A societal challenge today is the urgency to develop and adapt to more sustainable approaches to the amount of material artefacts we surround ourselves with. Clothes are no exception; they are products of a global market system, draining the understanding of what clothes can be. There is, however, an alternative quiet sustainability (Smith & Jehlicka, 2013) rooted in alternative and personal contexts, but of which we lack explicit knowledge (Fletcher, 2015). Based on a suede jacket, worn by five persons, from the 1950s and onwards, the study explores unspoken strategies and social and relational aspects that takes place in between the jacket and its wearer.
Methodologically, the study draws on memory work (Haug, 2008) and clothing’s tactility, sensuality and ‘memory-bearing’ capacity (Goett, 2016) to map experiences of wearing the jacket and how clothing is knotted into social structures and social relations.
Individual written memories, based on a physical encounter with the jacket, were translated into third person perspective and thereafter analysed collectively to recall and reassess the memories and to find similarities and connections in the stories.
The result shows how the jacket mediates experiences of an intense, context related balancing act between alignment–uniqueness, uncertainty–courage, and attachment–release, but also ethical reflections on the wearers themselves and their responsibility for others during certain periods of their life. The memory work gave insights in the commonality in the garment’s interconnectedness in the social construction of selves.
The responsibility to educate for sustainable development has over time been strengthened within the Nordic countries' education systems. In addition to providing in-depth knowledge of what quiet durability can be, the study contributes to conceivable methods to use in exploring quiet sustainability in teacher education in Crafts. Professional swedish craft teachers for example, find sustainable development, and perhaps especially social sustainability, difficult to teach about (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2015), so method development in the area is needed in both teaching in higher education and in research.
References:
Fletcher, K. (2015). Other fashion systems. I K. Fletcher & M. Tham (Eds.), Routledge handbook of sustainability and fashion. (pp. 15–24). Routledge.
Goett, S. (2016). Materials, memories and metaphors: the textile self recollected. I J. Jefferies, D. Wood
Conroy & H. Clarc (Eds.), The handbook of textile culture (pp. 121–136). Bloomsbury.
Haug, F. (2008). Memory work. Australian Feminist Studies, 23(58), 537 –541.
Smith, J., & Jehlicka, P. (2013). Quiet sustainability: fertile lessons from Europe’s productive gardeners. Journal of Rural Studies, 32, 148–157.
Swedish National Agency for Education. (2015). Slöjd i grundskolan: En nationell ämnesutvärdering i årskurs 6 och 9. Skolverket.