Can fashion change the world?

By BEL JACOBS

With its bleak record on social justice, environmental wellbeing, animal cruelty and waste, it’s hard to see a future for fashion - in its current incarnation, at least - that works for people and planet. But if there’s one figure who believes not only that fashion can change but that it can also be a force for good, that’s Francesco Mazzarella.

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF), Mazzarella’s research explores ways in which design activism can create counter-narratives towards sustainability in fashion. As part of the Making for Change: Waltham Forest project, a programme of community engagement, design research, and educational activities, he explores the potential of using fashion and making as catalysts for positive change.

“In the face of the complex challenges posed by the current global environmental, economic and social crises, designers are adopting more sustainable practices and social responsibility in their work, playing the role of activists to challenge the unsustainable status quo,” says Mazzarella, excitedly. “I focus on design activism, using my skills and expertise to build communities of practice with a shared vision towards activating positive change.”

The term is not common parlance. “Professor Alastair Fuad-Luke defined [design activism] as ‘design thinking, imagination and practice applied knowingly or unknowingly to create a counter-narrative aimed at generating and balancing positive social, institutional, environmental and/or economic change’,'“ explains Mazzarella. “I adopt it as an approach to rescue cultural heritage, fight social inequalities, help local economies flourish and enhance environmental stewardship.”

Waltham Forest is Mazzarella’s second iteration of these ideas; in his Loughborough Design School doctoral research project, he explored how service design can be used to help communities transition towards a sustainable future. “For the research project, I conducted case studies with two textile artisan communities, one in Nottingham, UK, the other in Cape Town, South Africa,” says Mazzarella. As a result of both cases, the artisans, who had previously working in isolated, precarious conditions, became communities. “I played diverse roles,” he smiles. “As cultural insider, storyteller, sensemaker, facilitator and activist …”

Artisanship is increasingly recognised as a meaningful model of design, production and consumption, contributing to sustainability, cultural identity and wellbeing.” Craft and making, in this interpretation, become the perfect riposte to the homogenisation of current industrial fashion practices, working in harmony with nature and respecting local cultures. “Artisanal products are often characterised as unique and pleasurable, useful and beautiful,” says Mazzarella. “They embed a timeless know-how and are deeply rooted in the material culture of a territory.

“However, artisans often find themselves working in isolated, precarious conditions, at the bottom of ecosystems which do not take people, heritage and the environment into account,” he continues. “We live in a complex reality where global economic and environmental crises are interwoven with social inequalities. Dwindling resources and re-localisation of urban manufacturing are making natural fibres unaffordable for artisans who have consequently turned to mass production.”

Where once there were pieces produced with care and cherished, there are now throwaway pieces churned out of factories for markets in both the Global North and South. “Many items once produced by skilled textile artisans have been replaced by fast fashion, whilst over-production and over-consumption are resulting in a fast landfill,” says Mazzarella. “Increasing global competition means that many artisans live in precarious, fractured and marginalized ways, at the bottom of the pyramid with little chances of overcoming their poverty due to the lack of long-term market access, regular wages and opportunities to learn new skills.” 

He continues: “The real nature of artisanship is challenged by issues of cultural appropriation leading to a form of ‘craft bricolage’, which consists of items inspired by foreign archetypes and mass produced in global peripheries, then sold in cheap supermarkets to cosmopolitan consumers who use them out of context.”

Mazzarella is also a key member of Mode Uncut, a collaborative network aimed at exploring ways to reshape unjust fashion systems. Its members have facilitated over 20 design and sewing workshops in Finland, Germany, Italy and the UK, challenging the way we make our clothes, individually and together.  “Mode Uncut was created to explore and disrupting fashion practices by reconfiguring the designer-producer-consumer relationship,” explains Mazzarella. In 2016, in partnership with Professor Alastair Fuad-Luke (from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy) and Anja-Lisa Hirscher (from Aalto University, Finland), Mazzarella initiated the ‘Make Yourself…’, a project focused on socializing value creation through making clothes differently. “We invited residents, migrants and refugees to a ‘makershop’ where they up-cycled discarded textiles and second-hand garments to create and exchange alternative types of value, including individual, community, societal, environmental and economic.”

Mazzarella has found himself described as a social capital catalyst … “I don’t particularly like labels,” he says, ruefully. “But those who know my work call me a ‘social capital catalyst’, perhaps due to my sensibility to recognise and value the social capital of people and to activate communities towards implementing collective action. I have been lucky enough to create an immense network of amazing people with aligned values, which I treasure and share generously. I am always keen on connecting people as this is for me the only way for nurturing open innovations.”

Travel has played a part in this. “I love absorbing other cultures and ways of working and shaping my own way of being a citizen of the world. Being Italian, cultural heritage and artisanship have always been in my DNA. During my studies at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, I deepened my interest in systemic design as a holistic approach to local assets. As an exchange student in the Netherlands, I learned about user-centred design, scenario building and design futures. A moment that marked my life was my experience as a visiting student at the CEDTec DESIS Lab in Brazil, where I collaborated with local artisans to investigate opportunities for design-led social innovation.” London is currently home. “The UK is the cradle of the Arts and Crafts movement and in this context, I have established my research in design activism, service design and sustainable fashion. 

An inspirational figure remains Professor Ezio Manzini from Politecnico di Milano, the ‘father’ of design for social innovation. “I was very lucky to meet him during my studies at a honourary MSc called Alta Scuola Politecnica, where I collaborated with a team of students in design, architecture and engineering on an EU-funded project (for which Ezio was one of the mentors) aimed at designing collaborative services to boost social innovation in smart cities,” remember Mazzarella. “Ezio was also the inspiration for focusing my work on services that contribute to social innovation and sustainability.”

“I am so grateful to be working at Centre for Sustainable Fashion, which is committed to living sustainably in interdependence with other human beings and within the natural world,” he continues. “We do this through our on-going process of embedding sustainability within fashion education across London College of Fashion.”

Mazzarella contributes to the MA Fashion Futures and MA Fashion Entrepreneurship and Innovation, placing sustainability and social entrepreneurship at the heart of fashion practice to help shape the next generation of sustainable pioneers; he is also part of a Climate Emergency working group across University of the Arts London. “I’m currently scoping a research project focused on climate emergency and the displacement of people as catalysts for new learnings on individual and community resilience in place,” he says. “Through participatory action research projects (such as ‘Making for Change: Waltham Forest’ - watch the video here), I tackle socio-economic issues experienced in local communities, using fashion activism to contribute to shaping better lives, for ourselves and all living beings.”

He has one piece of advice for potential design activists. “Reflect on your own potential to activate counter-narratives towards social innovation and sustainability. We need to tailor our approaches to specific contexts in order to craft meaningful social innovations, avoiding the risk of being ‘parachuted’ into communities using fixed toolkits and developing ineffective one-size-fits-all outputs,” he says. “Aso, given that activist terminology has increasingly been co-opted by organisations, we need to shy away from a commoditisation of the role. Design activists have been hired for commercial purposes to develop technical fixes to the symptoms of sustainability. Instead, [we need to] dive deep into an exploration of the root causes of the unbalanced system we live in.”

---