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Earth Logic Fashion Action Research Plan
The Earth Logic Fashion Action Research Plan is a visionary and radical invitation to fashion researchers, practitioners, business leaders and decision makers to: call out as fiction the idea that sustainability can be achieved within economic growth logic; and instead to ‘stay with the trouble’ of envisioning fashion connected with nature, people and long term healthy futures.
The plan does this by placing Earth first – before profit, before everything. This is both simple and changes everything.
The plan comprises three parts to support Earth Logic action research in fashion. Part I is a values-explicit context which can be used to plan, select and evaluate research and development projects. Part II is a checklist to keep action research on a radical track. Part III is made up of six holistic landscapes that set out progressive areas for transformation of the fashion sector directed at the whole system of fashion.
The plan does this by placing Earth first – before profit, before everything. This is both simple and changes everything.
The plan comprises three parts to support Earth Logic action research in fashion. Part I is a values-explicit context which can be used to plan, select and evaluate research and development projects. Part II is a checklist to keep action research on a radical track. Part III is made up of six holistic landscapes that set out progressive areas for transformation of the fashion sector directed at the whole system of fashion.
- GenresFashion
72 pages, ebook
Published December 1, 2019
2 people are currently reading
83 people want to read
About the author
Kate Fletcher
13 books19 followersKate Fletcher is Professor of Sustainability, Design, Fashion at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 18, 2025
I have mixed feelings about this book.
Calling it a 'plan' is somewhat misleading, as it does not provide concrete steps or action points. Going more in-depth wouldn’t mean neglecting the urgency to act now. Rather, it is more of a starting point for envisioning what an Earth Logic fashion system could look like, something we need to build upon further.
Nevertheless, this 'plan' can serve as a useful framework for transforming a sector that often feels overwhelming due to its size and complexity. The six pillars (less, local plural, learning, language,m and governance) may help counter feelings of despair and disorientation. The plan also embodies holisticness and radicality, which we definitely need more of.
Calling it a 'plan' is somewhat misleading, as it does not provide concrete steps or action points. Going more in-depth wouldn’t mean neglecting the urgency to act now. Rather, it is more of a starting point for envisioning what an Earth Logic fashion system could look like, something we need to build upon further.
Nevertheless, this 'plan' can serve as a useful framework for transforming a sector that often feels overwhelming due to its size and complexity. The six pillars (less, local plural, learning, language,m and governance) may help counter feelings of despair and disorientation. The plan also embodies holisticness and radicality, which we definitely need more of.
September 19, 2022
Introduction
p.20-21 – The limits of current strategies for change – The circular economy has gained traction and substantial interest perhaps because it aligns with existing commercial practices, suggesting that business-(almost)-as-usual is possible. Indeed, circularity is treated as a lifeline by industry reliant on a model of over-production and over-consumption of goods, an effective endorsement of contemporary economic and political practices. While the circular economy brings the promise of useful contributions to a more resource efficient industry (providing, that is, that the many challenges associated with technology, workers, scale, logistics, communities and entropy are overcome) yet, in terms of affecting change of the scale and to a timeframe made necessary by the climate imperative, it has serious limitations.
p.21 – Perhaps most significantly, the circular economy is limited by being situated within the logic of economics and specifically growth economics. The circular economy is optimised to grow the circulation of materials, irrespective of whether this goal supports total systems improvement and the ecological reality of genuine biophysical limits. Situated within the paradigm that created the problems, and in addition to circulating resources, circularity risks circulating norms and worldviews detrimental to earth.
The majority of the environmental issues caused by the fashion sector are endemic, not incidental. They are a consequence of how the current model is structured. The better the sector performs, the worse the problems will get.
Part 1 – Values-explicit context
p.31 – Paradigm: Earth Logic, Earth first. Loyalty to planet before industry, business and economic growth – We propose planet before industry as a radical idea in which the health and survival of our planet earth is given precedence over business interests.
In this work we wish to evoke the significance of staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) in work for sustainability in fashion and beyond. Staying with the trouble means commitment to the true purpose – saving the planet – even when this causes friction, awkwardness, pain, anger, and hard work.
p.32 – In the existing fashion system, the dominant focus is the economic growth logic and pursuit of profit. This constitutes a single focus of attention and reinforces human-centred priorities over the needs and at the cost of all others. By contrast, the values of Earth Logic explicitly promote plurality and multiple centres of attention and action.
p.33 - “Humans exist only in a web of living co-vulnerabilities.” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 145)
Human lives are inextricably reliant on planetary health and humans are intrinsically part of planet earth. The interdependency of human systems with all others makes processes of change real and complex. Interdependency underscores the ways in which individual products or human choices, often made with little concern for or understanding of the whole, combine in cumulative, layered, holistic effects that influence entire systems.
