Paper short abstract:

This paper examines material from semi-structured interviews with participants in the S4S: Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing project, to consider how affective relationships with clothing might provide a model for wider pro-environmental behaviour change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines findings from S4S: Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing (S4S Project Exeter University | S4S Project (s4sproject-exeter.uk), which explored how creative making might promote pro-environmental behaviour change. A range of design tools were co-developed to reflect on fashion behaviours including short films, clothing diaries, and wardrobe audits - the latter produced the material considered here.

Drawing on processes of making and crafting, in the broadest sense, the research is underpinned by the relationship between ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’ and the knowledge that emerges from making things, including assembling, and managing clothing. This is viewed as a form of quiet activism (Hackney, 2013) – embodied activism that occurs within the routines and activities of everyday life at home, at work or, in this case, in the wardrobe. Wardrobe studies (Fletcher & Grimstad Klepp, 2017) is a growing area of research. Margaret Maynard (2022: 125), arguing for the need for more work on the relationship between ‘wearers and wardrobes’, considers wardrobes as material collections, spatial structures, and networks through which garments flow with ‘political implications’.

The S4S interviews reveal the very personal and often deeply emotional connections participants have with their wardrobes, as well as the equally personal strategies many have developed to make them more sustainable. This paper considers how these affective relationships might be understood as assemblages for promoting wider change (Deleuze and Guattarie, 2013). It also proposes that autoethnography might provide an meaningful method to understand/realise this.