Wendy Ward
Our nineteenth member of the month is Wendy Ward
UCRF is running a ‘Member of the Month’ feature on this blog, where a member, selected at random from the membership database, is sent five questions to give us all an overview of our members. Our nineteenth participant Wendy Ward is halfway through a part-time PhD titled Enduring Fashion at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. She is exploring how wearer-garment connections can enable and encourage the enduring use of clothes.
—1 How would you sum up your research/practice?
My practice and research are informed by previous professional experience connecting people and clothes: as a designer in the fashion industry; followed by a transition into the DIY / home-sewing movement as an educator and author (link to: https://uk.bookshop.org/contributors/wendy-ward) teaching people how to make, mend and alter their clothes.
I am now exploring how wearer experiences with clothing could be used to foster a more caring relationship with our clothes to keep them in use for longer.
My research is practice-based and uses: image-making; creative writing; data visualisation; stitch; print-making; and clothes making and unmaking as investigative qualitative research methods in their own right, but also to communicate small sets of quantitative data collected through auditing, tracking and logging. These methods are used in my own creative practice and with a small group of research participants to celebrate the unique narratives embodied in our clothes.
— 2 How do you address fashion and sustainability in your work?
The central argument in my work is that there is little point in sustainably made (whatever that might mean) clothes if people don’t care about them and want to keep, wear and love them. I am trying to avoid using the term ‘sustainable’ as I believe that it is too vague, has no clear universally accepted definition and is being misused in some parts of the current fashion system, and therefore weakened and distrusted by consumers.
My work is all about reframing how we see value in our clothes. Not monetary value, but the value of time, memories, experience and stories that they embody.
I believe in small, individual acts of resistance: celebrating that loved garment through creative writing or a portrait; mending that hole or tear; redyeing that faded t-shirt; being seen in the same outfit multiple times; or engaging in ‘guerilla EPR’ by returning your end-of-life garments to the brands that made them.
— 3 What are the conflicts you have encountered around fashion and sustainability in your work?
I get really frustrated by an unwillingness to think differently: from designers, brands and manufacturers, all the way through to consumers and those dealing with our textile waste. Fashion is supposed to be a space of innovation, creativity and future-thinking, but it seems to have lost that ability. The preferred option always seems to be: ‘business as usual’ (aka overproduction and overconsumption) but with a few tweaks such as a factory powered by solar panels, or a fabric made from recycled bottles. The difficult ‘messy’ work of production and end-of-life disposal is always kept ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for consumers in the Global North, resulting in consumers who have little awareness of what it takes to make their clothes and dispose of them once they’ve finished with them.
Most recently I’ve personally felt extremely conflicted about end-of-life clothing. So much so that I’m now keeping hold of all of mine and my partner’s clothing that fall into this category as I don’t believe a satisfactory system currently exists in the UK to deal with it. I don’t want my textile waste to be incinerated in a so-called energy recovery facility contributing to local air pollution or to be exported to the Global South contributing to waste colonialism .
— 4 What do you consider the key sources and cases when it comes to fashion and sustainability?
-The most influential book that I align my work with is Kate Fletcher’s Craft of Use.
-Papers to which I repeatedly refer are:
Payne, A. (2019). Fashion Futuring in the Anthropocene: Sustainable Fashion as “Taming” and “Rewilding”. Fashion Theory, 23:1. 5-23.
Coscieme, L., et al. (2022). Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable: Resizing -Fashion for a Fair Consumption Space. Hot or Cool Institute, Berlin.
Amy Twigger Holroyd’s recent project Fashion Fictions encourages everyone to think differently and have hope, something that can often be a challenge in the face of such systemic global problems.
— 5 Could you recommend some less-known sources or cases you think should be more widely shared?
-Juriko Saito’s book Aesthetics of Care really resonates with my approach to fashion and clothes.
-As my research is practice-based many of my references are creative works, two excellent examples are:
Fast Fast Slow – an ‘alternative’ fashion show exploring the global impacts of fast fashion, overproduction and overconsumption. This was created by theatre company Common Wealth for the UK 2023 Textile Biennial.
The Human Touch project makes visible the invisible human labour in our clothes.
Thank you Wendy for sharing your work!