Fashion practices now, here, have effects in other parts of our world and long into the future. Biodiversity loss and climate change cumulatively affect each other, as well as other vital earth systems (Rockström et al., 2009).
Embracing interdependency and multiple centres in unison is about refusing to ‘be in a bubble,’ separate and remote from the unfolding of the real world. It changes both understanding and the purpose of research itself.
p.34 – Multiple centres are a necessity to make sure that we are drawing on all knowledge, wisdom, capabilities and creativity on earth to save our earth. Multiple centres include diverse ways of knowing; direct experience, practice, indigenous knowledge, artistic exploration, spirituality, and theory, among others.
Co-Creation – The promotion of multiple centres and interdependency in unison foregrounds specific skills of collaboration, listening, dialogue and linking.
While trans-disciplinarity and co-creation have been buzzwords for a long time, they have been slow to be enacted.
We need to search, explore, practice, prototype, learn, share insights and make change at the same time.
p.35 – Action research is also a way of thinking that recognises that theorising and acting are linked synergistically. Working as agents of change in both realms drives more embedded understanding and more informed action.
Part 3 – Holistic Earth Logic: Landscapes for Fashion Action Research
p.44 – Less: Grow out of growth – Growth logic also promotes a narrow view of fashion, accessed primarily through the shopping mall, built on an increasing dependence on the market as the chief provider for fashion needs.
In growth logic, ideas about fashion are organised around commerce and end up becoming dependent on them. Such fashion activity not only depletes the ecological resource base, but it also stifles other ideas about other types of fashion activity. Citizens are unable to take action – other than by buying more – even in the face of compelling evidence that different sorts of behaviour are needed.
p.49 – Local: Scaling, re-centering – In Earth Logic fashion, environmental and community priorities dictate industrial ambition, they describe natural and human limits to fashion activity. Yet because not all communities or ecosystems are the same, the activities within them – knowledge, communities, products, cultures, and practices – require adaptation to their specific place. This process of adaptation is localism and involves the shaping of an activity by a region’s natural factors and by what is intriguing and dynamic in a place to ensure its long-term prosperity (Fletcher, 2017). Localism favours the use of nearby resources, place-specific knowledge, community self-reliance.
p.53 – Plural: New centres for fashion – The economic growth logic is deeply intertwined with a Western hegemony, human exceptionalism, patriarchy and a focus on quantitative science. The plural landscape shifts our fashion perspectives to other foci, and explores what fashion can mean, what it can be and do in a pluriverse (Escobar, 2018). This form of decolonization involves new centres for making fashion, and also new ways of thinking and doing research, such as from feminist, indigenous and nature-based perspectives (Tuhiwai Smith, 1997). Foremost it involves setting fashion free from its prominent association with consumerist ideals and also making it open to voices that are marginalised by the dominant narrative of contemporary fashion activity. Creating platforms for envisaging fashion futures with a diversity of voices is interdependent with opening up language and ways of knowing (Tham, 2015: Sardar, 1999).
What might happen if we place fashion outside the market?
Decentering fashion can take many forms. We can imagine fashion for hitherto unprioritized clients, and for example challenge able-bodyism, ageism, sizeism in fashion. We can start fashion literally from nature, creating a studio in the local park or an area of wilderness. We can grow fashion expression from the craft of use (Fletcher, 2016). We can honour fashion in non-Western geographies. We can train the focus of fashion on supporting race and gender equality. Each perspective offers new models and practices for relating with fashion as well as broadening and diversifying the base of fashion expertise.
p.55 – Genuinely giving space for a plurality of fashion voices, requires profound attention to the space we allocate to dominant voices – making this space smaller, and how we genuinely reach those not currently prioritised. This requires new models for funding bodies, education admission, recruitment to organisations etc. It also includes sincere attention to citation politics, avoiding replicating the same, dominant narrative (Ahmed, 2017). In this landscape it is especially important to remember that the fashion system as we know it today is recent and manmade. There are a pluriverse of possible fashion systems if we set fashion free.
p.56 – Action Research Directions
Life in plurality
• Situate research within existing communities of practice outside the growth logic (such as Dorcas Clubs) and explore how values sharing and resilience can be translated to other contexts (Sinclair, 2015).
