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Sustainable Fashion Consumption

This working group brings together scholars and practitioners working on the issues of fashion consumption in the context of sustainability. Much of the existing research and action on sustainable fashion comes from the industry: optimization of complex supply chains, innovation in material design and production processes to reduce environmental impacts of fashion, improving the working conditions of people who make our clothes. However, research on fashion consumption has been fragmented and received much less attention. This working group aims to build a community of researchers interested in fashion consumption and working, among others, on the themes such as:
  • unsustainable fashion consumption patterns and social practices, including research on fast fashion consumption, its social and environmental impacts and related justice and mental health concerns, etc.
  • sustainable alternatives to fast fashion, sustainable fashion consumption practices, including second-hand shopping, swaps, renting clothing; trends of minimalism and decluttering, mindful curation and slow fashion; collaborative consumption and sharing economy; contributions from consumers to circular fashion, etc.
  • education for sustainable fashion consumption, including style education, mending and repair skills, post-purchase garment care, etc.
  • fashion consumption practices in various geographical contexts
  • gender dimension in fashion consumption
  • policies and industry efforts required to achieve more sustainable fashion consumption (not only awareness raising but also changes in material arrangements, infrastructure, fiscal and other measures to create opportunities for consumers to shop more sustainably), etc.
We welcome researchers from different disciplines and practitioners interested in these topics - and in other fashion consumption related research - to join the working group by sending out an email to the working group coordinator Katia Vladimirova.

GRF Sustainable Fashion Working Group Members

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Cosette Armstrong
Associate Professor, Oklahoma State University
cosette.armstrong@okstate.edu
 
An Associate Professor in the Department of Design, Housing and Merchandising and Oklahoma State University, Dr. Armstrong's research foundation has been focused by sustainability education for both university students and consumers. Her interests in sustainable fashion consumption include the topics of product service systems, collaborative consumption, personal authenticity and style, as well as spirituality

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Taylor Brydges
Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Human Geography at Stockholm University in Sweden & the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney
taylor.brydges@humangeo.su.se
 
Dr. Brydges is investigating sustainability and the circular economy, with a focus on the fashion industry, through a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR). This project draws on a number of case studies including, the Swedish (fast) fashion industry, international sustainable fashion intermediaries, and an exploration of fashion rental platforms in Canada.

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Claudia Henninger
Lecturer in Fashion Marketing Management
Claudia.Henninger@manchester.ac.uk
 
Dr. Henninger's research interest focuses on sustainability, sustainable consumption, fashion, and technology. Her recent work explores the circular economy, more specifically disruptive business model innovations, such as swapping. Dr. Henninger is one of the founding members of the SIG Sustainability.

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Samira Iran
Postdoctoral researcher at Technische Universität Berlin
samira.iran@tu-berlin.de
 
Since 2013 the focus of Dr. Iran's research has been on “sustainable fashion consumption”. Her doctoral thesis addresses the concept of collaborative fashion consumption in a cross-cultural context. For about three years (2016-2019), Dr. Iran was a research fellow in a real-laboratory project “Dietenheim zieht an” at the Ulm University. Since September 2019 she has held a postdoctoral research position at Technische Universität Berlin, working on a project on “education for sustainable fashion consumption with positive spillover effects through real-life experiments”. As a part of this transformational real-laboratory research, pupils will develop, implement, and evaluate real-life experiments for sustainable fashion consumption (e.g. a clothing library or a sewing café), together with scientists, teachers and other practitioners. You can learn more about it here. 

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Marta Karwacka
CEO of SENSA Sustainable Thinking, Poland
markarwacka@gmail.com

​Marta Karwacka CEO of SENSA Sustainable Thinking, author of the How to Wear Fair blog. Business sociologist, Dr. Marta Karwacka works with companies in the field of value management, circular economy, cross-sectoral cooperation and sustainable consumption. She belongs to the team of experts of the Responsible Business Forum and is a juror of Verba Veritatis, Sustainable Fashion Award and Positive Impact Start-ups. She is the author of the first book on the Polish market on the cooperation of business with non-governmental organizations in terms of CSR. The blog Blog How to Wear Fair -- her fashion project -- aims to raise consumer awareness of the (ir)responsibility of the fashion industry. Her contribution to the promotion of sustainable development in the fashion sector was awarded the ELLE Style Awards 2018 statuette by ELLE Magazine.

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Lisa McNeill
Associate Professor, Otago University
Associate Dean Postgraduate Research, Otago Business School
lisa.mcneill@otago.ac.nz

​Dr. Lisa McNeill is a Associate Professor of Marketing in the Otago Business School, Otago University, New Zealand.  Dr. McNeill specialises in consumer behaviour research, with a particular focus on sustainable and ethical fashion, and fashion consumer behaviour.  Most of her research explores the notion of fashion as an indentity construction tool, and asks how fashion sensitive consumers can moderate their attitudes and behaviours toward textile consumption and waste.  Dr McNeill’s recent research projects include: an examination of the slow fashion ethos among small, local retailers; attitudes toward collaborative consumption of fashion by young female consumers; the role of textile repair and maintenance in fashion wardrobe curation and disposal – a cross cultural examination in Korea, New Zealand and Canada; and consumer ability to interpret ethical labelling on fast fashion products – measuring the impact of ‘ethical’, ‘organic’, ‘child labour free’ and ‘Tear Fund rated’.

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Kirsi Niinimäki
Associate Professor in Design, especially Fashion Research, Aalto University, Finland
kirsi.niinimaki@aalto.fi 

Dr. Niinimäki’s research has focused on holistic understanding of sustainable fashion and textile fields and connections between design, manufacturing, business models and consumption. Her research group the Fashion/Textile Futures is involved in several significant research projects, which integrate closed loop, bio-economy and circular economy approaches in fashion and textile systems and extends the understanding of strategic sustainable design. Dr. Niinimäki has published widely and her newest book Sustainable Fashion in a Circular Economy was published in 2018. You can find it open access and learn more about Dr. Niinimäki’s research here.

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Magdalena Plonka
Founder of MSKPU (International Fashion School, Warsaw)
m.plonka@mskpu.com.pl
 
Dr. Plonka is broadly interested in ethical fashion consumption and production, on which she worked from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Dr. Plonka is a founder of RFA- Responsible Fashion Awards, international competition for ecologically and ethically oriented clothes designers.

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Katia Vladimirova
​​Postdoctoral Fellow, University Milan-Bicocca and University of Geneva
Ekaterina.vladimirova@unige.ch
 
Dr. Vladimirova is broadly interested in social transformation towards sustainability and currently works on fashion consumption and social change in Europe. Katia’s current projects explore the role of minimalist fashion challenges as a for a for sufficiency discussions, social media and Instagram in particular as an avenue for spreading awareness and social change in fashion consumption, and justice dimensions of a social change towards sustainable fashion.

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