Fashion’s Fibres as Planetary Flows

Abstract

Fibre, the basis of fashion’s materiality, is experiencing a rising demand year on year, reflecting the insatiable desire for ‘more’ that defines the dominant fashion system. With an annual consumption of 124 million tonnes in 2023, a doubling in twenty years (Textile Exchange 2024), humanity’s appetite for fibre has never been more voracious. Recent studies on fashion’s fibre are diverse: including technical analyses of different fibres’ sustainability benefits or challenges (e.g., Subramanian et al 2021), analysis of their value chains (e.g., Mellick et al 2021) and cultural histories (Stanes and Gibson 2017; Smelik 2023). In industry contexts there are calls for fibre to be traceable from all sources – whether from forests, oil fields, farms, or laboratories – and their impacts to be quantified and reduced (e.g., UNECE 2021; Changing Markets 2022).

The fourth issue of Fashion Highlight Journal proposes a planetary perspective on fibre, viewing it as a dynamic interplay of material flows and forces shaped by both human and non-human actors, the living and the technological, and the crowded continuum between them. In this Introduction we will first briefly situate our study of fibres within theoretical perspectives of new materialism and posthumanism. Then we will introduce the thirteen peer-reviewed papers through three thematic threads that we have detected among and across them.