenciaga's Fall 2018 collection, designer Demna Gvasalia showed a collection of nipped-waist blazers and masterfully layered hoodies, jackets, and puffers, a model walked down the runway in nondescript black pants, clunky shoes, and a blue-and-white striped button-down emblazoned with a telephone number. I called and woman's voice greeted me warmly, her intonation stilted and robotic: "Welcome to the new Balenciaga hotline. We would like to ask you a few questions." She asked for my gender, education level, whether I have a pet: it felt like market research. In the end, I was told that the information would be deleted, but I wondered whether someone at a data center had logged my replies.

Balenciaga has used populist imagery before: the $2,145 blue leather facsimile of IKEA's 99-cent tote bag, a remixed Bernie Sanders logo, and platform Crocs. There's little traditional workwear-no jumpsuits or high-vis stripes-but the brand is referencing something other than heritage workwear brands: the clothes reflect an economic shift away from manufacturing jobs towards the service industry, which, in America, has had its ranks double since the 1990s. "Ironically, those jobs...can be even more dead-end than the manufacturing job or a factory job that used to exist," said Luecke.

"It's tied into the office park, call center, big box store," Luecke continued. "The more that [workers] have to turn over their personality, and their personal style, and their grooming, and put their kids in child care, to work these hours at these jobs-the more they have to give, over time-the less the corporations are giving back. It's a very high-stakes exchange, interpersonally and identity-wise."

Perhaps the best example of this is Vetements' use of the DHL logo, which began with a t-shirt in 2015 and expanded this year to include, among other pieces, a piqué polo shirt with a shipping label pasted over one shoulder. "For me, it was such a recurring topic in my life," designer Demna Gvasalia told the Telegraph in 2016. (This was before his tenure at Balenciaga.) "Every day someone was saying, 'The package didn't arrive, we have to stop working with DHL, we will be bankrupt by DHL.' DHL seemed to be more a part of my life than anything else so I thought, why isn't it in the show?"

"If you think of the branded service uniform....The reason it's designed is to make the body an extension of the branded company," said McClendon, citing designer Stan Herman's uniforms for McDonald's and FedEx as an example. "When you look at how [DHL] uniforms are designed, they look like the truck; they look like the boxes." The original t-shirt bore the brand's logo, and the newer editions, with their use of uniform fabric and shipping labels, are almost trying to transform the Vetements wearer into DHL's product.

"We are socially conditioned from a very young age to read clothing and to interpret it," said McClendon. "As people living in this modern branded world, particularly in urban states, walking down the street, we read a uniform and we immediately know-if we need coffee, if we need something where we're looking for that uniform, then we register it. Otherwise, it fades into the background."

More than ever, unstable, low-paid jobs involve a complete aesthetic universe that can take over your life and requires ceding parts of your identity. It's not edgy anymore to dress down Lacroix couture with jeans; the thing of the moment is to attempt to fully embody the worker, just as the worker is asked to fully embody the job. The difference is who gets to choose what they're wearing.

It's exhausting, and a bit nihilistic, that the clothes that possess the aura of authenticity-to borrow Gvasalia's phrase, "more a part of [his] life than anything else"-are often those that remove a sense of individuality from the worker. "My friends very often can't afford the clothes," Gvasalia told the Telegraph of his Vetements designs. But we understand that they don't need them: Gvasalia's friends have their own point of access, and they don't need to own the clothes to feel like they are part of the culture. Their socioeconomic status might be closer to the DHL delivery-person than the Vetements customer wearing the t-shirt. For those who don't-who aren't firefighters or office managers or mail carriers, but would like to have a part of that life-they can dress up, for a price.

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Class Appropriation in Fashion Is Real, and Impossible to Talk About

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Criticism of cultural appropriation in fashion has been powerful and effective. Why have references to class avoided a similar level of scrutiny?

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Sustainable Fashion on a Budget: Is It Possible? Or Reserved for the Elite?

