British stockings, silk and cotton circa 1775-1795.
The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art. This work is made available under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) Public Domain Designation.
Special Issue: ‘Theorising Fashion Beyond Sustainability’
Co-edited by: Harriette Richards and Rimi Khan
Call for papers: Abstracts due 19 February 2027
As fashion’s sustainability discourse has grown in mainstream awareness and acceptability, it has lost its critical edge. The rise of sustainability as a market niche, a corporate responsibility framework, and a consumer identity targeted by greenwashing, have diluted the concept’s potency.
This Special Issue seeks to move beyond instrumentalist and impact-oriented approaches to sustainability by inviting critical, theoretical engagements and reframings of the sustainability agenda. It asks whether ‘sustainability’ still offers useful theoretical resources for addressing the interconnected problems of ecological crisis, climate injustice, and corporate accumulation. Do newer concepts such as ‘regeneration’ offer meaningful alternatives? How do sustainability questions need to be reimagined to respond to fashion’s decolonial projects and transnational inequalities?
We are interested in critical, humanities-informed contributions that are ‘beyond’, ‘against’ or ‘post-’ sustainability. The focus is on conceptual papers rather than policy or industry-oriented articles. Discussions of sustainability and related concepts should position these within a distinct intellectual paradigm that brings to light specific assumptions, possibilities and limitations. We are especially interested in how thinking ‘beyond sustainability’ might address fashion’s diverse cultural and geographical contexts, and what these contexts demand from sustainability thinking.
Guidelines:
Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words, along with an author bio of 50-100 words, to the two guest editors of the Special Issue by 19 February 2027.
Harriette Richards (harriette.richards@rmit.edu.au) and Rimi Khan (rimi.khan@rmit.edu.au)
Co-edited by: Natalya Lusty, Rimi Khan and Harriette Richards, 2021
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 35, issue.6, pp.813-937
Edited by co-founders of the Critical Fashion Studies research group, Professor Natalya Lusty, Dr Harriette Richards and Dr Rimi Khan, the issue brings together the material, ethical, and aesthetic practices of fashion with Cultural Studies approaches to sustainability and the micropolitical practices of cultural production and consumption. Over the last decade, fashion has emerged as a key site in which debates about social and environmental responsibility, and their gendered, socio-economic and spatial dimensions, have intensified. This special issue focuses on fashion as a cultural practice and creative industry, where aesthetics and design innovation are being shaped by local and global landscapes of activism and critical enterprise. The scholarly articles, by both established and emerging scholars, feature a cross-section of practice-based and theoretical approaches, reflecting the varied research interests within the growing field of critical fashion studies.
With essays drawn from the inaugural Critical Fashion Studies symposium, hosted at the University of Melbourne in mid-2019, the issue contributes to the growing field of critical fashion studies. Contributors include scholars addressing a range of topics, including: rethinking value; the feminisation of responsibility in the broader ethical and sustainable fashion dialogue; tensions between local practices and global markets; the idea of digital fashion activism; systems of design longevity; practices of scale; networks of creativity and solidarity; and potential sites for resistance and mobilisation. In addition to these scholarly research articles, the issue also includes an industry dialogue with Australian fashion practitioners Yatu Widders Hunt (Australian Indigenous Fashion), Courtney Holm (A.BCH) and Teslin Doud (The Threads).
