Repair and Care: Reframing Fashion Sustainability Pedagogy

Despite the consensus that extending the lives of extant garments is the surest way to meaningfully reduce fashion’s deleterious impacts on the environment, repair and care remain marginal topics in fashion higher education. Indeed, even as some colleges and universities work to develop sustainable fashion courses and degrees, many programs continue to perpetuate fashion’s linear “take-make-waste” model. When sustainability is addressed in fashion education, it is frequently framed as a business practice or, conversely, as an individualistic consumption/disposal practice. In both framings, sustainable fashion is presented as an “opportunity” as opposed to a practice of care, consciousness raising, or community building. In this article, we present our strategies for “repairing” fashion education, utilizing our own fashion sustainability courses as case studies. In doing so, we theorize the ways in which we have reframed sustainable fashion practice as a community-focused care and repair practice, rather than as an individualistic consumption or production practice. In discussing our activities and assignments, we will loosely map them along John Fisher’s model of personal transition, which visualizes how individuals must learn to move through feelings of fear, anger, guilt, and depression in order to accept changes and move forward with greater strength.