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Organic fabrics. Fair wages. Natural dyes. The truth hurts when you realize that sustainable fashion brands aren’t sustainable for every budget.

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THINKING OF WAYS TO MAKE SUSTAINABLE FASHION AFFORDABLE TO EVERYONE 

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THINKING OF WAYS TO MAKE SUSTAINABLE FASHION AFFORDABLE TO EVERYONE 

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The fast-fashion chain has, however, faced accusations of "greenwashing" from some campaigners, who argue that H&M's entire business model - which requires selling large volumes of clothing at low prices - is the very antithesis of sustainability. H&M, however, argues it is fully committed to eventually becoming a "100 per cent circular business", although there is clearly a long way to go before that can be achieved.

Another big concern is whether it's possible for workers throughout the supply chain to be paid a living wage, considering the low prices that H&M is selling its products at. There's been an increased focus on the treatment of garment workers, who were left in a desperate situation due to brands cancelling $3.18bn of orders in Bangladesh alone at the start of the pandemic (H&M has committed to paying for its orders in full). According to the Clean Clothes Campaign, up to 93 per cent of brands don't pay a living wage to its suppliers. While H&M has outlined a strategy to create the "best preconditions for fair living wages," campaigners have called for a more concrete commitment to ensure all workers are paid properly.

Investing in sustainable brands

All this means consumers, who are used to low prices, may have to pay more to ensure the garments they're purchasing are being produced as sustainably and ethically as possible. "If you're paying €3 for a shirt, let's really think about what went into making that and the sacrifices that came along with [it]," Burns says. "That's not to say a shirt needs to cost €900; I think there's certainly an in-between [price]."

The mantra "buy better and buy less" is helpful when considering the affordability of sustainable fashion; if you invest in a garment that you can wear for years to come, instead of wearing it a few times and discarding it, the cost per wear automatically becomes lower. "Change has to happen in consumption patterns, too," she continues. "Buy less, but buy things that you want to keep for longer."

Consumer demand is what's going to make sustainable fashion affordable for all - meaning that it's important to support brands with strong eco-credentials, and ask more of those that aren't currently doing enough. That will lead to brands investing more in sustainable materials and technologies and in turn, lead to prices falling. "It's supply and demand; as demand evolves, the industry is working to match this demand," Burns concludes. "There's power in the decisions that consumers [make]."

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Alice Cary, Emily Chan and Laura Hawkins

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Why Isn't Sustainable Fashion More Affordable?

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In spite of the growing demand for eco-friendly clothing, most consumers don't want to pay more for it. So, what's the solution? We speak to experts from H&M, Ninety Percent and Fashion For Good to find out

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CLOTHES THAT GROW

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"Don't let Zara and Uniqlo educate you on the price of a garment because that's not fashion. That's McDonald's."

With this one pithy comment, Virgil Abloh - the brains behind lauded street style brand, Off-White - inadvertently touches on an issue that haunts every panel discussion and every magazine article about fast fashion and price points: are ethically produced clothes a privilege for the wealthy? Should people with limited disposable income really be expected to pay more for clothes just to avoid buying cheap stuff that's bad for the planet? And after all of these questions, are we left with one unavoidable one: is fast fashion a class issue?

Abloh's analogy to the food industry has another layer of relevance, too. C omparisons are constantly drawn between fashion and food in terms of ethics, sustainability and production practices. But there is also a common, resounding air of snobbery and elitism. Buying ethically sourced coffee beans and getting your food delivered in a neat little box from Hello Fresh is great, sure. But if a struggling mother of four had to choose between that and buying the same things for a third of the price at Lidl, could you judge her for opting for the latter?

That, too, is a question that's easy to ask and much harder to answer. To avoid oversimplifying the argument, we need to remember that fast fashion isn't all bad, just as sustainable fashion isn't all good. It's not always the case that buying better means spending more, as Professor Dilys Williams, Head of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at London College of Fashion, UAL points out. "We have to be careful of buying into the rhetoric which reinforces the fact that 'sustainable fashion' is expensive", she says.

