research

ANTTI AINAMO

Guest Professor, University of Bors Swedish School of

Textiles; Professor, St. Petersburg Polytechnic Univ. Dept. of
Engineering Graphics and Design;
Adjunct Professor, Aalto University. School of ARTS and and
School of Business, Helsinki, Finland

RETHINKING
TEXTILE FASHION:
New Materiality,
Smart Products, and
Upcycling

BY ANTTI AINAMO

KEYWORDS:
Upcycling, Smart textile, Smart fashion,
Sustainability, New materialisms
DIO: 10.3384/svid.2000-964X.14253

Swedish Design Research Journal 2 | 14 53

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ABSTRACT

Manufacturing operations in much of textile fashion have

migrated from the developed economies to developing
countries in search of cost economies. Consideration for
the natural environment has been lost in the process due to
lack of clarity what corporation or some other participant
in what kind of an economy is most responsible. This paper
is intended as a thought piece on how new materialisms
offers an approach to bring back responsible concern for the
natural environment in textile fashion and, perhaps, beyond.
INTRODUCTION

1)

Resources, skills or wills for environmental protection have

not always readily been found in textile fashion. While the
manufacturing of textile fashion may have created many
new jobs in developing economies in the last ten years as a
result of outsourcing manufacturing of cotton textile and
clothes from developed economies (Gereffi & Frederick
2010), the net effect of the outsourcing has been detrimental
in terms of the loss of ecological balance when it comes to
the natural environment. Manufacturing in the developing
economies often pollutes more than in developed economies.
Transportation costs are high since consumption of fast
fashion is more characteristic of consumption in developed
economies than it is of consumption in the developing ones
(Allwood et al. 2006, 2008). The migration of manufacturing
has furthermore gone hand in hand with an externalization
of who is responsible for environmental protection. With
this kind of an emergence of an increasingly ecologically
unsound and irresponsible system, calls for radical systemwide change in how textile fashion is manufactured and
distributed internationally have grown (e.g. Niinimki &
Hassi 2011; Chomsky 2011, p. 16; Fry 2009, p. 74). Justified
questions include: What alternative approaches exist for
bringing about the radical and system-wide change in textile

fashion? How to know which of such approaches is best?

With this kind of a background, this paper is intended as
a thought piece on how to make textile fashion a more
sustainable human pursuit than it is now.
ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO
RADICAL SYSTEM-WIDE CHANGE

More than one kind of an approach for radical and systemwide change and international reorganization of textile
fashion has been proposed in research literature. These
include: (1) new materialisms or understandings of what is
textile material and what it ought to be (Coole & Scott 2010;
Hemmings, 2012; Moor & Mann-Weber & Haberle 2012),
(2) traditional materialism or return back to slow fashion
or even to a steady state (OConnor 2010), (3) smart
textiles, clothes and parametrically oriented solutions to
enable and speed up the ways that the radical and systemwide change will cascade (Fletcher 2013:25; Hanna 2012;
Jonson 2012; Quinn 2010; Tang & Stylos 2006; Allwood
et al. 2006), and (4) upcycling or activity to increase the
symbolic value of long-lived clothes (Ericsson & Brooks
2014; Boscia 2014). The above four approaches are shown in
a schematic form in Table 1.
This paper focuses on the first and second of the
above kinds of groupings of propositions; that is, on new
materialisms and traditional materialism. Intellectually,
an interesting exercise is to map out the two kinds of
approaches, as well as their starting points, logics and forms
of argumentation for their adoption in textile fashion. On
a more pragmatic note than that, such a mapping exercise
1) The author would like to thank Lisbeth Svengren Holm as the editor of this
journals research articles, as well as Amanda Ericsson, Lotta Jonson, Jonas
Larsson, Miikka Lehtonen, Heikki Mattila, Rudrajeet Pal, Clemens Thornquist
and Katrin Tijburg for discussions contributing to his writing of this article.
This said, any remaining mistakes or shortcomings remain the sole responsibility of the author.

Table 1. Categorizing approaches for radical system-wide change.

