Circular Fashion in the Capitalocene: Value-creating actors, activities and types of fashion design

My PhD project provides insights about valuecreation in the fashion resale market which holds useful information about human-garment relationships and allows designers to learn from the already made. Through a variety of ethnographic research methods that take off within existing resale environments, I explore 1) actors,
2) activities and 3) types of fashion design that create resale values. I draw on an actor-network theoretical (ANT) approach that situates fashion designs as co-dependent and world-making phenomena (Latour 2008; Yaneva 2009). This requires for circular fashion design, i.e. lasting design that performs well in circular resale business models, to be perceived as an effect of multiple heterogeneous mechanisms rather than a cause of design strategies and material attributes alone. By studying resale mechanisms, I seek to challenge simplistic understandings of design for longevity while contributing with insights that can pave the way for a meaningful circular transition of the Capitalocene fashion industry.