Wardrobe Hack and Uncatwalk: Design interventions to encourage more fulfilling relationships with our clothing

Abstract Fashion is now fast and disposable. The current product–service system for fashion ensures that unwanted items are quickly abandoned in favour of the next shiny new thing. Leaving little time or motivation for consumers to engage, appreciate and articulate oneself through fashion. This activity is destroying the value of clothing both figuratively and literally and is having a huge negative impact on people and planet. This research asks can designers create systems and services that improve and extend the use phase of the person–product relationship and ensure ongoing contentment and fulfilment for the user? The practice-led research projects, Wardrobe Hack and Uncatwalk, encourage everyday user autonomy of clothing from the site of their fashion experience, their own wardrobe. The aim of these projects is to enable the development of alternate ecologies of practice or behaviour for fashion users in the use phase of a garment’s life in order to encourage more fulfilling relationships with clothing to address the environmental impact of overconsumption. This practice-based fashion research project and its associated design intervention occur during the ‘use’ phase of clothing. This is a means of encouraging more sustainable consumer activity through longer-term consideration and connectivity with existing clothing. This is an under-researched stage of the conventional person-product-service relationship, and can be a means of encouraging more sustainable consumer activity.. This is achieved by exploring the viability and potential of a Wardrobe Hack service or courses of actions that enable ‘wearers’ to share their everyday practices, build competencies and create a space for sustainable fashion product–services and practices to emerge. This research builds on Fletcher’s work in the Local Wisdom (2013) project, exploring the emerging field of enriching the fashion user experience in the post-production and post-retail environment. It seeks to create a better integration of clothing and material culture in our lives by proposing alternative roles for designers and consumer to design services for longevity of use practices. These models demonstrate how digital and social media can provide a vehicle for fashion designers to facilitate participatory experiences amongst fashion users. Future research requires a longitudinal study to evaluate the impact from the consumer’s perspective.