Price points aside, there's an element of sustainable fashion that reeks of liberal worthiness. Yes, every little counts but boasting about how all your clothes are made from 100% organic cotton by single mums in western Africa while looking down your nose at people who shop in Primark isn't really going to save the planet, is it.

But our clothes, and where we buy them, have always been a class issue. They're a symbol of wealth and status. And increasingly, they're mixed up with ideology. Boasting about your cheap fast fashion haul says, 'I have priorities other than spending more on investment, consciously crafted pieces'. Ethically produced clothes scream, ' I'm proudly principled, and I want people to know it.'

Hypotheses aside, though, the statistics that illustrate how we consume clothes now are really rather grim. They don't point to a nation of empowered shoppers; quite the opposite. According to a report by sustainable thinking charity the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, British people are hoarding £46.7 billion of unworn clothing in their wardrobes at any one time. Last year, a survey by M&S and Oxfam, found that our nation's wardrobes hold 3.6 billion unworn clothes - that's an average of 57 items per person - with an average of 16 items worn only once, and 11 still with the tags on. And one in 20 people has over 50 items in their wardrobe with the tags still on. At the rate that we are consuming fashion globally, fashion will account for one quarter of the world's annual carbon budget by 2050.

"This is not proof of a democratised fashion industry - this is evidence that fashion is now regarded as disposable - as a cheap commodity not worthy of our love or care," says Dilys. And this is just how the people selling us clothes want it. "As humans, we are stimulated by novelty and curiosity but an overstimulation, running on adrenalin, is not healthy. We are undervaluing fashion."

Historically, people could buy only the fashion they could afford. Textiles were expensive and there were no cheap shortcuts enabled by inexpensive foreign labour and low manufacturing costs. "It was really in the post-war era that we started to see certain types of fashion being engaged with at all levels of society," explains fashion historian, Amber Butchart. " So in this society we also have things like the boutique revolution. And we have retail methods that are seen as a lot more democratic in many ways. So there are a number of factors that mean throughout the 20th century it becomes a system that's only available to the very wealthy."

Just as the post-war era saw a boom in food manufacturing, so faster production methods suddenly meant clothes could be made quicker and were more accessible to the masses. Now, over 50 years later, we have the internet: the design process of fashion is faster than ever, thanks to the way we share information. It's made it easy for the high street to copy clothes from both the catwalk and independent designers, and given us an all-access pass to the lives of people we admire and celebrate. A century ago, you couldn't afford to wear the same clothes as the wealthy, successful people you ogled in newspapers or from the other side of the road. Now, thousands of companies around the world are making millions from allowing us to buy into anyone's lifestyle at a fraction of the cost.

Some high street brands cater for the ethically minded consumer with the odd sustainable collection here and recycling drive there (although the jury's still out on whether they're well-timed marketing ploys or genuine attempts to right the fashion industry's wrongs). Others have made it their bread and butter.

Nobody's Child, the Fast-Fashion-Brand-That's-Not-As-Bad-As-The-Other-Fast-Fashion-Brands, is sold in Topshop and ASOS and targets the mindful consumer with more affordable clothes and on-point messaging. But they're not big on the word ' sustainability'. "I think the word that I prefer to use is that we have a 'conscience'" says their brand director, Becky Leeson. She's firm on this point and pragmatic in her outlook on the possibilities of creating a fully sustainable business that also supplies the latest trends when the customer wants them.

Right now, Nobody's Child can deliver fast fashion with a conscience because they own factories in the UK, Europe and Asia and their knitting plant, dye house, print facility and distribution centre are all based in the UK, too. That won't be the case for much longer. "As we grow we are not going to be able to make all of our own clothes," admits Becky. "We are going to need to go out to other suppliers. That's why I want to make sure that as we grow we're still able to give the right amount of choice."