Products as
Upcycling
Traditional
permanent solutions second-hand clothes materialism
Temporary products

New
materialisms

Deconstruction

54 Swedish Design Research Journal 2 | 14

Smart textiles and

smart fashion
No deconstruction

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contributes to capabilities to put each of these approaches

meaningfully in comparison, and in possible contrast, to
the other approaches in Table 1 and to possible still other
approaches.
This paper will not only specify to some of the ways that
the new materialisms and traditional materialism relate to
one another in both in theory and in practice. It will also
propose how to rethink research and practice within and
beyond textile fashion. Such rethinking includes showing
how smart products and up-cycling are sub-approaches that
extend from roots in the traditional materialistic approach
and the new materialistic approach, respectively. Let us thus
rethink what new materialisms and traditional materialism
are, as well as what they have to offer for a sustainable
future of textile fashion. Finally, let us then add new layers
of significance such as deconstruction, temporary forms of
product, smart products, and up-cycling.
THE NEW-MATERIALIST APPROACH

In contrast to traditional materialism that focuses on

what is settled, fixed and permanent, the new-materialist
approach assumes always an aggregate whose elements
vary according to its connections, its relations of movement
and rest, the different individuated assemblages it enters
(Deleuze 1992, p. 282; Ahmed 2010, p. 256). The new
materialist kind of aggregation allows also for considering
immaterial artefacts within one Hjelmslevian flat
multiplicities (Deleuze 1992, p. 9). Eschewing the negativity
of traditional materialism that assumes a necessary choice
between to manufacture and pollute, on the one hand, or not
to manufacture and not to pollute, on the other hand, new
materialism is an openly positive approach. In fact, the only
thing negated is the idea of negativity itself (Deleuze 1994, p.
55; Cheah 2008, p. 151):
It is not the negative which is the motor Those who
bear the negative know not what they do: they take the
shadow for the reality, they encourage phantoms, they
uncouple consequences from premises and they give
epiphenomena the value of phenomena and essences
[T]he negative is an illusion, no more than the shadow of
problems.
There are at least two mutually complementary subapproaches to how positivity is the road to healthy natural
environment. These are deconstruction and temporary
products.

Deconstruction
Deconstruction is one of the most extreme streams of new
materialisms. It refuses altogether that manufacturing and
distribution would involve any stabilized product form
in the first place (Derrida 1978; cf. Cheah 2008, p. 144).
Deconstruction takes it that to analyze a material object
it is most illuminating to analyze in relation to a given
outside that may or may not be material. To take the
best known example of deconstruction, a text is not only
a material form or object such as a letter or a book. It also
reflects the times and contexts surrounding when it was
written and when it is being read (Derrida 1978). This kind
of a framing represents the text as a twin process of writing
and reading, which intertwine into a text-tile or woven
(Cheah 2008, p. 144-6; cf. Derrida 1978).
To understand how the material base is not all that
matters in textile fashion, rethink of how a digital video
game of the fashion world plays out. At its core, it is
just code written by software coder rather than anything
concrete, tangible or real in any traditional sense. At the
same time (Farren and Hutchinson 2004):
clothing and fashion for people who inhabit virtual
environments, interacting with other people in real
time involve extensive, long-term social interaction
between participants. Unfortunately, the choice of
costume for the visual representation of each player,
currently very limited, has become a frustration for
[many of these participant-]individuals, and threatens
to limit the social agency and growth of these
environments.
The above snippet of life and of the limits of textile
fashion in virtual worlds is in line with how and why an
increasing amount of philosophers and textile fashion
researchers underline how any form is but a diversion of
life (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p. 499). Even economists
now understand how a textile fashion does not at its heart
always need to replicate finished forms that are settled.
Rather taking inspiration from one of these economists, any
form but momentarily suspends a continuous process of
change (Ingold 2010):
whether as images in the mind or as objects in the
world [a textile] seeks to join with those very forces
that bring form into being. Thus the [fashion] line grows
from a point that has been set in motion, as the plant
grows from its seed.
Swedish Design Research Journal 2 | 14 55

