Good Clothes: Negotiating Capitalism through Slow Fashion

This ethnographic dissertation follows the slow fashion community on Instagram and in the Pacific Northwest through their daily work to reconfigure how clothing is made, bought, and sold. “Slow fashion” connects a community of dedicated makers and consumers in a shared effort to resist and transform the waste-driven, profit-seeking, and inequitable systems that produce and sustain contemporary fashion. This contemporary women-led consumer movement and community is responding to the environmental harms, human rights abuses, and ethical conflicts of consumer capitalism through the creation and consumption of what I call good clothes. Good clothes come with an aspiration: that buying, wearing, and even selling these clothes do good for the human and non-human actors in the clothing supply chain. This aspiration is conditioned by consumer capitalism, neoliberal feminism and algorithmic influence, which tangles slow fashion practitioners in contradictions. My research follows the question: how do slow fashion practitioners navigate the contradictions in slow fashion? Using a multi-sited, multimodal ethnographic method–which knits together a creative blend of digital and traditional ethnographic methods and a personal making practice– I examine the contradiction woven into the social, political, and ethical aims of slow fashion, such as the false promises of ethical consumption, instability in making ‘sustainable’ clothing, the hidden labors of the ‘ethical workplace’, and how digital activism is entangled in affective and algorithmic influences. By following these contradictions through my interlocutors’ roles as slow fashion consumers, clothing makers, influencers, and community members, I offer careful attention to how they challenge and conform to these dilemmas in their personal, professional, and political practices. This insight contributes to anthropological inquiries into the politics of consumption and consumerism by showing how slow fashion produces a material form from which feminist politics of care are performed. As public and academic interest in the sustainability and ethics of fashion grow, this project offers practical applications and theoretical considerations for striving toward ethical practice and justice in a capitalist world.