Blog 1: Emerging Technology and the Fashion Industry, Nature
After watching a collection of the Better Lives lecture series one that stood out to me was lecture 8: Emerging Technology and the Fashion Industry delivered by Nick Almond. He discussed his knowledge on physics and technology and linked them to the fashion industry. This lecture opened my eyes to how much technology has evolved in the past few decades. Technology has transformed every industry in the world including the fashion industry. One thing which connected fashion and emerging technologies was when Nick discussed digital garments- this could potentially be a sustainable fashion practice which can help combat how big a contributor fashion is to pollution. I also question if these emerging technologies continue to grow they will become even more damaging to the earth? Learning about the rise of artificial intelligence in the fashion industry, the social impact of this will affect many people in the future career wise as this technology will be able to do a humans job at a faster and more efficient pace. However some creative practices such as design can benefit from these technologies in the future.
In the age of the climate emergency and devastating loss of species, the lecture delivered by Kate Fletcher explored nature and our relationship with it. ‘Nature’ defined by Michael Bonnett is the ‘self-originating material/spiritual world, of which we are a part, including the powers that sustain and govern it’. I really enjoyed this lecture and found it interesting as I have not really looked into how nature and fashion affect each other even though the two are hugely connected. The fashion industry is one of the leading industries contributing to polluting the Earth. Every stage of the fashion cycle plays a part from sourcing the materials to the consumer disposing of the clothing. I think people today are much more aware of introducing sustainable fashion practices such as brands sourcing materials which are eco-friendly as fibres impact natural systems. It has become a trend for consumers to ‘shop sustainably’ by buying vintage and second hand clothes and by donating or recycling clothes instead of disposing their clothing- more than 300,000 tonnes of used clothing goes to landfill in the UK every year, according to Wrap (2018), the waste charity. It said that 5 per cent of the UK’s total annual carbon and water footprint came from clothing consumption. As a PR student I know it’s important to communicate to the public how sustainable the brands they are consuming are. Something that enlightened me from Kate’s lecture is that humans tend to see themselves separate to nature and aren’t always connected- humans are part of nature and one only works with the other. Nature exists only in order to meet human needs; biodiversity has no inherent value. Inevitably nature is the enabler of the fashion system and nature is fashion’s limiting factor.
Bibliography
Lecture 3: Nick Almond, Emerging Technologies in Fashion
Lecture 5: Kate Fletcher, Nature