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The essential relation in a world of life is thus not

between materials and form. Rather, the essential relation
is between material elements and forces of life (Deleuze
and Guattari, 2004, p. 377). These forces exceed the life and
death of any individual material form (Cheah 2008, p. 155).
Seen from these kinds of angles, despite being such
an extreme version of new materialisms, deconstruction
provides us elements with which to improve upon the health
of the natural environment in concrete ways, to make
our textile fashion more sustainable. Other ways to work
towards freeing the natural environment from the current
states of pollution textile fashion include to manufacture and
to distribute increasingly temporary forms of product.
Temporary products
Temporary products offer a different kind of a starting point
of analysis for rethinking than deconstruction. In viewing
textile fashion as a series of temporary products, this subapproach takes an equally radical and system-wide view
of manufactured products that are traditionally considered
stabilized and material as does deconstruction. In temporary
products, the emphasis in textile fashion is on the relations
and spaces in-between material textiles, wovens, and fibers,
rather than on their material form and content. Within this
context, the relations and spaces refers not only what is
in-between one textile, woven or fiber and another, but also
those in-between one assembly of textile, wowen and fiber
and another across time. Consider, for example, how the
market for cellular telephony has been reframed as a fashion
market by a fashion consultant (Djelic & Ainamo 2005, p.
61):
in the fashion industry, brands are not imposed on
the consumer; they are found. This fashion consultant
went on, suggesting that if you want to build a brand
that stands on solid ground, you will need to use a
more grassroots type of approach. You need people
with influence in the fashion industry to believe in your
brand and to spread your name by word of mouth. Their
lifestyle will then be copied by other people (Kaufmann,
2003).
Within the above kind of deconstruction and rethinking
of temporary form as a viral process of social diffusion, no
particular textile, item of fashion, just like no organism or
organization, genuinely ever embodies life. Any of these will
be the shell that merely traps and imprisons life, for a while,
within a temporary organized form.
56 Swedish Design Research Journal 2 | 14

SMART TEXTILE FASHION AND UPCYCLING

In sum, in the above deconstructionist and temporary ways,

new materialism is a framework to nurture ideas on how
to deconstruct and represent on an on-going basis what is
textile fashion, and what ought it to be. At its core, in the
framework of this paper, pure new-materialist textile
fashion does not exist in material form but as a series
of in-between relations or spaces, which every reader or
participant in a role such as that of a designer, manufacturer,
marketer or consumer will understand differently. At the
intersection of the relations or spaces, each temporary
material product may appear meaningful for participants in
a way that is worth preserving in a second life of the textile,
woven, or fiber.
Even now, at a time when there ought to no longer to
be pollution, and textile fashion orient toward radical and
system-level change for a healthy natural environment, this
kind traditional materialism in textile fashion remains like
a living fossil. Rather than be activists to transform the
system in radical and system-wide ways, many traditionamaterialists are all too satisfied in calling for negation and
protest (Marcuse 1991, p. 63) whereby textile fashion:
contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced
positions, it is the Great Refusal the protest against that
which is.
The treatment of cotton textile has included using
chemicals to treat the emerging cotton textile material. Just
as meanings and structures of words and sentences and other
expressions can be tweaked as to what it is that we mean by
what is object and what is outside, what is fixed entity and
what is forever dynamic, so can one tweak what remains
physical material in whole in part, of one kind of material
or that of another. Within this context, in the case of a
case approaching the borderline between new materialism
and traditional materialist thinking, consider the following
example (Kotler 2000, p. 223):
when DuPont developed a new synthetic fiber for
carpets, it demonstrated to carpet manufacturers that
they could afford to pay DuPont as much as $1.40 per
pound for the new fiber and still make their target profit.
DuPont calls the $1.40 the value-in-use price. But pricing
the new material at $1.40 per pound would leave the
carpet manufacturers indifferent. So DuPont set the
price lower than $1.40 to induce carpet manufacturers
to adopt the new fiber. In this situation, DuPont used

