People, Planet, Profit, and Discourse. How Sustainability Rewrites the History of Fashion

Abstract

The contribution moves from the temporal perspective of the Anthropocene, in which the human being is seen as creator and manipulator of what surrounds it, to ask what shape time has in the perspective of fashion and how it is being rewritten in a post-anthropocentric direction. For this purpose, we intend to shed light on the complex relationship of fashion with its historical dimension by analyzing the complexity that the term sustainability evokes. The contribution proposes a conceptual and methodological framework based on three key aspects of sustainability explained by the so-called three “p”s strategy: people, planet and profit. Through this framework, the contribution offers the possibility of addressing the dense series of temporal references necessary to re-read the connections between fashion and sustainability, incorporating into the investigation both the development of a theory of sustainability related to fashion and the analysis of specific cases of study. The perspective highlighted by this contribution allows us to frame fashion as a destructive force, but also as a possible transformative, hybridizing and healing agent, as a conscious form of conservation of the physical, social and cultural environment in which we live.

Keywords

• anthropocene
• sustainability
• history
• fashion
• eco-centric system