Fashion Worth Circulating

This article-based PhD dissertation, "Fashion Worth Circulating", concerns the resale of clothing, challenging the dominant linear fashion industry by looking for transitional pathways in the rapidly growing resale economy that is grounded in promises of revitalising already existing garments. The dissertation is linked to the mission-driven research and innovation partnership TRACE (a TRAnsition towards Circular Economy) which, through a multitude of thematically joint projects, aims to accelerate the transition to a circular economy for plastics and textiles in Denmark. Within the TRACE framework, the dissertation takes its point of departure in the specific key challenge that ‘clothing is underutilised’ (RM2021, 23), a challenge that is sought to be remedied by scaling up the resale market, where the rates of 30–40 and 80–90 percent of revenue streams in the Danish textile sector are to be generated by the years 2030 and 2050 respectively. These are the concrete milestones that form the basis of the partnership’s vision, and they thus delimit the dissertation’s particular stance on what the future circular fashion economy will look like.

The dissertation argues that circularity is not static, measurable, or universal; not an ontological product property, a technical strength, or an aesthetic quality physically built into the design object; nor is it within the designer’s control. By cross-pollinating analytical findings from the three articles of the dissertation, circularity is proposed as a vibrant practice form and mode of becoming; an emergent potential that exists only when realised in practice; that often has multiple – surprising and entangled – causes; that it is not a being, but a becoming. For this reason, cultivating a circular textile economy with a resale-dominated fashion market involves 1) businesses, 2) users, and 3) design objects – but in principle also all other – human and nonhuman – (f)actors that influence the long-term survival of garments in real life.