Designing Fashion's Future: Present Practice and Tactics for Sustainable Change

How do fashion designers design? How does design function within the industry? How can design practices open up sustainable pathways for fashion’s future? Designing Fashion's Future responds to these questions to offer a fresh understanding of design practices within the sprawling, shifting fashion system. Fashion design is typically viewed as the rarefied practice of elite professionals, or else as a single stage within the apparel value chain. Alice Payne shows how design needn't be reduced to a set of decisions by a designer or design team, but can instead be examined as a process, object, or agent that shapes fashion’s material and symbolic worlds. Designing Fashion's Future draws on more than 50 interviews with industry professionals based in Australia, Asia, North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. These diverse perspectives from multinational retailers, independent and experimental contexts ground the discussion in contemporary industry practices.

Alice Payne is Professor and Dean of the School of Fashion and Textiles, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include the fashion design process and the problem of design for sustainability within the fashion context. Alice is also an award-winning designer, investigating design for sustainability in fashion via practice-led research.