Expanding accidental sustainability: A material culture study of clothing

This article adopts a material culture approach to clothing to investigate what sustainable practices women already employ when it comes to managing and engaging with clothes. The core elements of Sophie Woodward's concept ‘accidental sustainability’ are extended here. Practices considered as sustainable in nature are those that allow women's clothing to be retained and its active life extended. Utilising historical data from an Australian context, the everyday clothing practices of women are interrogated through two case studies to show that awareness of ecological implications are not necessary. That is, women often engage with clothing in sustainable ways without realising. As such, I argue that accidentally sustainable clothing practices are informed by material mastery through embodied skills that women develop through experiences with clothing. Overwhelmingly, the cases outlined in this article show that there remain further avenues to explore when it comes to encouraging sustainable clothing consumption amongst the end-user.