Resourceful garment use practices

The Craft of Use website explores resourceful garment use practices as one way to challenge the dependency of the fashion industry on increasing material throughput. Its proposition is that through sustained attention to tending and using garments, we can create an alternative set of experiences of fashion provision and consumption. After all, owning a garment does not mean we know how to use it.

The Craft of Use’s goal is to change our garment-related visions, ideas, habits, skills and stories so that they are shaped by our capabilities, experiences and achievements as well as our commodities.

The knowledge, skills and ideas of Craft of Use are the spiritual and intellectual home – the ‘mothership’ – of some of my other work in design for sustainability, most notably the 'Local Wisdom' project. This project, which links together a network of partners and design activity in seven centres of high fashion consumption spread across three continents, explores satisfying and resourceful practices associated with using clothes.

'Local Wisdom' gathers stories and images from the public of how people use their clothes at community photo shoots. These use practices are then the basis and inspiration for design projects in the UK, USA, Canada, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand which aim to amplify these practices and explore their integration into larger programmes or original business models.