Fashion Commons: A North Star?
Colèchi Team. Picture: Immo Klink
On January 8, Maxine Bedat, architect of the New York Fashion Act, released an impassioned LinkedIn post: “I spoke to a chief sustainability officer of a major brand recently. When asked if their company would support the Fashion Act's drive to curb climate emissions in line with the Paris Agreement (a commitment they have already voluntarily set), their response was essentially, that does not align with our growth plans. How quickly the idea of green growth evaporates. I ask, where is the can do attitude? I also ask, can you look your children in the eyes and say the same?”
It may be some consolation to know that, amongst collapse-aware communities, the ‘can do’ attitude is alive and kicking. A new report titled Fashion, Clothing and Textiles Commons: A North Star for Alternative Clothing Systems in Europe and Beyond explores how the practice of ‘commoning’ could revitalise clothing and textile communities that have been eroded and sidelined by industrial fashion - enough to become a ‘north star’ for a degrowth future.
Produced by the not-for-profit platform, OurCommon.Market (OC.M), in turn powered by activist group Fashion Act Now, the report provides insight on how fashion commons are funded and organised - and how their learnings could be disseminated. And it explores what a European network of alternative clothing systems could mean for an industry synonymous with exploitation and waste.
Commons are resources that are “collectively managed by a defined community in fair and collaborative ways.” In clothing, this means that fibres, textiles, knowledge and skills are shared and organised by the community, rather than owned or exploited by multinational groups.
Clothing by the people for the people
But commons are not just about physical materialities; they’re also about the deep relational ties necessary to care for them: “the shared histories bind us”. As a result, clothing in the commons tends to embody social knowledge, cultural practices and heritage as well as deep respect for the earth and other species. In Africa, this philosophy is known as Ubuntu - a world view that reflects a deep interconnection between all beings.
Kat, Joss and Sarah, makers at BlueBarn.Life. Picture: Immo Klink
In essence, fashion commons are clothing made by the people for the people and the community they inhabit. The report posits the idea of fashion, clothing and textile commons as a vital component of a degrowth society and advocates for a pluriverse of alternative fashion systems which decouple Western clothing cultures from the shackles of financial profit and ‘growth’.
Examples of fashion commoning exist everything but quietly, at small scale, driven by dedicated, often local groups but shunted aside by the marketing loudhailers of megalithic global brands. These examples include seed-to-closest initiatives such as Homegrown Homespun; upcyclers such as the UK’s Katy Mason and Soup Archive in Berlin, Germany; knitters such as Colechi’s You Can Knit With Us; natural dyers such as Justine Aldersey-Williams and craft custodians such as Yi Crafts. Many sit within the OC.M’s atlas of clothing communities, an online platform designed to nurture and bring visibility to the clothing commons.
Based on insight and learning gathered in 2024, the report offers guidance on how to engage in commoning, in the fervent belief that fashion commons don’t simply represent isolated pockets of change but are, in fact, building strategies for much-needed systemic transformation. “Why I think it’s very important for us to look at these grounded alternatives, even though they are currently marginal compared to the macro political and economic forces that we have, is because these are where the seeds of transformation are present, and if we want to get out of the crises, we need to nurture these seeds, make them saplings, make them trees and then connect them across each other,” said Ashish Kothari, Assembly for Fashion Commons at the Global Fashioning Assembly 2024.
David Bollier, founder of Commons Strategies Group and Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics sets up guiding principles for commoning which include Character of the Resource, Geographic Location, Experience, Historical, Cultural and Natural Conditions of the Area and The Potential Need for Institutions that are Reliable and Transparent. “We can create conditions of emergence for a democratic, cooperative, commons-based, ecological clothing cultures,” says Zoe Gilbertson, OurCommon.Market member and co-founder of Liflad. “To achieve this, a huge variety of measures must be undertaken and many more will emerge as we get going.”
Beyond borders
The key challenge to establishing commons remains financial: “Available funding sources are extremely competitive and are ill-equipped to support the commons, whose value is hard to grasp solely in monetary terms.” Conventional means of support come with limitations: investors often expect control while philanthropic opportunities are constrained to impact requirements. In this ecologically challenged ‘between-worlds’, fashion commons can adopt hybrid models which straddle both commons and capitalist systems, such as co-operatives, time banking, community currencies, gift economies and bartering. Or they can turn to a more progressive alternative: actively creating an ecosystem of democratic capital, which include vehicles such as peer lending, donations, reward-based crowdfunding and member contributions.
Honouring diverse experiences within a European entity remains key (“We call for a culture of solidarity that celebrates pluriversality and cultural diversity and contributes to its continuation.”) while considering the impact of a European commons on economies historically locked into producing clothing for Western markets is also fundamental: “Common systems blur the boundaries between producers and consumers, workers and owners. We recognise that economic sovereignty and democracy are needed for so-called garment workers. They are dependent on the Fashion industry and are prevented from having agency over their livelihoods. Garment-producing countries should also be able to use their productive capacity to participate in their own clothing cultures.”
Yiran Duan of YiCrafts. Picture: Immo Klink
In this work, OC.M honours current agents of change including War on Want, Fashion Revolution, Clean Clothes Campaign and ReMake. The report advocates creating alliances with advocacy groups and unions in garment-producing areas - and recognising their activism. “Can we talk about defashion without talking about the exploited people?” asks Sara Arnold, co-founder of both Fashion Act Now and OurCommon.Market and one of the report’s authors. “They are already organising. They are commons. They have power.”
But working well, while in isolation, is not enough. The clear hunger for connection with others involved in fashion commons requires space and time for relationships to blossom. And the report acknowledges the importance of disseminating information in active protest against dominant institutional and educational strategies. Open access, non-hierarchical methods of sharing practices, peer-to-peer learning and knowledge exchange and localised, on-the-ground movements challenge formal educational systems which serve mainly to prop up the status quo.
For fashion commons to grow, culture needs to change: “How do you capture the hearts and imaginations of those whose experience of clothing culture has been mainly passive as consumers of Fashion?” The answer lies in storytelling, in working case studies and in hands-on, experiential activities. In this scenario, interrogating current language becomes instrumental. “We at least acknowledge that there are physical areas of the world that are sacrifice zones but we haven’t acknowledged that culture and psyche and people are sacrifice zones of the system,” writes independent researcher and OC.M co-founder Sandra Niessen. “For me, the term ‘garment workers’ is a kind of normalisation of that erasure; an obscurity of the violence being done by the system. To use the term and to ‘align with them’ is to reinforce the idiom and structures of neo-liberal capitalism and that is problematic because these are what we believe need to be reformed and dismantled.”
“The ambition of OC.M is to track and support the development of fashion, clothing and textiles commons and commoning throughout the world,” says the report. “As the need for alternatives to industrial Fashion become increasingly evident to the populace, the commons will grow, become more numerous and diverse. OC.M aims to be a useful tool to facilitate that development.”
