Sarah Kilkenny

Slow Fashion: Crafting Futures Through Material Practices

Responding to devastating environmental effects of the global fashion industry, this interdisciplinary design and social science research investigates how a more-than-human approach can inform the co-design of fashion futures beyond growth logic regimes. The research is grounded in the inventive and performative turns in social science and STS, notably feminist technoscience, and aims to develop a novel inventive research method (combining design ethnography, growing fibre, and participatory speculative practices) to engage local fashion efforts to achieve sustainable futures.

Situated within emergent UK flax fibre communities, part of a burgeoning ‘slow fashion’ movement, it addresses the barriers specific to these initiatives such as seed sovereignty, missing processing machinery, and a price point which allows only the privileged to engage. Furthermore, the research aims to support designers and a sector, used to opaque global supply chains, who lack the skills of working with native fibres, in these local networks, and in practices that offer alternatives to the perpetuation of sustainability via consumption.

The research asks the following questions:

1. How do slow fashion communities negotiate relationships between material agency, sustainability and sociotechnical futures?
2. In what ways do material practices (e.g. flax growing and processing) shape and reconfigure MTH relations in (slow) fashion ecosystems?
3. How can participatory speculative methodologies be employed to facilitate co-designing futures for slow fashion in ways that include MTH interests and futures?
   

Supervisors

• Prof Alex Wilkie
• Mathilda Tham

Researcher Biography

Sarah Kilkenny is a design researcher based in London. She trained for an MA in Knitwear Design at the Royal College of Art (London) and after 6 years working within the fashion industry, her research now aims to explore the possibilities for her practice outside the industrial fashion paradigm. Her practice currently centres growing, foraging and processing bast fibres and learning to spin. Sarah is undertaking a practice-based PhD in the Design department of Goldsmiths, University of London as an awardee of a SENSS doctoral studentship.