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its manufacturing cost only to judge whether there was

enough profit to go ahead with the new product.
In other words, the challenge has been that even
participants who are ecologically aware, still cannot liberate
themselves from thinking in traditional materialist ways.
Emerging trends in research and practice in new materialisms
and in challenging traditional materialism include the
foregoing smart textile fashion and up-cycling, terms already
mentioned in conjunction with Table 1.
Smart textile fashion
A material or product is considered smart when (Porter &
Heppelmann 2014, p. 5):
software replaces some hardware components, or
it enables a single physical device to perform at a variety
of levels.
Translated into textile and fashion, materialist fast
urban fashion and negative conservativeness differs from
immaterial and positive new-materialist consideration of
ecological concerns (Edwards 2010). It is worth to have
parameters in place for optimization (Hanna 2012).
Many examples of this kind of negation remind us
of many varieties of social or linguistic constructionism
and theories of performativity (Cheah 2008, p. 144). They
represent the kind of activity that has as its in-built feature
what Beauvoir (2012) has called circularity. Circularity
in an economy operating with whatever currency becomes
all the more intense the more materialization happens in
recurring series, time after time, in social ensembles, in
which each human individual is but one passive participant
with others in a collective.
It is within this kind recurring cycles that materialization
also in textile fashion becomes practico-inert; that is,
circularity impinges upon human freedom and alters how
individuals or groups of any size can act (Sartre 1968, p.
169, and Beauvoir 2012 in Kruks 2010, p. 261). Besides
negativity, circularity and practico-inertia, a further feature
of traditional materialism feature is the ordering of things
resulting in a near-deterministic process of futuring (Fry
2009); that is, restructuring an immediately present but
undesired reality with promises of change supposedly soon
or later.
If we were to follow the above kinds of negative protest
indefinetely, the end result would be to degenerate into a

state whereby each part-member would have a deterministic

designated function with little vision of an integrated
or systemic totality (Cheah 2010, p. 87). Practico-inert
reification and materialization of artefacts would drive
each other in a shifting chase, holding as its two key
features first, the understanding of nature and history as
law-governed processes that can be rationally understood
instead of immutable metaphysical substances, and, second,
the determination of these processes as processes with
material existence that can be explained through empirical
science (Cheah 2008, p. 143). Organic, social and existential
elements would merge and reinforce each other (Beauvoir
2012, p. 9) so that:
each reacts upon the others and is at the same time
affected by them.
Up-cycling
In response to the kind of degeneration that tends to go
with smart textile fashion taken too far, variants of effective
action under such conditions include down-cycling of
appreciation for the supposedly new and improved, on
the one hand, and up-cycling of second-class clothes,
on the other hand (Ericsson & Brooks 2014). Rather
than irresponsibly source new materials from the natural
environment, up-cycling is a burgeoning sub-culture and
fashion movement in London, Stockholm, New York, and
elsewhere. Driven by an environmental concern with fast
fashion and long life cycles of natural fiber, fiber is sourced
from old clothes and ecologies of the artificial, rather than
from the natural environment. With little burden on the
health of the natural environment, natural and artificial are
thus sourced from near the end of their life cycle in thrift
stores and charity shops, and re-cut and re-sewn for second
life (Ericsson and Brooks 2014, pp. 91-92).
In countries such as the United Kingdom and the United
States, around 15 percent of old clothing is donated for
recycling. The second-hand clothing system of provision
includes doorstop collections, textile banks, crafting and
handiwork practices, and local networks of sale. The revenue
often is directed to fund community projects (Ericsson &
Brooks 2014), to raise awareness (Albinsson & Perera 2012),
or both, to contribute to reuse of clothes in a sustainable
way.
Despite such steps towards sustainability, demand for
used goods has gone down with the growing availability
of value retailers low-cost fashion (a price category that is
almost without exception manufactured in the developing
Swedish Design Research Journal 2 | 14 57