The very nature of fast fashion means that cutting out waste, paying your workers enough money and making sure you're not destroying the planet is close to impossible. It's a business model built on speed, not on ethical practices. But if fast fashion can't be good, then it begs the question: Do we need it at all? Is it the responsibility of companies to make clothes in the right way, or is it our responsibility to buy less?

"It's not a bargain if you don't wear it and it ends up in your wardrobe with the tags still on," says Dilys. "Fast fashion reflects society's insatiable appetite for cheap goods - we are told over and over again that we are one shop away from fulfilment. Good fashion design is about being relevant to the time and place of where you are in that moment - it should be a balance between personal expression and honouring the people, skills, time and natural elements involved in the process."

"Caring is not based on your income status, it matters to us all", concludes Dilys. And as long as we believe that our wardrobes - and ourselves - are not good enough as we are, we will see new clothes as a right, not a privilege. And that isn't a class issue, it's a human one.

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Our clothes, and where we buy them, have always been a class issue. They're a symbol of wealth and status. And increasingly, they're mixed up with ideology

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LONDON, United Kingdom - At London Fashion Week, the British class system is visible everywhere. The British Fashion Council's homepage still proudly shows Queen Elizabeth II sitting front-row, shoulder-to-shoulder with Anna Wintour, at Richard Quinn's Autumn/Winter 2018 show. At the other end of the spectrum, Samuel Ross-founded streetwear label A-Cold-Wall is presented as an ongoing love letter to Ross's working-class upbringing.

Even the luxury brand most synonymous with the UK has its business tangled up in the country's complex class system. Burberry once launched an entire rebranding strategy by downplaying its iconic check pattern after it became infamously mired in working-class "chav" culture. Interestingly, it now sells £550 trackpants and £650 trainers.

The constant collision between the elitist establishment and the irreverent anti-establishment is what many see as a strength of British fashion. In fact, some of the UK's biggest moments in fashion history are testament to the trickle-up theory of creativity, drawing from punk, mods and rockers, rave culture and even football hooliganism.

"So much of the streetwear references we take for granted as being legit on the catwalks of Paris, Milan and New York today stem from the early work of brave, open-minded British designers, stylists and photographers in the '80s and '90s - and even the 2000s - who came from really, really humble working-class roots or even what people might call the underclass," said Adonis Kentros, the London-based stylist consultant for Christopher Kane.

Queen Elizabeth II and Anna Wintour at Richard Quinn's Autumn/Winter 2018 show | Source: Yui Mok/AFP/Getty

"Many of the young creatives who were from underprivileged backgrounds were the ones who wanted to reinterpret what was happening in their hometowns or on the [public housing] estate they grew up on," Kentros continued. "They were critiquing the streets that they fled from or celebrating the community they felt secure in [and somehow] keeping it real. However they ended up using those class references, it was really personal."

But some now argue that what drives this phenomenon is an unhealthy preoccupation with socioeconomic class and poor social mobility in the British fashion industry. As a more sophisticated awareness of cultural appropriation and tokenistic diversity comes to the fore, it makes sense to look at meaningful representation in terms of socioeconomic class and to debate the notion of "class appropriation."

"Fashion has become a rich person's job," claimed Andrew Davis, a pastry chef-turned-stylist who blagged his way into an interview at Central Saint Martins and worked for The Face and Arena Homme Plus after graduating in 2000. "[It's] such a shame, because CSM [used to be] such a mix of working-class kids and the children of lords and ladies who turned up to classes in a Merc."

The trajectory of someone like Davis, who has styled for clients such as Calvin Klein, Nike and celebrities like Uma Thurman and Gwyneth Paltrow, appears to back up the idea that hardworking "grafters" can succeed despite the onerous class system which many see as stacked against them from birth.

