This article explores the notion of deeper luxury, which insists that 'real' luxury should involve sustainable practices in the production and consumption of luxury goods. It traces historical and recent developments in the field of fur to understand the implications, uncertainties and ambiguities of luxury's confrontation with sustainability. Considering fur in relation to future standards for luxury products, we raise questions about moral problematisation and justification of luxury in terms of sustainability. We first examine the encounter of luxury with sustainability and explain the significance of the notion of 'deeper luxury'. After taking stock of the impact of sustainability on luxury and various directions in which sustainable luxury is evolving, we discuss concepts of sustainable development in relation to the history of moral problematisation of luxury. This leads to the case of fur as material used to establish social distinctions from at least medieval times to the present and subject to moral condemnation and controversy. Our case inquiry reviews recent research projects and industry initiatives that seek to determine whether the fur can be seen as sustainable or not. The article discusses whether fur is about to lose or reclaim its legitimacy in an era of sustainable luxury, and concludes with reflections on depth and sustainable luxury.
Much "Fashion thinking" is concerned with the new, the trend leading and the spectacular. Hence, much debate and theorization within this area of research focuses on fashion as a generic, institutionalized and ritualized system that continuously produces and disseminates new trends and ideals. A large body of knowledge has been developed that aims to comprehend how fashion trends emerge and connect to society and subsequently get promoted by a system of trend agencies, fashion designers, or fashion editors. In contrast to this line of thinking, other areas of research have been looking the opposite way for the last few decades, namely at the down-to-earth everyday routines of people-what is often referred to as the ordinary. In line with the development of practice theory, the area of design research has produced increasing inquiries with regard to the way people's daily practices are intertwined with time, space and objects. This paper represents a view on dress practice building on this view, with a particular focus on the issue of temporality. Based on her concept 'the biographical wardrobe' the author points to alternative understandings of dress practice that highlight how continuity rather than newness plays a vital role in the self-understanding of individual users.
No abstract
This article displays selected findings from a line of so-called ‘wardrobe method’ interviews conducted in the period 2010–16, in which the sensory system plays a particularly important role. The research approach of the project represents a fusion, on the one hand, of addressing the body as important within fashion and dress research and, on the other, the emphasis on user experiences and practices within the area of design research that also highlight sensory, utilitarian and symbolic aspects. Synthesizing the two research areas in the interview technique of clustering, the author shows how she has engaged with sensory perspectives of dressing in her field work, as well as in her analysis. As such, the overall departure for the article is the idea that user- and practice-oriented approaches from within design research are particularly well fitted to enrich the understanding of the way in which dress culture is not only something that has to do with visual display, but very much so with sensory experience as a tool for sense-making.
In this article, I investigate the wardrobe as a possible explanatory framework and methodology for studying and analysing the relationship between people and what they wear. Since I have previously elaborated on the human–object–time relationship in my concept of the biographical wardrobe (Skjold 2016), here I wish to elaborate on the human–object–space relationship. This implicates decoding and analysing the kinds of stylistic references people make use of when they build up their personal collection of garments and accessories in their wardrobes over a lifetime, and what these references carry with them in the form of institutionalized rituals, institutions, values and practices that the individual co-creates and reproduces. Based on this, I end up concluding how the discourse of fashion – as a set of values, practices and driving institutionalized rituals – cannot explain fully what goes on when people dress. Instead, I point to some coexisting discourses that I found to be represented in the wardrobes of my informants as carriers of alternative or even contradictory values and practices.
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