• Use norm critical and norm creative lenses (Vinthagen and Zavalia, 2014) on fashion garments, communications, events and practices. This can mean analysing how power is attributed to, for example, race, gender, able-bodyism, and reimagining the specific situation with power equally distributed. What design decisions, communications etc. would it take to achieve equality?
Drivers of plurality
• Co-create models for diverse representation in organisations and how such diversity can be upheld over time together with a diverse range of stakeholders.
Communicating plurality
• Consider giving priority to non-verbal and non-visual languages in action research situations and explore emerging ways of knowing, negotiating, communicating and distributing power. For example, what happens if we let sound and touch play a more prominent role than sight, or if drawing and making are given precedence over theory?
• Consider processes of reaching out to a diversity of communities and offering diverse communities mandate and resources to define and run projects.
p.57 – Learning: New knowledge, skills, mindsets for fashion – Core competencies of learning and unlearning are: confidence, creativity, community and ecological literacy.
p.61 – Language: New communication for fashion – Languaging means the co-creative relationship between communicating, thinking and doing (Tham, 2010; Wood, 2004; Maturana and Varela, 1987). The language we use shapes our thoughts and actions. Communication makes these thoughts and actions visible, thinkable, doable and talk-aboutable.
p.62 – Sustainability communication in fashion has been dominated by technical, quantitative language and management terminology spawned out of scientific reductionism. What would happen to fashion if this was replaced by the language and practices of relationship and care? If sustainability was mediated in new ways?
This requires a new culture of language of sustainability which transcends knowledge hierarchies (between disciplines, theory and practices etc.). It draws on nonviolent communication (Rosenberg, 2015) and focuses interaction on deep understanding, respect and collaboration.
p.20-21 – The limits of current strategies for change – The circular economy has gained traction and substantial interest perhaps because it aligns with existing commercial practices, suggesting that business-(almost)-as-usual is possible. Indeed, circularity is treated as a lifeline by industry reliant on a model of over-production and over-consumption of goods, an effective endorsement of contemporary economic and political practices. While the circular economy brings the promise of useful contributions to a more resource efficient industry (providing, that is, that the many challenges associated with technology, workers, scale, logistics, communities and entropy are overcome) yet, in terms of affecting change of the scale and to a timeframe made necessary by the climate imperative, it has serious limitations.
p.21 – Perhaps most significantly, the circular economy is limited by being situated within the logic of economics and specifically growth economics. The circular economy is optimised to grow the circulation of materials, irrespective of whether this goal supports total systems improvement and the ecological reality of genuine biophysical limits. Situated within the paradigm that created the problems, and in addition to circulating resources, circularity risks circulating norms and worldviews detrimental to earth.
The majority of the environmental issues caused by the fashion sector are endemic, not incidental. They are a consequence of how the current model is structured. The better the sector performs, the worse the problems will get.
Part 1 – Values-explicit context
p.31 – Paradigm: Earth Logic, Earth first. Loyalty to planet before industry, business and economic growth – We propose planet before industry as a radical idea in which the health and survival of our planet earth is given precedence over business interests.
In this work we wish to evoke the significance of staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) in work for sustainability in fashion and beyond. Staying with the trouble means commitment to the true purpose – saving the planet – even when this causes friction, awkwardness, pain, anger, and hard work.
p.32 – In the existing fashion system, the dominant focus is the economic growth logic and pursuit of profit. This constitutes a single focus of attention and reinforces human-centred priorities over the needs and at the cost of all others. By contrast, the values of Earth Logic explicitly promote plurality and multiple centres of attention and action.
p.33 - “Humans exist only in a web of living co-vulnerabilities.” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 145)
Human lives are inextricably reliant on planetary health and humans are intrinsically part of planet earth. The interdependency of human systems with all others makes processes of change real and complex. Interdependency underscores the ways in which individual products or human choices, often made with little concern for or understanding of the whole, combine in cumulative, layered, holistic effects that influence entire systems.
Fashion practices now, here, have effects in other parts of our world and long into the future. Biodiversity loss and climate change cumulatively affect each other, as well as other vital earth systems (Rockström et al., 2009).
