Problematizing Fashion Sustainability

Business author John Elkington´s key assumptions, presented in his 1997 work Cannibals with Forks - the multiple perspectives view, global data and future-oriented temporality - continue to inform mainstream fashion sustainability today. If fashion is to move beyond a singular profit-driven vision toward shared well-being, the research community needs to increasingly steer studies toward using reflexive approaches, by actively mobilizing and problematizing existing frameworks, not aiming to subvert or debunk or to vindicate or defend our normative point of view, but to critically problematize it. In this article, problematization methodology is used to identify and challenge the assumptions underlying Elkington’s work and contemporary fashion sustainability research. By analyzing this seminal text the article contributes to the critical problematization of design disciplines, fashion sustainability in particular. Retaining hope and moving toward prosperity fashion in its true sense calls for dialectically questioning and unravelling one’s own position, and scrutinizing and reconsidering some commonly held assumptions. This will enable us to make space for different positions and lines of thinking, which are desperately needed in fashion research.