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countries). The market for re-wearing and recycling secondhand clothes in affluent developed countries is limited,
especially in comparison with the near endless growth of
new-clothing consumption (Ericsson & Brooks 2014, p. 92):
The vast majority of donated clothing is exported
clothing is exported overseas and retailed in the
developing world, via a trade pattern that is largely
unknown among the general public. Across the globe,
rich and poor people are intimately linked, as used
clothes pass through networks of charitable and
commercial exchange that trade second-hand clothes
between continents (Rivoli 2012).
Second hand clothing is massively important in subSaharan Africa and difficult to appreciate for readers
unfamiliar with the context. Countries such as Kenya,
Mozambique, Uganda, Senegal and Zambia have major
second-hand clothing markets.
Given that natural fiber is both sourced and distributed
at the end of its life cycle in developing countries, it is good
design to close to loop. Indeed, there are instances of this
already happening. For example (Ericsson and Brooks 2014,
p. 94):
In the Mozambiquen markets, some tailors do use
a mixture of second-hand clothing together with the
traditional capulanas (printed sarang) to add value and
to produce something different for local consumers.
[As a prime example of this still but new and emerging
is to] use second-hand clothing imports as the basis to
make desirable new commodities, taking old textiles and
creating high-value, up-cycled, second-hand dresses
both questioning to the way fashion is made on a global
scale, as well as contributing to the local design scene.
In up-cycling, old clothes are used up toward the end
of their life cycle in the very same countries from where
especially natural fiber for textile fashion is originally
sourced (Boscia 2014):
Upcycling allows these old clothes to have a second
life, rather than amassing in secondhand markets in
developing countries or going into landfills.

58 Swedish Design Research Journal 2 | 14

PROPOSITIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH,

GUIDELINES FOR PRACTICE

This paper has inquired into sustainability issues in the

global textile fashion industry. Resources, skills or wills
for environmental protection have not always readily been
found in this industry. In response to calls for radical systemwide change in how textile and fashion manufacturing and
distribution are organized internationally, this paper has
asked: What alternative approaches exist for bringing about
the radical and system-wide change in textile and fashion?
How to know which of such approaches is best?
Across research and practice, over time, we ought to
develop techniques to treat natural and artificial fibers in
second-hand clothes so that they will represent material
equal to new material, at par with de novo natural and
artificial fibers, or at least nearly so. We perhaps cannot yet
even imagine how to do that, but a vision that such is our
intent matters. When we will be able to repair second-hand
fibers or regenerate totally new ones, this is when we will
be able to smoothly migrate or move fibers from secondhand clothes into new textile fashion in the vision of new
materialisms. We will have in place relations and spaces for
a truly sustainable complex of textile fashion and natural
environment.
Now, with the intention to be a thought piece on how
to make textile fashion a more sustainable human pursuit
than it is now, this paper is ready to extend propositions for
further research and their corollaries for transfer into textile
fashion practice:
Proposition 1. Textile fashion grows from what is already
in motion, like a plant grows from its seed, but the seed
need not be a material one.
Proposition 2. A temporary product may be just as
meaningful and of worth for participants as fiber sourced
from the natural environment.
Proposition 3. Smart textile fashion can negate textile
fashions negative impact on the health of the natural
environment, so that the outcome is positive.
Proposition 4. Natural and artificial fibers sourced from
second-hand clothes can be treated into a source of fiber
materially at par with de novo natural and artificial
fibers.

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Translated into practice, there are four guidelines that

can be drawn from the above four propositions, already
at this stage. Firstly, textile fashion ought not to consider
natural or artificial fiber as the starting point of creativity,
manufacturing and distribution, but to focus on the social
processes of the participants that have key roles to bring
textile fashion into being. One of the keys in taking up
second-hand clothes as a source of raw material for textile
fashion is to unlearn traditional social norms about what is
good material for textile fashion.
Secondly, channeling meaningful and valuable software
and other artificial assemblies into new diversions of
life sustains meaningfulness and what is of worth for
participants, while contributing to the health of natural
environment. One Finnish company illustrates how
upcycling is a process whereby textile waste goes through a
recycling process that turns the waste into pure waste or
raw material for the textile industry (Pure Waste Textiles
2014). In turn, the textile industry will churn out not only
products but also textile waste, so that there is a closed loop.
Thirdly, any physical components that can be replaced
with software will alleviate textile fashions burden on
the natural environment. Finally, second-hand clothes are
a plentiful and resource-efficient source of natural (and
artificial) fibers for textile fashion producers, designers, and
consumers. It would be great, if we could improve quality
with treatment and reproduce quality rather than only to
consume until all is total waste.

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