But, two decades on from Davis's first industry gig, is his experience the exception or the rule in fashion today?
Snobbery and the Scourge of Nepotism
"It's definitely [still] a classist industry," said Bianca Saunders, who started her own menswear line after graduating from The Royal College of Art in 2017.

"Growing up, I didn't think so much about class and race until I started going into [fashion] education, where I was a minority, and noticing how different I was from everyone else in my class. I realised that I have to think about these things more and how much more it affects how successful you can be because of the social position you are in."

It's such an illness in British society.

Since entering the fashion industry, Saunders said she notices that those who have parents in the same line of work, or adjacent creative fields, "have been able to leverage the fact that they've always been around art, so they've learned a lot more. That's why my research can come across as really broad; it feels like I'm learning things backwards."

Saunders worked part-time to support herself through school. Although the experience helped her develop a strong work ethic, valuable personable skills and a network of contacts that have served her well in the industry, she said it is a double-edged sword.

"It has benefited me, but in the long term it's an unhealthy way to live. I've always felt that I've had to work a bit harder to get things done. Not a bad thing per se but there's a lot of self[-inflicted] pressure."

Kitty Joseph is another designer who understands the challenges and importance of being resourceful in trying to break into the industry. "I had a supportive family, but they didn't have very much money," she said.

The Face covers | Source: Courtesy

Joseph, who grew up seeing the UK's idiosyncratic brand of elitism through the eyes of her Australian mother, also found that classism and snobbery informed the choices she made starting out as a designer. "It's such an illness in British society... [and in fashion] there are so many hidden languages and ways to behave. I consciously chose to go down the textiles route - I've always loved colours and patterns - because I thought it might be warmer and friendlier as a space than the fashion industry."

While working for Zandra Rhodes on weekends, Joseph said she benefitted from a number of programmes and initiatives along the way, many of which are no longer available to budding designers.

Fortunately, she narrowly missed the sharp increase in tuition fees - and decrease in means-tested loans and grants - when she started university. "So many of my friends looking to study after the increase couldn't take the risk," she said.
Social Mobility Dilemma
As with any creative industry, a career in fashion is both hard work and financially precarious. But this leaves recruits from lower-income backgrounds at a distinct disadvantage.

Farrah Storr, who in addition to being editor-in-chief of Elle UK sits on the UK's independent Social Mobility Commission, described the challenges of entering the fashion industry as "a web-like matrix of barriers," starting with "poor career advice about what a job in the arts looks like" and extending to the nepotism of support networks, unpaid work placements and "a frightening lack of security" in the form of short-term contracts and freelance work. As a result, "only the very privileged or brave are prepared to face all of those challenges."

The endurance of nepotism is evidenced in the reality of job postings: 85 percent of all roles are recruited by word-of-mouth rather than being openly advertised, according to data from Creative Access, a recruitment platform for people of colour and socioeconomically disadvantaged people looking for creative jobs. The social enterprise works with over 300 organisations including the BBC, Bauer Media Group and Christies.

Only the very privileged or brave are prepared to face all of those challenges.

According to a report on internships by social mobility charity Sutton Trust, 86 percent of work placements in the arts (including theatre, TV, film, fashion and music) did not pay the minimum wage, the highest rate of any sector, with working-class young people less likely to carry out internships in the creative industries than their counterparts from more affluent backgrounds.

"Social mobility in the UK is low and not improving," said Dr Rebecca Montacute, research fellow at the Sutton Trust. "Where you are born and who your parents are play a considerable part in shaping the opportunities you have later in life."

The problems with class-based representation in the industry can be traced back to the increasingly expensive institutions and courses that have turned out some of the biggest names in British fashion.

However, the biggest barrier that working-class talent face when trying to enter the fashion industry is not unique to Britain. The US, France and Italy - home to the three other fashion capitals of the world - have similarly poor rates of social mobility, with 2018 data from the OECD showing that, in all four countries, it can take at least five generations for the offspring of a low-income family to reach the average income.