Embracing interdependency and multiple centres in unison is about refusing to ‘be in a bubble,’ separate and remote from the unfolding of the real world. It changes both understanding and the purpose of research itself.
p.34 – Multiple centres are a necessity to make sure that we are drawing on all knowledge, wisdom, capabilities and creativity on earth to save our earth. Multiple centres include diverse ways of knowing; direct experience, practice, indigenous knowledge, artistic exploration, spirituality, and theory, among others.
Co-Creation – The promotion of multiple centres and interdependency in unison foregrounds specific skills of collaboration, listening, dialogue and linking.
While trans-disciplinarity and co-creation have been buzzwords for a long time, they have been slow to be enacted.
We need to search, explore, practice, prototype, learn, share insights and make change at the same time.
p.35 – Action research is also a way of thinking that recognises that theorising and acting are linked synergistically. Working as agents of change in both realms drives more embedded understanding and more informed action.
Part 3 – Holistic Earth Logic: Landscapes for Fashion Action Research
p.44 – Less: Grow out of growth – Growth logic also promotes a narrow view of fashion, accessed primarily through the shopping mall, built on an increasing dependence on the market as the chief provider for fashion needs.
In growth logic, ideas about fashion are organised around commerce and end up becoming dependent on them. Such fashion activity not only depletes the ecological resource base, but it also stifles other ideas about other types of fashion activity. Citizens are unable to take action – other than by buying more – even in the face of compelling evidence that different sorts of behaviour are needed.
p.49 – Local: Scaling, re-centering – In Earth Logic fashion, environmental and community priorities dictate industrial ambition, they describe natural and human limits to fashion activity. Yet because not all communities or ecosystems are the same, the activities within them – knowledge, communities, products, cultures, and practices – require adaptation to their specific place. This process of adaptation is localism and involves the shaping of an activity by a region’s natural factors and by what is intriguing and dynamic in a place to ensure its long-term prosperity (Fletcher, 2017). Localism favours the use of nearby resources, place-specific knowledge, community self-reliance.
p.53 – Plural: New centres for fashion – The economic growth logic is deeply intertwined with a Western hegemony, human exceptionalism, patriarchy and a focus on quantitative science. The plural landscape shifts our fashion perspectives to other foci, and explores what fashion can mean, what it can be and do in a pluriverse (Escobar, 2018). This form of decolonization involves new centres for making fashion, and also new ways of thinking and doing research, such as from feminist, indigenous and nature-based perspectives (Tuhiwai Smith, 1997). Foremost it involves setting fashion free from its prominent association with consumerist ideals and also making it open to voices that are marginalised by the dominant narrative of contemporary fashion activity. Creating platforms for envisaging fashion futures with a diversity of voices is interdependent with opening up language and ways of knowing (Tham, 2015: Sardar, 1999).
What might happen if we place fashion outside the market?
Decentering fashion can take many forms. We can imagine fashion for hitherto unprioritized clients, and for example challenge able-bodyism, ageism, sizeism in fashion. We can start fashion literally from nature, creating a studio in the local park or an area of wilderness. We can grow fashion expression from the craft of use (Fletcher, 2016). We can honour fashion in non-Western geographies. We can train the focus of fashion on supporting race and gender equality. Each perspective offers new models and practices for relating with fashion as well as broadening and diversifying the base of fashion expertise.
p.55 – Genuinely giving space for a plurality of fashion voices, requires profound attention to the space we allocate to dominant voices – making this space smaller, and how we genuinely reach those not currently prioritised. This requires new models for funding bodies, education admission, recruitment to organisations etc. It also includes sincere attention to citation politics, avoiding replicating the same, dominant narrative (Ahmed, 2017). In this landscape it is especially important to remember that the fashion system as we know it today is recent and manmade. There are a pluriverse of possible fashion systems if we set fashion free.
p.56 – Action Research Directions
Life in plurality
• Situate research within existing communities of practice outside the growth logic (such as Dorcas Clubs) and explore how values sharing and resilience can be translated to other contexts (Sinclair, 2015).
• Use norm critical and norm creative lenses (Vinthagen and Zavalia, 2014) on fashion garments, communications, events and practices. This can mean analysing how power is attributed to, for example, race, gender, able-bodyism, and reimagining the specific situation with power equally distributed. What design decisions, communications etc. would it take to achieve equality?