What differentiates the UK from its country counterparts is that class is defined by a unique set of social and cultural factors - that ineffable convergence of money, family lineage, education, accent and even place of upbringing.
A Very Imperfect Haven
Criticising the fashion industry for its elitist shortcomings without acknowledging its progressive role in previous decades sounds one-sided to the generation of professionals older than Saunders or Joseph.

"Over the past 30 years, London's fashion industry has had most of the problems that the industry had in other fashion capitals and I mean there have been a lot of serious problems," said Kentros. "But it did embrace some people who were ostracised who could never make it in other industries, and that included a much more lenient attitude toward class."

"I just think younger people in the industry today have much higher expectations - and rightly so - but the industry hasn't been all bad either. Sometimes it was ahead of the curve and a safe haven and we shouldn't forget that either."

Dazed & Confused's first issue, 1991 | Source: Courtesy

Kentros cited examples of industry leaders and fashion imagery from titles such as The Face, Sleazenation, i-D and Dazed, who in the '90s and '00s used class distinction as a creative schism filled with irony, humour, shock and awe. But he suggests that these earlier "style battles critiquing class" might be lost on a younger generation for whom advocacy and earnest activism are the medium of protest.

Jo-Ann Furniss, the Manchester-born fashion editor best known for her seven-year editorship of Arena Homme Plus, might agree. Arena was a magazine that distilled fashion subcultures of the day, with a creative output that was at once irreverent and intimate in the way it presented working-class aesthetics.

Furniss described the fashion industry of her youth as an "island of misfits" - a "way out" for women, LGBTQIA people and working-class people. "Now," she said, "it has changed. [Fashion is] seen as a legitimate part of the entertainment industry in a way, whereas if you're working class [and want to be upwardly mobile], it's like, 'why aren't you doing law?'"

In the past (and some say today too), the British fashion industry was divided into two halves. "Back then, Tatler and Vogue and that whole set were running a very different fashion industry from the industry run by people at The Face, Dazed and i-D. But when these two worlds of class extremes collided, it could also produce amazing things. Just look at when Isabella Blow met Alexander McQueen," Kentros recalled.

Indeed, the mid-to-late '00s saw the beginning of a convergence of the two sides of the British fashion industry. Previously situated firmly on the other end of the anti-establishment spectrum was the far splashier world of fashion PR firms and Condé Nast-owned titles - the culture of which inspired the award-winning BBC sitcom "Absolutely Fabulous," first aired in 1992. The show's protagonists, Christian Lacroix-obsessed PR Edina and her champagne-swilling fashion editor friend Patsy Stone, were caricatures plucked straight from the West End world of moneyed fashion who occasionally collaborated with the raw and raucous fashion creatives of the East End, many of whom were working-class.

But sometimes life imitates art, and when the upper classes dabble in the palette of the working class, the resulting artwork is often a pastiche.
Class Appropriation and Alienation
For Davis, this was epitomised in Vogue's July 2005 issue. Just one month after controversially doing a spread on "WAG" media personality and footballer Wayne Rooney's now-wife Coleen McLoughlin, the publication featured Vicky Pollard, the fictional character from comedy sketch show "Little Britain" who had come to embody the media's demonisation of "chav" culture with her hot-pink tracksuit, "Croydon facelift" ponytail and defiant back chat in the face of any figure of authority.

Dazed Autumn/Winter '17 cover | Source: Courtesy

"It was almost like they were taking the piss," said Davis. "When I started shooting for The Fac e, I was keen to shoot real people in their environment. If they were in a tracksuit, it's because they wore a tracksuit."

Attempting to embrace the very group that they are presenting - and often failing at it - is something that hasn't gone away. So-called "class appropriation" (a take on cultural appropriation that involves superficially co-opting aspects of a lower socioeconomic class, rather than a marginalised race or ethnicity) is a hot debate among young fashion industry commentators today, and for good reason.

"You know, in the wrong hands, sometimes working class references can be fetishised or patronising or just used in a bad or wrong way," said Kentros. "But if it weren't for some talented British fashion people celebrating and showing off and revamping the style references they lived or saw in tough neighbourhoods in the Midlands and the North and areas of London, then we would never have developed a whole part of the fashion design palette."

Yet some believe say that the working environment of the fashion industry is a much bigger and urgent problem to solve than any problems that exist around class appropriation.

Creative industries such as fashion "sell themselves as being open, informal and having spaces that allow people to celebrate individuality and self-expression," said Sam Friedman, a sociology professor at LSE and author of "The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged." "The thing is, it's a little bit of a myth when you delve into who works in those jobs and how the culture reflects their class backgrounds."

This "culture" among fashion professionals manifests itself as social cues that tilt in favour of those from privileged backgrounds, and are therefore taken for granted and perpetuated as the industry remains closed-off to outsiders. As Creative Access Founder and Chief Executive Josie Dobrin put it, "privilege perpetuates privilege... It's not just about the job itself; it's about the environment." A classic example of this is workplace chatter where colleagues "not only talk about what university they went to, but what college within the university they went to."

Friedman refers to these modes of self-presentation as "studied informality." Fashion, like media and other creative sectors, positions itself as a friendly alternative to the suited-and-booted corporate world, but these unwritten codes of behaviour - from hugs and kisses instead of handshakes to awkward conversations with PRs about one's last summer holiday - can be just as daunting as more stuffy, traditional professional spaces.

Privilege perpetuates privilege... It's not just about the job itself; it's about the environment.

"These things can seem superficial, but they are very clearly classed," said Friedman, citing some working-class creative professionals who described their experiences as "disorienting, intimidating and hard to navigate. As a result, they [can] appear to be ill-at-ease, or the classic term 'lacking in confidence,'" making them less appealing to the employers who determine career progression. "Confidence is contextual," he said. "Certain behavioural codes can embolden some but intimidate others."

When it comes to redressing disproportionate representation of lower income recruits - or indeed any demographic - in fashion, there's no easy answer. "It's about outreach, making sure there are routes in," said Dobrin.

Without these routes in, prospective applicants in more precarious financial positions feel pressure to find work in different, more (ostensibly) stable professions. Among designers, existing circuits of the fashion establishment are arguably losing their appeal, becoming an outdated - if not unwelcoming and insular - place for young talent to make a name for themselves, particularly as individual entrepreneurship becomes a more viable option.

But despite the many challenges they continue to observe and experience, young designers like Joseph and Saunders seem hopeful. "I do feel optimistic that this industry is changing and opening up," said Joseph. "You don't have to be aligned to some quaint institution or special club [anymore]."

Like Joseph, Saunders sees her working-class background as a credit - rather than a hindrance - to asserting herself in London's fashion industry. Put simply, she said, "You can have as much money as you want, but you can't create culture out of nothing."
Related Articles:
[ A-Cold-Wall's Class-Clashing Workwear ]

[ Why Puffer Jackets Are at the Centre of Korea's Class Divide ]

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British Fashion Exploits, Celebrates and Fetishises the Working Class

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From hero worship and 'class appropriation' to subtle snobbery and downright discrimination, British fashion has an odd relationship with social class.

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HOW MIGHT YOU ADD VALUE TO A FABRIC OR GARMENT? REVERSIBLE? GENDER NEUTRAL? TRANS SEASONAL? ADJUSTABLE FABRIC?

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HOW MIGHT YOU ADD VALUE TO A FABRIC OR GARMENT? REVERSIBLE? GENDER NEUTRAL? TRANS SEASONAL? ADJUSTABLE FABRIC?

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DOES YOUR WORK CONVEY A POLITICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL MESSAGE?

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DOES YOUR WORK CONVEY A POLITICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL MESSAGE?