Drivers of plurality
• Co-create models for diverse representation in organisations and how such diversity can be upheld over time together with a diverse range of stakeholders.
Communicating plurality
• Consider giving priority to non-verbal and non-visual languages in action research situations and explore emerging ways of knowing, negotiating, communicating and distributing power. For example, what happens if we let sound and touch play a more prominent role than sight, or if drawing and making are given precedence over theory?
• Consider processes of reaching out to a diversity of communities and offering diverse communities mandate and resources to define and run projects.
p.57 – Learning: New knowledge, skills, mindsets for fashion – Core competencies of learning and unlearning are: confidence, creativity, community and ecological literacy.
p.61 – Language: New communication for fashion – Languaging means the co-creative relationship between communicating, thinking and doing (Tham, 2010; Wood, 2004; Maturana and Varela, 1987). The language we use shapes our thoughts and actions. Communication makes these thoughts and actions visible, thinkable, doable and talk-aboutable.
p.62 – Sustainability communication in fashion has been dominated by technical, quantitative language and management terminology spawned out of scientific reductionism. What would happen to fashion if this was replaced by the language and practices of relationship and care? If sustainability was mediated in new ways?
This requires a new culture of language of sustainability which transcends knowledge hierarchies (between disciplines, theory and practices etc.). It draws on nonviolent communication (Rosenberg, 2015) and focuses interaction on deep understanding, respect and collaboration.
December 10, 2020
This is a brilliantly researched and developed instructions into how to carry out action research in the fashion industry to influence change. It is worth the read for everybody to understand how our current system is faulty and not caring of the wellbeing of people nor the planet. And it provides an alternative option - Earth Logic. It is not prescriptive but rather provides tools for the change that is suitable for all of us.
March 31, 2025
Interesante voz sobre la tierra. Siento que hace más alusión a lo social y a su daño que a buscar una solución; lo cual va mucho conmigo...
El daño en la industria sin importar que, ya esta hecho
El daño en la industria sin importar que, ya esta hecho
October 23, 2022
An important step towards the sustainable fashion industry – or at least, that’s what the writing feels like.
The Fashion Action Research Plan could how ever have been a short writing of 10 pages. If you know about the current environmental situation and the devastating situation for the millions of people working in the industry, skip to page 45 and start reading.
There is a five-step plan sketched out.
The content however is not specified. It’s not a plan nor a manifest that inspires for change. It feels a bit, as if the author meant well and prepared a big dough, but no one is acting and baking the bread. At least, I have not yet herd about a follow up. Even though a lot of things are happening in the industry. Fletcher is a recognized name within the sustainable transformation. Maybe it’s time for a follow up, or maybe the torch could be taken by someone else that has the time and capacity to follow up. I guess that’s the main purpose of the plan, that other people in the industry uses this Fashion Action Research Plan and act themselves. Fil in the blanks. Because there is something in this, but not much to write about yet. As if this document is a simple act for Fletcher to empty her head to make sure that the content gets written in paper, just to secure or document information, so that it does not disappear. An unfair judgment of an author this capable and knowledgeable, I know, but this is the feeling I get. Let’s make some noise. Let’s use this paper to go further. Let’s make it our own!
The Fashion Action Research Plan could how ever have been a short writing of 10 pages. If you know about the current environmental situation and the devastating situation for the millions of people working in the industry, skip to page 45 and start reading.
There is a five-step plan sketched out.
The content however is not specified. It’s not a plan nor a manifest that inspires for change. It feels a bit, as if the author meant well and prepared a big dough, but no one is acting and baking the bread. At least, I have not yet herd about a follow up. Even though a lot of things are happening in the industry. Fletcher is a recognized name within the sustainable transformation. Maybe it’s time for a follow up, or maybe the torch could be taken by someone else that has the time and capacity to follow up. I guess that’s the main purpose of the plan, that other people in the industry uses this Fashion Action Research Plan and act themselves. Fil in the blanks. Because there is something in this, but not much to write about yet. As if this document is a simple act for Fletcher to empty her head to make sure that the content gets written in paper, just to secure or document information, so that it does not disappear. An unfair judgment of an author this capable and knowledgeable, I know, but this is the feeling I get. Let’s make some noise. Let’s use this paper to go further. Let’s make it our own!
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